Script: "Keep behind me - there's no sense getting killed by a plant."

I love movies about killer plants. Naturally, I was very excited to see 1963’s Day of the Triffids. I was looking forward to cheesy b-movie plant action, and the film did deliver, but… it also had some extremely chilling, non-plant-related stuff that made the hokey greenery seem as out of place as plastic parsley on $50 prime rib.

The premise of the film (and the book, which I haven’t read but now plan to) is that a meteor shower affects the triffids on earth, making them people-eating, pollen-spreading, funky-noise-making menaces. This same meteor shower strikes everyone blind who looked at it.

Killer plant action aside, the fact that almost the entire world has just been struck blind is freaking horrifying. And the film goes there, exploring what would happen if we all suddenly lost sight:

A cruise ship in a panic, stranded on the ocean without a single sighted person on board.

A plane in the air, almost out of fuel. The pilots try to hide the fact that they are all completely bind, and there is no one on the ground to talk them down. The passengers clue in and riot just seconds before the plane crashes.

A train wrecks at the station and people tumble off, disoriented and afraid. They discover a single, sighted girl among them – and swarm her to the point that we fear for her life.

The idea of this stuff happening just makes rubber plants seem kind of lame. And I was rooting for the plants. Everyone being struck blind felt more possible to me, and therefore scarier, as I was continually reminded of the Halifax explosions, where hundreds of people were struck blind by watching the harbor through glass windows when it exploded.

I guess the lesson here is, your mythology cannot be scarier, or more plausible, than your monster.

On the whole though, some very creepy elements make Day of the Triffids worth checking out. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me this film influenced 28 Days Later quite a bit.

Our protagonist wakes up in a hospital, his stay there having saved him from an epidemic that wiped out most of the population. He hooks up with a young girl and a spunky woman as they follow radio calls toward a nebulous military base that offers safety but doesn’t deliver. They wind up trapped in an English mansion with creepy guys with guns who want to rape them.

28 Days Later took the best lessons in creepiness from this film, and left out the cheesy plant bits. Not that there’s anything wrong with a killer plant or two…