Director Steve Sekely misses the mark with his congested adaptation of John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Day of the Triffids. Though one of his plotlines is fascinating, after the film’s antagonist is introduced, the work suffers exponentially as it slowly succumbs to its budgetary constraints.
After experiencing a visually stunning meteor shower, most of the populace goes blind, making escape from the triffids, carnivorous plants who possess locomotion, nearly impossible.
There are several reasons why John Wyndham’s novel of the same name didn’t survive the voyage from the written page to the big screen. One, it overloads its plot. Whereas an apocalypse offset by global blindness would sustain a storyline (and did for Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago in his masterpiece, Blindness), the addition of man-eating plants detracts from the tension of the recent epidemic. It is obvious that Wyndham began with the idea of creating a monster out of the least likeliest threats imaginable, plants, and then devised a method by which the antagonist would be plausibly menacing atop of not easily dispatched, hence the visual impairment of his characters. Yet I would complain that even the novel, which I have admittedly not read, misses the point because, theoretically, such a story is best suited as a radio play (it was produced as such by the BBC in 1957). Regardless, the director’s major faux pas was attempting to film an apocalypse on a limited budget. Even Byron Haskin’s pedantic The War of the Worlds presents the theme of extraterrestrial invasion more intriguingly and consistently than Sekely’s work.
Honestly, there isn’t much else to say about the work outside of the aforementioned drawing board mishaps. The misfiring of duel plot lines, consisting of two collectives attempting to fend off the triffids, is only part and parcel given the circumstances surrounding the production atop the poorly executed villains as they are literally carted along throughout the film. To put it simply, the financing the filmmakers were working with culminated in an antagonist which makes Roger Corman’s Audrey, from The Little Shop of Horrors, look excessively detailed and authentic.
Of greater interest is the fact that Wyndham’s novel was adapted to the screen by Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted writer who was responsible for Fred Sears’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers six years prior. Gordon would go on to produce Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Also of note, Freddie Francis goes uncredited as co-director. Francis, when behind the camera, was a bull in a china closet, but as cinematographer produced such works as David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Straight Story, Edward Zwick’s Glory, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.
Trivia tidbit: Sekely’s work is not wholly without socially redeemable value. The design of his triffids influenced Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. plants” in the director’s famed 1982 classic.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
