They are older than Man, older than the animals of Earth. They never sleep. But they are always watching. And waiting. In a war that began millions of years ago, when one protozoian decided to get its nourishment from the Sun and another from its fellows. Plant and Animals. The two warring kingdoms. The relentless power and great age of plants have chilled writers since the beginning of time. Science has done nothing to lessen this fear in modern times. Many writers have chosen the plant as its villain, its monster.
The wicked denizens of the Terror Garden tend towards five earthly types. These are: blood-suckers, usually vines equipped with needle-like protuberances and purple blossoms; man-eaters, with gigantic Venus Fly-Trap style jaws and octopoid crawlers; fungi, parasitic mushrooms and molds; slimes, moving pools of digestive terror or shambling man-beasts; and poisonous killers, with sharp thorns or deadly blooms.
Blood-Suckers
H. G. Wells can be considered the originator of many literary themes but not the intelligent (non-supernatural) killer plant. There were at least seventeen precursors. That being said, Wells was by far the most famous user of the idea. “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (The Pall Mall Budget, August 2, 1894) tells the story of Wedderburn a plant collector who purchases an unknown tropical orchid. The bulb was found under the dead body of Badden, another collector, sucked dry of blood, supposedly by jungle leeches.
When Wedderburn doesn’t appear for tea, his trusty factotum rescues him from the vampiric plant that overcomes him with its fragrance, and then bleeds him with its strange aerial rootlets. The housekeeper smashes the flower’s pot and it shrivels and dies. Wedderburn is encouraged to look for a new hobby.
One of the better Wellsian imitations is “The Purple Terror” (The Strand, November 1899) by Fred M. White. Here, instead of a small potted plant, the blood-sucking vines dwell in the trees, snatching their prey from below. Lt. Will Scarlett is sent to cross Cuba to deliver a message to an awaiting ship. The party of five men and one dog are taken through the jungle by a vengeful Spaniard named Tito, who leads the Americans to an odd bone-filled grove. Later that night, terror strikes:
… then the big mastiff seemed in some way to be mixed up with the phantasm of the dream, barking as if in pain, and Scarlett came to his senses. He was breathing short, a beady perspiration stood on his forehead, his heart hammered in quick thuds — all the horrors of nightmare were still upon him. In a vague way as yet he heard the mastiff howl, a real howl of real terror, and Scarlett knew that he was awake. Then a strange thing happened. In the none too certain light of the fire, Scarlett saw the mastiff snatched up by some invisible hand, carried far on high towards the trees, and finally flung to the earth with a crash. The big dog lay still as a log.
With the death of the dog, Scarlett is quick to see why Tito picked the spot and why he sleeps outside the ring of trees. When the Lieutenant threatens to tie Tito to a tree for a day in mock ignorance, Tito confesses his treachery. The villain is marched off to be tried and hung, instead of cruelly fed to the Devil’s Poppy.
Robert E. Howard used the blood-suckers in “The Garden of Fear” (Marvel Tales, July-August 1934), a tale of genetic memory. James Allison, a cripple, relives one of his past lives as Hunwulf, an Aryan who loses his mate during their migration across prehistoric Europe. Hunwulf’s girl, Gudrun, is being held in a tower of glass inhabited by a strange winged man, and surrounded by a hedge of blood-sucking flowers. Howard describes for us the equipment of the hemophagous blooms:
“The petals were each as broad as my hand, and as thick as a prickly pear, and on the inner side covered with innumerable tiny mouths, not larger than the head of a pin. In the center, where the pistil should be, there was a barbed spike, of a substance like thorn, and narrow channels between the four serrated edges.”
Hunwulf’s method for destroying ‘The Garden of Fear’ is ingenious, for with the flowers guarding the base of the tower he can not even approach it. The warrior stampedes a herd of mammoths that dwell nearby, driving the huge beasts over the blood-drinking vines. With the flowers crushed, Hunwulf then goes on to kill the villain and save his love.
Man-Eaters
The man-eating plant has become something of a cliché, a creature of B-Movies and Saturday morning cartoons. One of the earliest Pulp stories using such a monster is “The Plant-Thing” R. G. Macready, which appeared in the popular British anthology Not At Night (1925). Macready’s tale is a poorly written tale about a journalist who sneaks into Professor Carter’s mansion and discovers the doctor’s work, a strange carnivorous plant from Rhodesia. Carter claims: “… For my part, I dare to believe that I have discovered the ‘link’ between the vegetable and animal kingdoms …” The plant is a gigantic mass of tendrils with a wide animal-like maw. The professor demonstrates the plant’s meat-eating habit by feeding it sheep and calves, much to the reporter’s disgust:
The tentacle threshed about, endeavouring to clutch the animal, which lunged back, wild with terror … It was seized. A loud cracking of bones broke the momentary silence, and was followed by an agonized cry. Six feet from the ground the great orifice gaped wide. The calf disappeared. A fleeting second and the mouth closed. There was no sign of its location; the trunk was smooth and unbroken.
During such an experiment both Carter and the newspaperman are attacked. The professor’s faithful Malay servant, Tala, shoots the killer plant with an elephant gun. Carter’s only reaction is to weep at the loss of his discovery. The newspaperman departs with the scientist’s beautiful daughter.
Gordon Philip England, John Murray Reynolds, A, Hyatt Verrill, Edmond Hamilton, Donald Wandrei, David H. Keller, Sophie Wenzel Ellis and plenty of others wrote similar stories in the Pulps.
Hollywood has created many killer plants in B-movies and Science Fiction films. But the most famous film plant monster is Audrey Junior (or Audrey II in later versions) from the Roger Corman film The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). The film would later be made into a successful stage-play in 1982 and refilmed in 1986 by Frank Oz of Muppet fame.
Discovered by the nerdy Seymour Krelbourn during an eclipse of the sun, Audrey II makes a Satanic bargain of financial success in exchange for blood, and later, whole body depredation. Ashman describes the plant in the Dramatis Personae as “An anthropomorphic cross between a Venus’s-fly-trap and a warty avocado. It has a huge, nasty-looking pod which gains a shark-like aspect when open and snapping at food … Its voice … sounds like Wolfman Jack and sings hot, funky blues.” Eventually Audrey II (named after Seymour’s love Audrey) eats the entire cast, assimilating their faces into its gigantic form.
Not all the man-devouring plants take the form of large predators. “Seed” by Jack Snow (Weird Tales, January 1946) tells the story of Myra Bradshaw, an explorer/journalist working in Africa, who mysteriously returns to the States when her health begins to fail. As the narrator refuses to believe, Myra is the victim of an African Flower God. She had investigated the stories of the fleur de mal: “… fully expecting nothing less than a monster, carnivorous plant — a fly-catcher plant on a gigantic scale. But I was wrong …” The truth proves even more terrifying. In the shrine is a dead girl with a blossom growing in her mouth:
“… I saw that natural decomposition of the girl’s body had never taken place. Her skin hung about her frame like a loose, brown sack that was beginning to fall to shreds … That skeleton was filled with an interweaving and interlacing network of tiny green feelers and roots that perfectly and completely duplicated what had once been the arteries, veins and caparillies of the unfortunate girl’s body.”
The vengeful shaman tricks Myra into eating the seed and her fate, despite her friend’s best efforts, is similar to the girl in the shrine. Jack’s tale is creepy but Clark Ashton Smith out creeps even him with “The Seed From the Sepulchre” (Weird Tales, October 1933). Smith anticipates much of what Scott smith will use in the modern horror novel, The Ruins. (2006)
Slimes and Fungi
The greatest fungi classic, one of H. P. Lovecraft’s greatest influence, was William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (The Blue Book, November November 1907). It is the first (and best) fungi story. A narrative told by a mysterious voice off a ship at night, the narrator, John, relates strange and disturbing events.
Bound for Frisco from Newcastle aboard The Albatross, John and his fiancée survive four days in a life boat after a storm. One morning the two survivors wake to find themselves in a lagoon near an island, next to an abandoned ship. The ship is infested with “a kind of grey, lichenous fungus”. The couple stays on the ship for a few days until they find the mold growing on them.
Escaping to the island that houses the lagoon, they find it is also covered with the white fungus. As food grows scarce, and the growths on their skin increase, the two victims find themselves resistibly drawn to eating the fungus. Their fate is sealed, like the other anonymous lumps on the island. They are doomed to become giant mushrooms.
Ray Bradbury wrote “Come Into My Cellar” (Galaxy, 1962), exploring a similar theme as Finney’s The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (1955). The story begins with two men, Hugh Fortnum and Roger Willis, discussing Roger’s feeling that something terribly wrong is going to happen. Later Willis runs away, sending Hugh some strange telegrams about heading for New Orleans and not accepting any packages. But the news comes too late as Fortnum’s son, Tom, has already received a package of “Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise-Them-in-Your Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms”, which get dumped in the basement during an argument. Tom’s family and friends, including Roger, all become strangely controlled after eating the mushrooms. The story ends with Hugh giving up and joining the rest of humanity.
Brian Lumley’s “The House of Cthulhu” (1973) features a fungus disease. Zar-Thule, a terrible pirate, survives the Great Old One’s destruction of his crew but contracts the symptom of Cthulhu. The character ends his days moldering in a pit: “A fumbling grey mushroom thing that moved not of its own volition but by reason of the parasite growth which lived upon and within it …”
But it is Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies”(Weird Tales, Summer 1988) and 1989 British Fantasy Award winner, which best illustrates the fungus theme. The story centers on the remote seaside town of Easingham, which is slowly crashing into the sea. Amongst the abandoned houses, the narrator, Lane, finds an old man who lives alone with his dog. The town suffers from a cancer — dry rot or Merulius lacrymans— which the old man believes came to Easingham from Haiti in a shipment of rare wood. The rot has grown fibers under the ground and into the old houses, leaving a red dust of spores everywhere. The old man even shows him the “fruiting bodies”, large mushroom like balls under the floorboards and in the graves of the abandoned cemetery, where the old man’s wife rests.
When Lane returns a year later his visit to the old man is short, finding his house dark and lifeless. Sitting on the settee is a huge mushroom reminiscent of the dead wife’s picture. The dog and old man also show up in mushroom form before Lane runs away. That night, during a storm, the sea devours Easingham. The narrator hopes it is the end of the strange mushroom growths but wonders about all the spores that fell into the sea, and those he touched and breathed.
Related to the fungi are slime creatures. Theodore Sturgeon gained his first big success with a story entitled simply “IT” (Unknown, August 1940). A shambling slime thing, consisting of the bones of a dead man and swamp plants, terrorizes a backwoods family. The resulting combination is a new being, one which is more ignorant than malevolent, for when it kills Alton Drew and the dog Kimbo, it does so out of curiosity. Later, the beast is knocked into a river and dissolved. Sturgeon’s image of the swamp-man creature continues in comic books with characters like Swamp Thing and its poor imitation Man Thing.
Poisonous Killers
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1854) by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a classic American morality tale and probably the oldest modern tale of a killer plant. Set in Italy, a young Italian, Giovanni, falls in love with a mysterious girl named Beatrice. Giovanni can never touch her for Dr. Rappaccini has made her poisonous, like the strange plant in the courtyard where she lives. The Doctor’s obsession with keeping his daughter pure and capable of deterring evil has made her into a monster. Giovanni recruits the help of his mentor, Dr. Baglioni, who creates an antidote. Beatrice takes the formula but dies. Even in death Rappaccini can think only of his science as Baglioni cries, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment!”
The ultimate plant classic is John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951). Set in the near future, man has crossbred several plants to create the Triffids, highly poisonous killers with ten-foot long whip-like stingers, because the oil extracted from the plants is cheaper than petroleum. The triffids have their stingers clipped and are caged in triffid stations. Man seems to have complete control of the creatures.
Unfortunately a strange meteor shower happens one night. Everyone goes out to see the spectacle, only to find they are permanently blinded the next day. The narrator of the novel is saved this fate by being in the hospital because of a triffid sting to the eyes. He emerges one of the few sighted people left, as London deteriorates into a holocaust of savagery.
The human decline is bad enough, but the triffids, who are much more intelligent than previously thought, have broken out of their prisons and find the blind humans easy prey. The narrator and a handful of others try to escape London and the triffids. They plan to build a new colony away from the tyranny of blind slavers, the lash of the triffids and disease that consumes the cities.
Originally filmed in 1963, the film version of The Day of the Triffids, starring Howard Keel and Janette Scott, is disappointing. The 1981 BBC television version of The Day of the Triffids, starring John Duttine and Emma Relph, was far superior, also filmed in England but faithful to the novel. A more recent version starring Eddy Izzard is oddly unsatisfying.
