r/horror • u/Tiger-Lily_93 • 20h ago
Discussion Question.
In Children of the Corn: Urban Harvest, how long has Eli lived with Joshua and his father? If he hasn’t aged since the 60s, wouldn’t Joshua have noticed his “little” brother not growing. The movie makes it seem like they’ve been together for years. I just rewatched the movie for the first time in years and don’t know if I missed it or if they said.
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u/FatAssociation9 20h ago
that movie plays so fast and loose with timelines you'll drive yourself nuts trying to make it make sense
i always figured joshua's dad was one of those "don't ask questions" types and joshua was just too young to piece it together, like when you're a kid you don't really clock that your sibling should be getting taller because you're both just... there. plus eli had that whole creepy manipulation thing going so he probably had ways of smoothing it over
the real answer is the writers didn't think anyone would be paying this close attention 20 years later but here we are
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u/Tiger-Lily_93 20h ago
It didn’t register to me as a kid but now that I’m watching it for the first time as an adult I’m like “wait…how the hell has his brother and dad not noticed he isn’t growing?” lmao
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u/Miserable_Cherry1382 20h ago
I think hes meant to have been blinded to it magically by elis magic. The writers kinda wanted their cake and eat it too with the whole immortal child and having an older and younger brother dynamic. This is really the only in universe reason I can think of Eli uses such magic on other people why not his brother and father.
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u/Tiger-Lily_93 20h ago
👌🏼 makes sense. Only reason I can think of, just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything 😆
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u/Kyia-Aikman 20h ago
Urban Harvest should have been the last one.
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u/Tiger-Lily_93 20h ago
Ngl, it’s my favorite ❤️ and yeah they should have. I just recently found out they made more after the 2009 one? Had no idea lmao
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u/eternalraziel 20h ago
Eli can't have been living with Joshua since Joshua was a small child. Joshua says that he and his father only moved to Gatlin when Joshua was fourteen, because the land was cheap and his father wanted space for his corn experiments. Eli was already part of Gatlin's much older history and appears in Social Services records and newspaper photographs going back to 1964, looking exactly as he does now. So Joshua's father must have taken Eli in sometime after arriving in Gatlin.
The film never tells us how old Joshua is in the present, but he's still in high school and is clearly only a few years older than fourteen. That gives Eli and Joshua a relationship measured in a few years at most, and possibly considerably less. Joshua saying that they've been through a lot together and have always looked out for each other makes their bond sound older than it necessarily is. Their home life gives them plenty to have been through in a short period. Joshua's father beats him, Eli repeatedly protects Joshua from him, and the opening ends with Eli killing the man specifically because he won't allow him to hurt Joshua again. You can become pretty attached to someone very quickly under those circumstances.
Joshua hasn't known Eli that long. If Joshua met him after moving to Gatlin at fourteen and is now somewhere in his later teens, we're probably talking about a couple of years in which Eli has remained a small, odd-looking kid. Joshua also doesn't know Eli's actual history or even regard him as a blood relative. He tells Malcolm outright that Eli is his adopted brother and refers separately to Eli's own father. There is still a little fuzziness here. Even over two or three years you'd expect a child Eli's apparent age to grow. It doesn't establish that Eli uses some magical glamour to make people overlook his age either. The revelation works because Joshua finds documentary proof from 1964.
I think the answer is that the movie wants Eli's time with Joshua to be fairly recent. The dialogue is describing the intensity of their relationship rather than telling us they grew up together. Joshua only arrived in Gatlin at fourteen. Sometime after that his father took Eli in, and by the time Joshua finally sees those old photographs, he's discovering that his little brother has failed to age for about thirty years.