A company representing Spider-man /
Evil Dead director Sam Raimi has recently acquired the movie rights
to this 1951 post-apocalyptic novel by British science fiction author John
Wyndham.
In the book the Earth is overrun by a breed of human-flesh eating
plants known as “triffids” after a meteor shower has left most of humanity
permanently blind. A handful of survivors however manage to elude the
creatures and survive in the process.
(In his book about the history of sci-fi, Billion Year Spree,
writer Brian Aldiss supplies Day of the Triffids as an example of
what he termed the “cosy catastrophe” SF subgenre in which a handful of
survivors somehow manage to eke out a relatively comfortable existence
even though the rest of humanity is wiped out. Who needs telephone
hygienists after all, eh? )
Wyndham’s book has been filmed thrice already: as a horribly bad 1963
American B-movie and two British TV productions, one in the early 1980s
and another as recent as 2009. This particular brand of post-apocalyptic
subgenre is of course nothing new and plot strands from Day of the
Triffids have made its way into the likes of
28 Days Later amongst others
throughout the years.
How seriously audiences will take the notion of killer plants is
another matter altogether. For many audiences it is a subject ripe for
parody as the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors has
illustrated. The recent The Ruins,
which featured killer vines, for instance didn’t go down particularly well
with audiences.
However, if anyone can make an invasion by killer plants work it’d have
to be Sam Raimi who is currently fishing round for a new project now that
his Spider-man 4 project fell through and is
being re-booted as they in Hollywood-ese without him or any of the
original films’ stars. After all, his debut movie Evil Dead
famously featured a woman raped by a tree . . . No, seriously.
It is unclear at this stage whether Raimi will direct the project
himself or just produce it.
The
Day of the Triffids (2012)