English author John Wyndham wrote numerous highly influential Science Fiction novels in the fifties, including the likes of The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and The Midwich Cuckoos (source of the multiple Village of the Damned films)—but The Day of the Triffids, originally published in 1951, remains singular. Yes, it’s foundational to the post-apocalypse subgenre, providing some early and potent imagery of decaying social cohesion and a major city turned into a hollowed-out wasteland, but what really struck me was how the background of the story combines many contemporary-at-the-time fears: the dangers posed by arms race secrecy, unchecked scientific experimentation (for mostly economic purposes), and ecological distortion, all becoming a volatile chemical combination that eventually blows up in the face of the entire civilization. Unique among killer plants, the triffids are far more frightening for the way they become the ultimate invasive species, and how they’re not even the most immediate threat the surviving humans have to deal with—but they’re always there, spreading, and it’s only deep into the novel (and in the successful adaptations of it) that the survivors realize just what they’ve wrought upon themselves.
The narration from the perspective of protagonist Bill Masen is soaked in ceaseless anxiety, and the odd wry observations that can never fully mask how harried and on edge it is. The structure of the novel establishes the presence of the triffids from the beginning, and their early history is a darkly humorous story of our ability to exploit, or just learn to disregard, a weird and dangerous discovery. As we are told, triffids just started showing up in people’s gardens decades before the events of the novel, and those people quickly learned not only of the plants’ ambulatory capabilities, but also their potentially lethal poisonous stingers—they also learned the usefulness of the oil harvested from them, and so triffids went from pest to lucrative crop, and the things are kept around and periodically pruned to keep their deadlier aspects in check. Although seemingly tamed, Bill’s childhood encounter with a triffid leads him to become a biologist that researches them, and he is the only one throughout the story who recognizes the threat they pose once humanity’s ability to control them is eliminated.
In fact, Bill having another bad triffid incident—his eyes splashed with poison, requiring surgery and a period covered with bandages—is also what saves him from the other crucial event: a mysterious and beautiful meteor shower that nearly everyone on Earth watches one night, only to find out the next day that the lights have rendered them blind. The terror that Bill feels about his temporary blindness offers a stark contrast the permanent kind foisted on almost everyone around him. The eerie silence of the streets of London and the hospital give the early passages of the novel a particularly disquieting edge that more loud catastrophic stories do not.
Much of the novel follows Bill dealing with both basic survival needs, his search for other people who did not lose their sight, and observing the desperation of the inflicted population. After meeting Josella, a novelist who also avoided seeing the meteor shower, they run into a number of groups with different ideas of how to deal with this situation, whether that be everyone-for-themselves take-what-you-want survivalists, those trying to logically plan out creating a new society (that, for pragmatic purposes, feels the need to enforce polygamy, gender roles, and otherwise limit basic freedoms), or those whose sympathy for the blind convince them to force the sighted survivors to tend to them. A number of people are even convinced that someone out there is coming to set things right, a possibility that grows increasingly remote the more time passes. While violence is present, it’s not nearly as big a threat as the disease that tears through whole swathes of the population. All the while, Bill has to argue again and again to each new survivor he meets that the growing number of triffids stalking the streets and the countryside need to be prepared for (he witnesses multiple people being killed by triffids along the way, including Josella’s father), despite the disbelief of many that a common garden staple could be a bigger problem than the other forms of chaos engulfing civilization—until, suddenly, it becomes clear that they are. By the climax of the novel, when Bill, Jo, and the small group they’ve gathered have been able to live in Sussex for a few years, dealing with the thousands and thousands of triffids that appear like clockwork becomes the central concern in their lives.
The triffids remain partly mysterious, with their origins and aspects of their behaviour existing only in theory, which of course only makes people’s tolerance of them even more short-sighted. Bill spends the entire time wondering if the signature rattle of their roots is actually a form of communication, and whether that means that they possess a kind of intelligence unique among plants. As for where they came from, the implication is that they were a Soviet science experiment that escaped (that explanation is made slightly more explicit in the 1981 BBC adaptation, which we’ll get to), which brings in the Cold War angle—contributing to that, Bill later airs his suspicions that the meteor shower was not a natural phenomenon, but some kind of weaponized satellite that malfunctioned (who made it is not said, but I think the subtext is that it doesn’t matter.) Some of those things would have been considered standard issue at the time—certainly the fifties were not in want of sensationalist tales of science gone wrong and Cold War paranoia—but the way Wyndham winds them together into this snowballing accident is what makes this story powerful. One thing going wrong—in this case, the spread of the triffids—is something we could possibly deal with (and maybe even profit from), but when compounded with another thing going wrong—the blinding meteor shower—it suddenly goes out of control. The society of the story was arrogantly confident that they had as much mastery of the triffids as any other plant or animal, but it only takes one change in the situation for the advantage to be reversed. Triffids, much like humans, are what David Quammen would refer to as a “weedy species”, one with the adaptability to propagate easily and rapidly, and when conditions favoured them, they took the reins of their ecosystem.
The ending of the novel, with Bill and the others joining a colony on the Island of Wight (after dealing with a militia group with despotic ambitions by getting them drunk and then turning off their triffid-proof electric fence), shows him being cautiously optimistic that someday humanity, even in its diminished state, will be able to destroy the triffids and retake the land. Maybe it’s this light streak of faith in our own adaptability that made SF legend Brian Aldiss use this story as an example of “cosy catastrophe”, the slew of English post-apocalyptic stories that still allow their characters a chance to find some comfortable form of existence. Given the despair seen throughout the rest of it, Bill and Jo’s ability to gather what they need and find abandoned but intact apartments to stay in (to say nothing of the nice-sounding country house they live in near the end) does give it a feeling of middle-class practical pluck. These people do get along a lot better than everyone else seems to. I don’t think that necessarily detracts from the horror of the scenario, but it does prevent it from feeling as bleak as it probably could have.
There have been multiple adaptations of Triffids since it was first published (as well as many things that were clearly influenced by it), and as is usually the case with classic stories with multiple adaptations, the results vary wildly. The first high profile one was the 1962 film, directed by Steve Sekley and written by Bernard Gordon (future producer of Horror Express, and hiding his name behind another writer because he was blacklisted at the time), which takes names and situations from the novel and throws them haphazardly into something that otherwise has nothing to do with it. This version makes both the triffids and the meteor shower extraterrestrial in nature, and Bill Masen is now an American in the merchant navy (played by Howard Keel with a very brassy voice) whose initial eye accident is of course not triffid-related. The movie tries to find ways to portray the societal crumble of the novel, but aside from a few moments of the blind people’s desperate struggles to find their way around, it mostly relies on more bombastic moments like a train or plane crash, which undercuts the tension with their over-the-top nature. Rather than mostly staying in around London, too, the movie’s version of Bill manages to make his way from England to France and then to Spain in a seemingly short span of time—the mystery of what’s happening in the rest of the world gave the novel an effective sense of isolation, but not so much here (but, hey, you get a brief appearance from Carole Ann Ford a year before she starred in the first few seasons of Doctor Who.) They also regularly cut to scenes of two married marine biologists (Janette Scott and Kieron Moore) stuck in a lighthouse—the husband has become a belligerent drunk, apparently because he didn’t understand what being a research scientist entailed (“I’m bored with stingrays! I really don’t care why the stingray stings!”)—and dealing with their own triffid problems. The far more optimistic ending of this movie has the scientists discover that sea water kills the triffids definitively, killing any and all ambiguity as well. Speaking of the triffids, in this they look like a dishevelled pile of rubber and fibre, although some moments of their dripping maws and unnatural movements are gross enough to be slightly memorable. This ultimately feels more like a standard monster movie mostly enlivened by some effective filming and unusual colour choices, which might be due to Creeping Flesh director Freddie Francis contributing to the direction.
Far better is the BBC mini-series, aired in six episodes in 1981, which is a very faithful adaptation of the novel, capturing the slow build-up of the triffid menace. As a visualization, it even manages to make the scenes of the blind wandering the streets, surrounded by the remains of the early chaos or attempting to chase down people they hear can see, far more disturbing than in prose—it’s the terror in the faces of the actors and the hesitance in their actions that heighten all the non-triffid scenes to an equal level of horror. The acting in the series is great across the board, and while one could probably argue that the special effects for the triffids themselves are probably more along the lines of a high end Doctor Who monster, their designs manage to follow the book illustrations while having a texture and bright colouration that makes them look more plausibly like a real plant. You even get some additional worldbuilding, including a moment early on where you see a black-and-white newsreel showing how the world has accepted the sudden appearance of the triffids. The BBC produced a second, much looser (and more star-studded) two-part adaptation in 2009, which I haven’t seen, but sounds a bit more action-packed than this one. Your mileage may vary.
Something tells me that if the name of a monster has entered the vernacular, that means it has hit upon a nerve in the collective unconscious, and the word “triffid” has become a way to describe unusual and possibly troublesome plants. In particular, the name has been given to Chromolaena odorata, a species native to the Americas that has become invasive in West Africa, Asia, and Australia, where its rapid growth and ability to spread itself make it a real pain to deal with. Although not poisonous to humans unless ingested, it is to cattle, and apparently causes other ecological problems that have made extermination of it a large scale project in many countries. Whether it is dangerous to people or not (at the moment), though, if you happen to live in a place with it, maybe reconsider that meteor shower viewing party.
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