Act 3/4
So, here I am at another film convention. Somebody had told me that he’d heard about this bloke who had a stall at it who said he had a copy of The Corn Mother.
Of course, it wasn’t true. It was just yet another person who claimed to know somebody who’d seen it.
I can’t tell you how much of my life I’ve spent thinking about and looking for this film. Ever since I was a kid in the mid-eight- ies and I heard the guy behind the counter and a customer talking about it in my local video rental shop. I’d been looking at the family film section, while sneaking glances over towards the zombie films, wandering if I could get away with renting Poltergeist. And all the time I was listening to what they were saying.
They’d talked about this mythical lost film called The Corn Mother that they wanted to see, about how a handful of promotional video copies were said to have been made and planned to be sent out to the trade before it was pulled from the rental release schedules and nobody in the industry had ever received a copy.
One of them said they’d heard it was nearer to the original director’s earlier films, his more arthouse ones, while the other said from what he knew it was more like all the horror trash that littered the shelves of the shop. They talked about the different versions of the film’s script they’d read, ordered from an obscure mail order company’s advert in the back of a science fiction magazine, but they couldn’t decide which was more likely to have gone into production.
It seemed to open something up in my mind and create a fascination with the lost worlds of this film, a dreamscape with this unknown treasure at the end of it.
