Children of the Corn

While driving in rural Nebraska, a couple, Burt and Vicky Robeson, on their way across America to California in an attempt to save their marriage, run over the body of a young boy who was killed and thrown onto the road. Looking for the authorities, they take the body on to the next spot on the map; Gatlin, a small, isolated town that seems to be abandoned. Too late, Burt learns that years previously the town's children murdered everyone after embracing the bloody pseudo-Christian cult of an evil being that lurks in the corn fields: "He Who Walks Behind the Rows". The wife is captured by the children and the husband barely manages to escape into the cornfields surrounding the town. After running some distance, he believes that he has lost the children that had been following him but instead discovers the body of his wife, the town's minister, and a police chief. All three have been sacrificed to "He Who Walks Behind the Rows." It is then that he realizes that he is on the holy grounds of "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" and that an enormous being with glowing red eyes is slowly approaching.

The next morning, a group of children from Gatlin arrive at the sacrificial place, looking at the bodies of the two recently killed adults. A nine-year-old boy, Isaac, who is known as a "seer" by the inhabitants, tells them that "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" is displeased with their most recent sacrifice and lowers the sacrificial age from nineteen to eighteen. The story ends with the eighteen-year-olds in the town walking stoically into the corn.