Mindless Ones

Yes, that’s not the poster – I’m not sure British television in the 80s did posters. Especially not for a series as outright miserable and cheap as Day of the Triffids. Instead what we got were real suburban streets, sets hungover from the seventies, and parochial British accents. The show was so bloody scary because the world it inhabited looked and sounded so depressingly like our own. The triffids were like some vile full stop on the end of contemporary British life – we were defined by the moment of our extinction and we turned out to be parochial, small, insignificant and suffering. The fact that mankind was to meet its fate blind (after a freak meteorological event) just served to underline the point that the universe is merciless, uncaring, uncompromising, and alien to all human feeling. What better monster to take on the role of apocalyptic deathbringer than one which has no anthropomorphic qualities: that skitters along on it’s roots, and feeds on blood, that, as a consequence of its inhuman nature, negates the value of culture, thought and emotion?

Fuck yeah, triffids are nasty.

More after the jump

By God I’ve written some long winded posts. Everyone else has only managed to throw up one or two bigguns, but this here mindless poodle has at least five to his name and it’s time to give myself a break, in the name of my love-life, my free time and my sanity. So here it is, the first of a what will be an occassional, but altogether less masochistic, series of posts where I try to get to grips with what makes some of our fave baddies tick and why they have proven to be so popular. And maybe along the way unearth a few ideas that will serve as pointers, guiding today’s creative powerhouses towards a deeper understanding of their subject matter and, resultingly, a brighter, altogether more interesting future for the characters themselves.

Because everyone at DC gives a flying fuck what I think.

More after the jump