THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS Decoded: Surprisingly Multi-layered

Day of the Triffids is a product of its time, marked by all the features of 1950s and 1960s science fiction, and not only that. The film can also be classified as a disaster and post-apocalyptic movie. And the most important thing – it was not made by Americans, but by a Brit and a Hungarian. In this case, the creators’ background matters. I will explain why in a moment.

People fight carnivorous plants, this is true, but the triffids are not invaders from space, as some viewers may have thought, based on the movie title alone. Triffids are plants genetically engineered by Soviet scientists, and it was only by accident that they spread across the world. However, humans managed to deal with them, though not by destroying them – that would have been too thoughtless and simultaneously difficult. The triffids were locked in special nurseries, like Christmas trees. The problem was solved, until the comet appeared. And here comes the mysterious comet, and people begin to go blind. Moreover, they start getting sick as well. These three threads mix together, coexist, creating a rather complicated plot for a disaster science fiction film. As I mentioned, the creators’ background matters.

American filmmakers, at the same time as Day of the Triffids was being produced, were already highly specialized in typical disaster cinema with science fiction elements. However, they focused on a single thread, usually characterized by a cosmic or post-atomic origin and large scale. The creators of Day of the Triffids, namely Freddie Francis and Steve Sekely, built their film by combining many themes. The bloodthirsty plants are not the main catastrophic motif, although one might think so based on the title. The triffids are the background, waiting for their time. The destruction of humanity is also not caused by the mysterious comet and the blindness caused by its presence in the sky. They are merely the factors causing change in the world. What matters, however, is what people will do with this new reality. Will they be able to find their place in it?

Another difference between the American and European approaches is how the dialogue layer is treated in the film and how social changes are shown in the post-apocalypse. There are many characters in the film. There are the blind, there are the survivors, and there is the main character – Bill Masen, a scientist who miraculously survives losing his sight, indirectly because he was attacked by a triffid with its venom. Finally, the film shows groups of survivors who form new social cells with the aim of reproducing the human race. Despite the apocalypse, there is an unusual opportunity to create the human race almost from scratch. This leads to the activation of various sociological mechanisms that had remained hidden until then, at least since the end of World War II.

This post-apocalyptic world is parallel to the Nazi one, planned by Himmler in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The triffids are a tool that humans are capable of using to achieve their own goals, to create another domination on Earth, even using the extermination of their own species.

There are many more semantic layers in the plot of Day of the Triffids than one might expect from science fiction cinema. It is surprising for those times that the plot, consisting of a cosmic disaster, dangerous plants, and an epidemic, was successfully integrated. And it succeeded because the filmmakers did not focus on action with triffid attacks, but on humans and their dramatic struggles with the external situation. The scenes with the triffids are poorly executed, which is why I would rather not take them into account when making an overall evaluation of the film. And I do not, because there is no point in spoiling the experience of watching the story by the fact that the huge triffids moved on platforms with added wheels.

There is another interesting theme, or rather the connection of themes. It is worth considering the origin of the triffids. They were created in the Soviet Union. They are purely a human creation. Through human actions, they escaped the laboratory and became an unusual element of the human world. So, was this comet, which caused mass blindness, really the cause of it? Does the plague, which appears as a complement to the apocalypse, have its source in actions independent of human behavior? When considering the plot of Day of the Triffids within comprehensive, logical frameworks, one can answer these questions negatively. Science fiction does not always rely on finding the causes of unusual phenomena outside human activity. Since humans were able to create something like the triffid, they could also bring mass blindness upon their own species, and the comet was not necessarily a celestial body of that kind.

Day of the Triffids is a specific kind of cinema, full of technical errors, but with a well-developed narrative space in this somewhat non-fantastic layer. It is also worth realizing that the film was not made based on an original screenplay but is an adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel. This certainly helps the film withstand the test of time better than productions based on screenplay sketches, which are then painstakingly expanded, often without deeper consideration of whether the idea is suitable for a feature-length film. With a screenplay based on a book, it is different – perhaps it is even easier for the person writing it. The idea of the triffids turned out to be so original that in 1981, it was adapted again, this time into a series. The British made it. In 2009, they returned to the theme, creating a miniseries this time. Interestingly, only recently, after so many years since the release of Francis and Sekely’s film, have the Americans shown interest in this concept. Will their interpretation be high-level science fiction, in the style of Denis Villeneuve’s works?