s are tall, carnivorous, mobile plants capable of aggressive and seemingly intelligent behaviour, which arrived on Earth as spores from a meteor shower. They move about the countryside by "walking" on their roots, appear to be able to communicate with each other, and possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting that enables them to kill their victims and feed on the corpses. Bill Masen, a merchant navy officer, is lying in hospital with his eyes bandaged. He discovers that while he has been waiting for his injured eyes to heal, an unusual meteor shower has blinded most people on Earth. Once he leaves the hospital, Masen finds people all over London struggling to stay alive in the face of their new affliction. Some survive by cooperating while others simply fight, but it is apparent that after just a few days society is disintegrating. Masen rescues a schoolgirl named Susan from a crashed train; she has no parents and is a ward of the state. They decide to leave London and head across the English Channel to France. Masen and Susan find refuge at a chateau but when it is attacked by escaped sighted convicts, they are again forced to escape; shortly afterwards, triffids attack and kill everyone in the chateau. The carnivorous plant population continues to grow in number, feeding on people and animals as they move. At a lighthouse on an island off Cornwall, Tom Goodwin, a flawed but gifted scientist and his wife Karen, battle the aggressive plants as he searches for a way to kill them. Goodwin eventually finds the answer, which has been right there in front of him all along: salt water dissolves the triffids.
Although the film retained some basic plot elements from Wyndham's novel, it is not a particularly faithful adaptation: "It strays significantly and unnecessarily from the book and is less well regarded than the BBC's intelligent 1981 TV serial". Unlike in the novel, the triffids arrive from a meteor shower, some of the action is moved to Spain and an important character, Josella Playton, is deleted. Most seriously, the screenplay supplies a simplistic solution to the triffid problem: salt water dissolves them and "the world was saved". This ending appears to be closer to the ending of The War of the Worlds than to Wyndham's novel. The invading triffids succumb to a substance common on Earth, as do the Martians of The War of the Worlds when they die from bacterial exposure and both films end on a religious note. This water ending was also used in M. Night Shyamalan's science fiction invasion filmSigns, and the Night of the Big Heat Simon Clark, author of The Night of the Triffids, stated in an interview: "The film version is enjoyable, luring the effective looking Triffids away with music from an ice-cream van and some other good action scenes. The Triffids' death-by-seawater climax is weak and contrived though. But it would still rank in my all-time top 100 films". Halliwell's Film Guide claimed the film was a "rough and ready adaptation of a famous sci-fi novel, sometimes blunderingly effective and with moments of good trick work". At the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 79% based on, with a weighted average rating of 6.4/10.
Remake
In January 2014, it was announced that a remake was planned and would be directed by Mike Newell.
