They are out there. The retro sci-fi fanatics already know this. A sixty-year-old movie, The Day of the Triffids (1963), may have served as inspiration for dozens of horror and sci-fi you’ve come to love in your lifetime. The seemingly innocuous title sounds like a campy puppet parody, but it’s far from that. Based on the 1951 novel by John Wyndham, The Day of The Triffids is a terrifying exploration of apocalyptic events you cannot ignore.
Some films from before our respective times seem tame or boring, but we’re all aware of classic staples like Nosferatu (1922), Frankenstein (1931), and certainly the rest of your favorite black-and-white Universal films. Even if you haven’t seen it, you’re fully aware of the many iterations of The War of The Worlds. But these pillars of horror and sci-fi will often go neglected while their impact on modern entertainment goes unnoticed.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and unless you were already old enough to have seen it previously, you explored the original The Thing from Another World (1951). The appealing terror factor is the idea that the “invaders” aren’t little green men or scary hairy monsters made of foam. These stories found terror in the idea that we were unprepared for the threat. When you can’t identify your attacker, you’re left in a state of fight or flight, but there’s no one you can punch in the nose to get away.
The same goes for when your aggressor is something that would typically be described as anything but a threat. Venus fly traps have fascinated all of us, but have you ever entertained the idea that one could climb out of its pot, grow to ten feet tall, and gobble you up in the night? Imagine Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors had legs. That’s basically a Triffid.
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Now imagine a field of Stranger Things-like Demogorgons (just not quite as agile) doing the Night of the Living Dead zombie shuffle toward your hiding space. They don’t have eyes or ears, but they feel vibrations, so like Death Angels from A Quiet Place (2018) and just about any zombie, they are attracted to sound.
(In my best Columbo impression…) Oh, just one more thing: If you survived long enough to have the opportunity to be stung by a Triffid, you are likely blind. At least you are spared the terrifying appearance of your killer. Like Color Out of Space (2019) (from the 1927 H. P. Lovecraft story, so this may have inspired this detail from The Day of The Triffids novel), the world was mesmerized by the unimaginable colors from a spectrum we didn’t know we had the capability to see when the spores of Triffids showered the night sky.
The dazzling display was thought to be as harmless as viewing a Perseids meteor shower. The colors transfixed most of the population, and within a day, they found they’d lost sight. Vision loss is instant in most cases, so planes go down, highway collisions happen en masse, and people scramble to find their way only to be trampled by panicked crowds.
Enter the Rick Grimes character. Robert Kirkman had to have, at least unconsciously, placed Rick in a hospital bed during the first wave of the zombie apocalypse after seeing Bill Masen wake from slumber in a hospital. Bill had his eyes covered with bandages during the captivating astronomical event. Scheduled to have his bandages removed the following day, fate was on Bill’s side. When he woke in an abandoned hospital, he removed them and began to piece together what the world had become.
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The movie only shares the early part of the novel’s plot, but both, like so many zombie movies and books, focus a lot on the human response. For some, it’s “everyone for themselves,” while for others, group factions are formed almost immediately. The vilest of characters, and this is more evident in the book, advocate for a new tyrannically structured order to “repopulate” even before the Triffids problem is taken care of. That hierarchy of power is typically expressed by the weakest of males who wish to manifest their “natural dominion” over women.
The abrupt and simple solution to a world conquered by Audrey Demogorgons resembles the ending to The War of the Worlds, where the Martians die from the common cold. It feels lame, but the lesson is that there is always an answer, and it’s usually a straightforward one. Occam’s razor isn’t just a catchy term uttered by Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. If you can kill a houseplant with salt water, you can kill a Triffid. The earth’s surface is 71% water, so probability already made the invasion a little easier on us.
The BBC has had two goes at doing a series and miniseries about The Day of the Triffids, but other than that, this masterpiece of storytelling has been left in the attic to rot. Even the streaming print on Tubi looks like an animated GIF that’s been reproduced several times too many. IMDB indicates a project in development called Land of the Triffids but with very little other information available.
Of all the remakes so many of us say don’t need to be retold because “Hollywood has run out of ideas,” we should all be asking why The Day of the Triffids has not seen the light of day on the big screen for sixty years!
