The Monstrefact Redux: He Who Walks Behind the Rows

In this classic episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the the sinister entity from Stephen King’s 1977 short story “Children of the Corn” and its mythological and folkloric predecessors…. (originally published 1/8/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The
Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your
Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
In March of 1977, Penthouse magazine published a short story
by Stephen King called Children of the Corn. alongside a

(00:32):
pro-Nixon Watergate piece and photos of Polish model Jolanta von Zamuda.
It was a nasty and highly effective little short story
about a troubled couple on a road trip across America's heartland,
right into the corn-choked expanses of Nebraska and the clutches
of a strange youth cult that venerated a being known

(00:53):
only as He Who Walks Behind the Rose, represented in
crude local folk art as a kind of pagan green-haired Christ.
King writes of it as, quote, a strange green god,
a god of corn grown old and strange and hungry.
And later on, he describes it as a large shadow

(01:14):
with great red eyes moving behind row upon row of
perfect corn. The being in question here may have connections
to the titular entity from it as well as other
beings in the Stephen King universe. And in the 2006
Malleus Mostrorum monster book from the RPG Call of Cthulhu,

(01:35):
he who walks behind the rose is identified as an
avatar of the god Shub-Niggurath and described as a kind
of twisted fertility and vegetation deity. Children of the Corn
is a tale full of monocrop anxiety and religious horror.
And while the deity worshipped by the murderous children in

(01:55):
the story is purely fictitious, it does tie into several
different legacies of corn, crops, and associated deities. For starters,
we should remind ourselves that corn, maize, was long a
sacred crop of indigenous Americans and multiple Mesoamerican maize gods
loom large, including the Aztec god Zenteatu and the goddess

(02:19):
Chico Micuac. The rites concerning these deities, like the rites
concerning harvest deities around the world, could certainly involve bloodshed
and sacrifice. But I think a better match for what
we're dealing with in Stephen King's short story here can
be found in European folklore. I turned to Brad Steiger's

(02:40):
Werewolf book from 1999 and was instantly captivated by an
entry for The Cornwolf. Yes, that's spelled with a K
like the new metal band. And the corn in question
is not maize, but wheat. As we've discussed on Stuff
to Blow Your Mind before, maize only entered into European
usage after first contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas,

(03:01):
and the new-to-Europeans crop came to be known as corn
in some English-speaking countries. But the word corn predated this
contact and referred to different grains and cereal grasses. German
folklore in particular features various accounts of corn, Feldgeister, or
field spirits, also known as Korndemon. There's also the Hofferman,

(03:25):
or Oatman, as well as the Roggenwolf, and indeed, the Kornkinder.
There are many such corn spirits, typically malicious in nature
and prone to disappearing people, especially children. According to Steiger,
one such spirit is the Kornwolf, a supernatural lupine predator
said to haunt the fields and prey on the weak

(03:47):
or unaware. The tale, it would seem, served as a
kind of boogeyman to alert children to the risks of
actual wolves amid the crops, drawn in by hares and
small game in the unbalanced ecosystem of a farm, as
well as referring to human outlaws and miscreants potentially hiding
from capture amid the cover of pre-harvest fields, a place

(04:10):
where you could hide and potentially sustain yourself on the
ripening crops. Steiger goes on to mention various rural European
rites in which the corpse of the corn wolf or
related entities is symbolically burned each year. Now, I should
mention that Steiger cites a particular book for this entry,
Robert Eisler's Man into Wolf, an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism,

(04:36):
and lycanthropy from 1948. It's a rather interesting volume. It's
not purely history or folklore, but rather a Jungian anthropological
work arguing that the Jungian archetype of the werewolf connects
with a primal evolutionary split that saw humans develop into
opposing groups of peaceful and violent individuals, ultimately proposing his

(05:00):
own version of, to borrow a term used by Terence McKenna,
archaic revival, a return to primordial ways of human behavior
in an attempt to prevent our own continual self-destruction. Indeed,
Eisler does discuss the corn wolf, rye wolf, bean wolf,
and pea wolf, and related entities as imaginative creatures, archetypes of, quote,

(05:21):
the disguised outlaw and werewolf hiding and feeding in the
ripe cornfield. Dream analysis and Jungian theory aside, the traditions
presented here are fascinating and do match up with what
I've read elsewhere, such as in James Fraser's section of
The Golden Bough on the corn spirit as a wolf
or dog. as well as more contemporary writings in folklore

(05:43):
and belief. You might also remember our past Stuff to
Blow Your Mind episodes on beans, in which we discussed
the very old traditions of supernatural danger associated both with
legumes as something you might eat, and also as haunted
fields of legumes where you might dare to venture. And

(06:03):
all of this brings us back once more to Stephen King.
In Children of the Corn, He does a fantastic job
of conveying the uncanny nature of the monocrop field. It
sits both with the main character Bert and the reader
as a sinister perversion of the natural order. Within the
depths of the corn, dangerously close to the presence of

(06:24):
he who walks behind the rose, Bert encounters corn so perfect,
so flawless, that neither weed nor insect encroaches upon it.
As such, the green harvest god of the story stands
as a fitting deity for modern, industrialized agriculture, brutal, unflinching,
and alien to natural balance. Tune in for additional episodes

(06:47):
of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can
email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
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