The following is an edition of The Mirror’s movie column, Panther Picture Spotlight. All views, thoughts and opinions belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Drury Mirror. 

For October, The Mirror put out a poll to decide which scary movie on Netflix Drury students would most like to see reviewed. The winner was “Children of the Corn.”

In short, you guys are mean. This movie is a total snooze to sit through. Saying it has aged poorly is an understatement.

Horror in the daylight?

At first, it seemed like the film might actually be enjoyable. Not because it’s any good, but because of how hammy and ridiculous it was. There’s a dramatic zoom on corn in the first ten minutes.  How could it not be amazing?

Well, shortly after the film starts to follow Burt Stanton (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton), it goes from being a campy slasher about some insane kids killing a town to a weird mystery that we already know the answer to.

And it isn’t scary. It’s hard to even imagine a child being scared while watching this film. It’s shot and lit like a bad sitcom, taking place nearly entirely during the day.

Horror so rarely works during the day because what’s unknown is scary. Being able to see everything makes it feel like nothing is hiding, waiting to get the characters. At least if it were dark, there’s a danger of the unknown.

Corn isn’t scary

Here, the only thing that could be hiding the threats is corn. And if the sentence about zooms on corn didn’t make it clear enough, corn isn’t scary.

While we’re on the topic of zooms, this movie is weirdly obsessed with them. They never feel important. Most look like they were added in post-production.

It seems that while editing the film, they realized that nothing interesting was happening, and they hoped adding some camera movement would help. And it does for the most part, but not in the way they hoped. It’s hilarious watching the film frantically try to be scary while falling flat on its face in doing so.

But none of this can save the film from feeling long at only 90 minutes. The good news is: there are some great horror films on Netflix. “The Witch,” “The Babadook” and “Coraline” are all excellent movies to get you in the spooky spirit. All I’m trying to say is this: Don’t waste your time on this schlock when there are many other good films to explore.

Article by Jacob Maher.