The Day of the Triffids (1963)

"Beware the Triffids... They Grow... Know... Walk... Talk... Stalk... And Kill"

Plot

A once in a lifetime meteor shower illuminates the skies across the world, causing everyone who witnessed it to become blind. What’s worse is that the meteorites brought with them triffids – giant, carnivorous plants which now prey upon the helpless population.

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Review

How can a film somehow manage to brilliantly capture a genuinely chilling, masterful post-apocalyptic scenario while simultaneously stumbling completely backwards through some of the clunkiest monster movie cliches you could possibly imagine? This is The Day of the Triffids, a very specific piece of early 1960s British sci-fi based on the novel of the same name by John Wyndham. This adaptation is widely considered an absolute demolition job of the book because it takes some massive liberties with the source material. But yet, despite being a pretty unfaithful adaptation, it still holds an influential place in British science fiction history (just ask Danny Boyle). It starts off as a top tier post-apocalyptic thriller but quickly descends into pulpy monster movie before it knows what’s good for it.

The Day of the Triffids opens on a sailor named Bill Mason. He is currently in the hospital, and he has just undergone an operation on his eyes. His head is completely wrapped in bandages and because he's recovering in total darkness, he misses out on this massive once in a lifetime global meteor shower which literally illuminates the skies across the entire world. Everyone else is outside, staring up in absolute awe at this spectacular celestial event. However, missing that cosmic light show turns out to be the single most important event of his entire life - the ultimate stroke of luck. When Bill wakes up the next morning and the medical staff finally takes those bandages off his eyes, he makes a terrifying discovery. Every single person who looked up at that magnificent meteor shower the night before is now completely, permanently blind. He wanders out of the hospital and steps into London, and he is greeted by absolute total chaos. This first half of the film is great, where the audience is just as disoriented as the protagonist. It relies on the sheer, sudden, catastrophic collapse of modern infrastructure. These are vivid, harrowing scenes of utter disaster playing out across the city. You have passenger trains violently derailing and smashing into stations at full speed. You have commercial airplanes literally dropping out of the sky. Massive ships are crashing directly into the docks. And all of this destruction is happening simultaneously because the pilots, the train conductors, the ship crews, all of them, are all inexplicably blind in an instant. They are entirely unable to do anything to prevent their own deaths or the deaths of the thousands of passengers relying on them. It paints such a visceral, terrifying picture of how fragile our world really is. We place so much blind trust, pun intended, in the people operating these massive machines and the second they lose a single sensory input, the entire system crumbles.

If we connect this to the bigger picture, you must consider the specific era this film was born into. This is early 1960s British sci-fi, and the cultural landscape was heavily fuelled by the pervasive paranoia of the Cold War. There was this constant underlying anxiety simmering in society at that time about how quickly everything we knew could just end – it wasn’t just about being nuked into oblivion but the fear of the suddenness of the end. That flash of light in the sky and society collapses overnight. Despite the film operating on a fairly minor budget, it does a stellar job of spelling out this low-scale, terrifyingly quiet end of the world. It is an apocalyptic scenario that feels incredibly grounded and uncomfortably plausible. These long, chilling shots of our main character, Bill Mason, just walking completely alone through the deserted, silent, debris-filled streets of London clearly influenced director Danny Boyle in his opening salvo for modern zombie classic 28 Days Later, now such an iconic opening sequence in its own right. Picture Cillian Murphy wandering through that empty, desolate version of London in a hospital gown - he is walking directly in the cinematic footsteps of the The Day of the Triffids.

The visual parallel is striking, and it is a brilliant way to force the protagonist and the audience into a very harsh reality right away. One of the most fascinating aspects is Mason's initial reaction to the survivors he encounters because he's not exactly heroic at first. At first glance, Mason comes across as incredibly selfish. He shows a deep, almost callous reluctance to help any of the blind people he comes across stumbling through the ruined streets. You are watching him, expecting him to step up as the hero, and instead, he is actively avoiding people who are begging for help. It looks brutally cold-hearted on the surface, but this isn’t poorly written characterization. It is the bleak, horrifying reality of the post-apocalyptic situation setting in. Mason suddenly realizes that he is now part of the 1% of the world's population who can still see. He is completely outnumbered by a helpless, terrified society. He literally cannot save everyone. If he tries to become a saviour to every blind person he meets, he will be mobbed, overwhelmed, and likely killed himself in the resulting panic. He is looking at a terrifying mathematical problem where the currency is human lives, and his survival instinct is just completely overriding his empathy. The Day of the Triffids really does not shy away from how dark that is. It fully leans into that darkness very early on involving the scene with the first blind person Mason discovers; the doctor who operated on his eyes and ironically saved his sight just days prior. Mason ends up having to test the doctor's vision for him, delivering the devastating confirmation that the doctor is now permanently blind. The psychological weight of that sudden inescapable disability combined with the bitter irony of the situation is so immense that the doctor simply cannot cope with his new reality. He just gives up, turns and makes a suicidal leap out of a window. It is a profoundly dark, heavy moment, and it does a brilliant job of conveying the true crushing weight of this scenario.

The meteor shower didn't just blind 99% of the global population but brought something else down to Earth with it – the triffids, tagging along to Earth in spores from the meteors. The titular menace, for those unfamiliar with the lore, is essentially a giant walking carnivorous plant – almost like a Venus fly trap, except these plants want to trap something bigger than flies inside. Selling the concept of killer vegetation to an audience is aways going to be an uphill battle, but the special effects here do the film zero favours. The triffids are classic papier-mâché monsters that are quite clearly being pulled along the set by visible wires. You just feel the tension completely evaporating the second you see the studio lights glinting off the strings pulling a giant wobbly vegetable toward the camera. This is despite the actual physical design of the plants coming off as unique and somewhat sinister. They are tall, imposing, and strange, but there is a massive caveat to that praise. They only look menacing as long as they're standing completely still. The moment they start shimmying across the screen on their little hidden wheels and wires, the illusion shatters. Despite the clunky execution, there are few memorable encounters where the director manages to wring some genuine tension out of these giant vegetables. Their initial introduction in London, which is handled with a decent amount of suspense, features a dog that unfortunately wanders a little too close to a triffid for its own good off camera. The director also utilises that absolute classic cliché of a car being stuck in the mud while the monster is slowly closing in, this time the vehicle being shrouded in fog which hides the visual issues with the plant, and you can only make out a vague silhouette of one getting closer.

Later on, once Mason and Susan, a young schoolgirl companion he picks up, manage to escape to mainland Europe, they take refuge in a mansion alongside other some other survivors leading to a fairly decent couple of minutes as the triffids kill off a minor character (who the audience had been building lot of sympathy for it has to be said), In these specific, highly contained moments, the film successfully conveys a genuine element of danger. The problem is that these fleeting moments of tension simply cannot sustain the entire runtime and the pacing just drops off a cliff. The Day of the Triffids suffers a severe noticeable loss of momentum once the characters leave London and cross the channel into France. The initial novelty value of the blind world scenario begins to wear thin because the script simply runs out of new ideas to explore, falling into a very repetitive rhythm. Mason and Susan essentially just bounce from one isolated situation to another, encountering different groups of blind survivors, having a brief conflict, running into triffids and then moving on. The narrative transforms from a tight psychological thriller into a very episodic, meandering road trip. Furthermore, the triffids are generally relegated to background duty for the entire second half of the film. I mean, I’ve read the book and this is kind of what happens in there too, so I can’t be too critical. But a motion picture is different to a book and requires different tools to keep audiences engaged.

Without that hungry vegetation constantly clogging up the screen to keep the thriller aspect alive, there is very little left to hold your interest. The human drama simply is not strong enough to carry the weight. The dialogue becomes clunky and the supporting characters are incredibly flat. Out of the entire cast, only Mason and Susan manage to elicit any sort of emotional connection from the audience. You stop caring about the interpersonal drama because the characters lack any real depth or motivation beyond simply existing in the scene. So the film is already struggling heavily with its pacing. The narrative is repeating itself, the practical effects look silly in motion, and the human drama is falling flat. But there is a whole other layer to this production disaster, a massive, almost unbelievable behind the scenes problem. The studio finished all their initial filming, wrapped production, went into the editing rooms, and suddenly realised that the total running time of their feature was woefully short. They simply did not have enough usable footage to hit the minimum required run time for a full-length feature film release, a complete logistical nightmare for any studio. You cannot release a 60-minute movie to cinemas and expect audiences to pay full price, so they had to fix it. Instead of bringing the original cast back to the set to expand on the existing story or flesh out the characters, they drafted an entirely different director, Freddie Francis, handed him some money, and told him to shoot completely new extra scenes just to pad out the clock. These new scenes didn't even feature the main characters of the film, so they created a simultaneous, entirely separate, completely disconnected story. This newly fabricated subplot followed two random, previously unseen survivors who were trapped inside a lighthouse being menaced by triffids, essentially stapling a completely unrelated short film onto the side of their film, solely to hit the 90-minute mark. This is incredibly jarring, resulting in tonal whiplash for the audience. You are watching Mason and Susan wandering through the desolate French countryside, and then the film abruptly cuts to these two entirely different people sitting in a claustrophobic lighthouse somewhere completely alien to us. The lighting is different, the tone is different, the pacing is different. It gives the viewer the bizarre illusion that there are two completely different films battling for supremacy right there on the screen. And neither one of those films actually wins out in the end. The two stories never gel. Every time they cut away from the main plot to check in on the lighthouse, it destroys whatever tension the main story was building. The two storylines remain virtually unrelated to one another for the entire runtime of the film, finally merging with a completely forced token scene right at the conclusion just to tie a bow on it.

This critique of the ending doesn't stop at the clunky merging of the storylines because the ending itself is a problem. The ultimate resolution, how the characters finally figure out a way to deal with the triffid nenace, feels incredibly contrite and ridiculously tacked on for the sake of the box office. The studio clearly mandated a happy ending and wanted the audience to walk out of the theatre with some sort of warm triumphant feeling of hope. There is a logical flaw with this supposedly triumphant resolution because even if the heroes found a convenient way to momentarily defeat the triffids in their immediate vicinity, it does absolutely nothing to change the foundational tragedy of the film which is the mass blindness of most of the population. The vast, overwhelming majority of the human population across the entire globe is still completely, permanently blind! The film wants you to cheer as the credits roll, feeling like humanity has been saved from the plants. But you are sitting there realising that billions of people are still stumbling around in the dark while global society collapses into the Stone Age. It is such a hilariously grim reality for the filmmakers to just sweep under the rug and pretend everything is fine and completely undercuts any forced optimism the ending tries to provide, leaving you with a very strange taste in your mouth as the lights come up.

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Final Verdict

The real takeaway is how a truly brilliant, terrifying concept - the sudden, widespread, catastrophic introduction of a societal disability - can carry a piece of media's entire legacy. That one chilling idea of waking up to a world that can no longer see is so powerful and so deeply unnerving that it secures The Day of the Triffid's place in science fiction lore, even when the actual execution features papier mache plants pulled on strings and two totally mismatched storylines battling for screen time. The script taps into the deep underlying fragility of modern society's infrastructure. In the film, the sudden removal of just a single human-sense sight causes airplanes to instantly fall from the sky and society to entirely collapse within a matter of hours. The question for us to consider is this: what would our modern meteor shower equivalent be today? If a single foundational pillar that we all blindly take for granted, like global satellite communication or the international electrical grid, simply vanished overnight, how quickly would our own straits resemble the deserted, chaotic, terrified London that Bill Mason woke up to? The likes of solar flares or asteroids could literally do this to the planet in one, swift swoop and we’d all be back to the Stone Age before we knew it.

The Day of the Triffids is simply too talky, the narrative is entirely muddled by that bizarre lighthouse story, and the production values are just too low scale to do true justice to the genuinely brilliant post-apocalyptic scenario that is so desperately trying to break free from the clunky script. I do concede that the film still manages to deliver enough action and enough genuine creeping suspense in its quieter moments to strongly appeal to fans of old school vintage sci-fi. It is a film where the ambition vastly outpaces the execution, but the core concept is so undeniably strong that it carries the film into cult status, though a definitive adaptation still needs to do the novel justice.

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The Day of the Triffids Director(s): Steve Sekely Writer(s): Bernard Gordon (screenplay), Philip Yordan (front for Bernard Gordon), John Wyndham (novel "Day of the Triffids") Actor(s): Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Mervyn Johns, Ewan Roberts, Alison Leggatt, Geoffrey Matthews Duration: 93 mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjG3p3XkQu8