The Day of the Triffids – 1962 | 93 mins | Sci-Fi, Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Steve Sekeley’s adaptation of Day of the Triffids falls too gratefully upon the horror film that is implied within Wyndham’s story. From the dramatic chords over tide and credits and the American voice narrating the introduction to this quintessentially English story, to the men in rubber suits impersonating what seem like walking broccoli plants, the film looks like a cheap horror. The main character, Masen, becomes an American seaman, and instead of confining itself to the south of England, the action takes in France and Spain and loses the novel’s sense of cultural claustrophobia. The plot becomes less one of survival and reconstruction and more a simple journey to the naval base where a British submarine is collecting survivors.

Following a meteor shower, Masen (Howard Keel) wakes up in hospital after an eye operation which has prevented him seeing the meteor shower, the rest of the world has been subject to comprehensive blinding. Blindness means not merely inability to live our normal lives, but exposure to something actively malevolent out there in the dark; the triffids! The triffids are a carnivorous plant that is in some way connected with the meteor shower. After removing his eye bandages Masen leaves the hospital to be greeted by the sight of blind Londoners groping through the streets; passengers waiting calmly for rescue at a railway station; a man stumbling out of the crush holding a teddy-bear in front of him, as if it were guiding his way.

A subplot is added concerning the Goodwins, a husband-and-wife scientist team who take refuge in a lighthouse. Although the action there adds nothing to the main plot, the setting is richly ironic, since a lighthouse is entirely useless in a world in which people cannot see. The early encounters with the triffids show them looming into vision like something out of nightmare, more insectoid than plant. The film’s one genuinely unsettling moment is an early episode, not taken from the book, in which the passengers and crew of an aircraft are in mid-flight. The frightening calmness of the aircrew – all resolutely stiff-upper-lip in a crisis – emphasises the nature of the predicament. How, without being able to see the controls, is the pilot going to land the plane? He orders the passengers to fasten their seatbelts and prepare for landing – a charade that can only end one way. Separated from their normal environment, these people are doomed. Yet they behave as if the situation were retrievable, until a child asks the question which is in everyone’s mind, ‘The pilot – is he blind too? ‘Then utter panic breaks out. For this scene alone, the film’s crudities can almost be forgiven.

Then we have Wyndham’s true thesis: that our social lives function only within the set of communal lies we call ‘civilisation’, and once they are seen to be illusions our situation is at best precarious. Without the defensive social strategies enabled by our sense of sight, we have little chance against better-equipped carnivorous plants. The novel ends with humanity still facing both the triffids and a pressing need to develop new social relations: it is the film’s rabbit-out-of-a-hat reassurance that is the true ‘cosy catastrophe’. In the film, Coker (Mervyn Johns) is entirely different, an elderly English tourist in France who merely shares the same name. While something of the debate remains when Masen and Susan (Janina Faye) come across the French community headed by Mme Durant (Nicole Maurey), who represents the ‘humanitarian’ strand which seeks to look after the blinded, it is sacrificed by the film’s inability to engage fully with the ideas implied by the plot.

While Wyndham’s narrator Masen, like most of his characters, is something of a flat stereotype, we must beware of reading his English reticence as lack of depth. There are several touching and emotional scenes in the novel as Masen witness’s individual human tragedies in this mass slaughter. Emotion in the film, however, rarely rises above pure pantomime melodrama – Karen Goodwin (Janette Scott) is adept at screaming when triffids appear, but otherwise acts the long-suffering victim of her disillusioned alcoholic husband. Only in the scenes in the tube station and the aircraft do we see real emotional collapse beneath the staid veneer, but the cracks are vivid and the more disturbing for being contrasted with surface stability and calm. The contrast is immediately undercut by Howard Keel’s position as foreigner and wanderer (as a seaman he is less ‘rooted’ than Wyndham’s character), that marks him as not part of the society he that observes.