General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Day of the Triffids (1962 film)

The Day of the Triffids is a British-American science fiction film directed by Steve Sekely, loosely adapted from John Wyndham's 1951 novel of the same name, in which a meteor shower blinds most of the population and mobile carnivorous plants called triffids attack the helpless survivors.¹ It was produced by Security Pictures and released by Allied Artists, runs about 94 minutes in color, and stars Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Kieron Moore, and Janette Scott.² Sources date it to 1962 or 1963 depending on whether production or release year is used; the Science Fiction Encyclopedia lists it as a 1963 film, while most reviews and databases call it the 1962 film.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Source	Loosely based on John Wyndham's 1951 post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids⁴
Direction	Steve Sekely; Freddie Francis directed the lighthouse scenes uncredited¹
Screenplay	Credited to Philip Yordan; actually written by Bernard Gordon, who was blacklisted at the time¹
Production	Security Pictures Ltd/Allied Artists; made at Shepperton Studios, England; CinemaScope, Eastmancolor, 2.35:1¹
Running time	94 minutes (also listed as 93 minutes)²^•¹
Principal cast	Howard Keel (Bill Masen), Nicole Maurey (Christine Durrant), Janette Scott (Karen Goodwin), Kieron Moore (Tom Goodwin), Mervyn Johns (Mr Coker)¹
Music	Ron Goodwin, with additional music by Johnny Douglas¹

Spoilers

Plot and departures from the novel

A spectacular meteor shower blinds anyone who watches it, leaving much of the population of Northern Europe sightless; in the aftermath, the carnivorous, mobile triffids escape and begin attacking the helpless humans, and only a handful of sighted survivors can fight back.¹ As in the novel, most of England's population has been blinded by light or attendant radiation from the meteor shower, and the survivors are beset by lethal seven-foot (2.1 meters) mobile plants with poison stings.²

The adaptation departs from the book in ways critics have repeatedly singled out. In the novel, the triffids are the result of human bio-engineering, and Wyndham hints that the meteors may be debris from a satellite weapons system that has gone wrong and that the triffids themselves are the result of a Russian bioengineering project; the film instead presents the triffids as having been brought to Earth on the meteorites, losing most of the novel's social commentary in the process.⁸ The lighthouse storyline with the sea-water weakness is an invention, and the film ends on a resolution the novel does not provide.⁷

The Marylebone train crash. One of the film's best-remembered sequences shows an express train ploughing into the buffer stops at a terminus after its footplate crew have been blinded. It was filmed at London Marylebone using a BR Standard 'Black Five' Class 5MT 4-6-0 locomotive, with the crash itself staged on a studio set; the arrival was shot at normal speed and then speeded up for the sequence.⁴

Production

The film was a Philip Yordan production for Security Pictures, presented by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, with George Pitcher as producer and Ted Moore as director of photography.¹ The screenplay credit went to Philip Yordan, but the script was actually written by Bernard Gordon, a Hollywood writer exiled after the House Un-American Activities Committee era; Gordon was in Paris in late 1960 when Yordan called him to Madrid to help with a script based on Wyndham's novel that he was struggling with.¹^•⁵ Steve Sekely's papers at the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center include a 131-page screenplay with holograph notes, an estimated budget dated January 21, 1961, and daily continuity reports from the shoot.⁶

Freddie Francis's contribution. The cinematographer-turned-director Freddie Francis directed all of the scenes set in the lighthouse, uncredited.¹ This subplot, in which a married couple of scientists are stranded on a triffid-infested island off the Cornish coast and discover that sea water is the creatures' weakness, was created as a parallel story cut against the main Bill Masen narrative, giving the film a more upbeat, audience-friendly ending.⁷

Reception and legacy

Contemporary and later critical opinion has been largely negative. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls it an unsuccessful adaptation that had a moderately generous budget but no sense of how genre science fiction works, with plenty of preaching and florid love interest but only intermittent attention to the basic situation, and triffids that are more absurd than frightening.² Time Out finds it patchily assembled, with uncertain performances and dodgy process work, though it notes that some of Wyndham's ideas translate effectively, such as the airliner whose crew and passengers are suddenly struck blind and the electric fortress surrounded for miles by invading triffids.³ Halliwell's Film Guide described it as "a rough and ready adaptation of a famous sci-fi novel, sometimes blunderingly effective and with moments of good trick work".⁷

Reception at the time was warmer than later assessments suggest: the film was praised by John Carnell, editor of New Worlds magazine, and by Wyndham himself, though it is now criticized for its "men in broccoli suits" approach to special effects.⁹ A retrospective reviewer finds that the premise of a blinded human race, rather than the plant monsters, is what still works, and judges the film genuinely terrifying in places despite weak special effects and unsatisfying endings to both storylines.¹⁰

Comparison with later adaptations. The BBC's 1981 six-part television serial, directed by Ken Hannam and adapted by Douglas Livingstone, is generally regarded as much more faithful to the novel and superior to the film.²^•¹¹ A further BBC two-part miniseries followed in 2009.² The 1962 film's cultural footprint outlasted its reputation: the word "triffid" has passed into English as a term for any aggressively weedy unfamiliar plant, and the film earned a mention in the opening song of Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show ("...And I really got hot/When I saw Janette Scott/Fight a triffid that spits poison and kills...").⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026