The end of the short story. Burt and Vicky do not survive, there are no good kids, and the cult is not stopped. The fact that one of the cultists is pregnant with Malachi's child was somehow the most disturbing thing about these lunatics.
Made only slightly less horrific by the fact that in the short story, Burt and Vicky are complete assholes. Not to mention complete idiots.
The lack of exposition of exactly what happened in Gatlin in the original story is actually pretty terrifying on its own. The evidence Burt finds and pieces together paints a pretty horrifying picture on its own, but you dont see any of it happen unlike the 1984 adaptation, and the time skip between the massacre and the time of the story is also MUCH longer. The cult has been doing this for 12 years by the time Burt and Vicky finds them, and NO ONE has noticed it before. No one who lived to tell the tale anyway.
Vicky was right. Something was terribly wrong
The sheer isolation of Gatlin is utterly soul crushing, imagine being trapped in a place like that, lost in a sea of corn, you might as well be the only town in the world.
Something had happened in 1964, something to do with corn, and religion. Perhaps a religious mania had swept them? Alone, all alone, surrounded by miles of the rustling, secretive corn, alone under a million acres of blue sky. Alone under the watchful eye of God, now a strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Burt felt a chill creep into his flesh.
The fate of Gatlin's original priest and the police chief in both versions, their corpses turned into human scarecrows.
