When I went to see I Am Legend with a friend, one who’s a bit of a Norm, he commented that the film seemed to rip off 28 Days Later quite a bit. Forcing myself to bite back on a rather disproportionate surge of nerdly outrage, I pointed out with moderate calm that 28 Days Later rather ripped off I Am Legend, a novel from 1954, of which the current film was but a third adaptation.
Actually, though, although Richard Matheson’s novel was but one early example of a genre that sci-fi critic Brian Aldiss somewhat acidly dubbed the “cosy castastrophe.” These would be works featuring a planet suddenly bereft of the far greater portion of its population, allowing the surviving few to not only attempt to rebuild civilization, but also to run riot through the remaining luxories of the age. The consumerist aspect got its greatest play during the late ’70s and early ’80s, with satirical films like Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Comet.
There are quite a few movies made of this type, with 28 Days Later not establishing much that was particularly new (especially since otherwise it’s yet another riff on Romero’s zombie movies): 1951’s Five was one of the first “last person/people on Earth” movie, but there are several similar films, including The Last Man on Earth, Omega Man (the latter two previous adaptations of Matheson’s I Am Legend), The Earth Dies Screaming, Target Earth, The Quiet Earth, The Last Woman on Earth, the TV movie Where Have All the People Gone, and the miniseries based on Stephen King’s The Stand. That’s just off the top of my head, and doesn’t even count the numerous TV anthology shows that have used this idea, most prominently (and often) The Twilight Zone.
In any case, 28 Days Later in fact draws rather a lot more from the John Wyndham 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, as well as various radio, film and, here, TV adaptations of the book. The most famous version is the fairly crappy but warmly remembered 1962 killer plant film The Day of the Triffids, which was a TV late night perennial back in the day. The biggest change is that the movie presents the world with a miracle cure for the Triffids (ambulatory plants that kill with a poisoned stinger), whereupon civilization is (it is implied) fairly easily restored. This is pretty far from Wyndham’s intent.
Far closer to the mark is this 1981 BBC TV adaptation, which hews very close to the novel and its far more wide-ranging concerns. The basic set-up is that there’s a spectacular meteor shower that is seen worldwide. This blinds everyone who watches it*, which is about 99% of everyone everywhere. The everyman hero, Bill Masen, is spared because he was in the hospital following an eye operation (ironically because he had been attacked by a Triffid), and his eyes were bandaged during the shower.
[*Bill eventually proposes some alternate and somewhat paranoid theories for the blindings, but they strike me as unconvincing.]I don’t really want to get too much into it, because really, you should find a copy and watch it. However, as with the book, the mini-series (six thirty minute episodes) is a lot more concerned with the attempts of various groups to rebuilt society. The horror of the situation, in which the sighted are alternately god-like figures and so valuable a commodity as to have their humanity stripped from them, gets across quite nicely. The Triffids are definitely a concern in this world, but in fact they are but an element of everything that is happening.
For themselves, the history of the Triffids, rather richer in the book than in the aforementioned movie (which unsurprisingly but understandably shorthanded the arrival of the Triffids as resulting from the same meteor shower that blinds everybody) is followed here, and really gives the world it creates a nice sense of weight and history. That there was an entirely valid commercial reason for keeping the Triffids around before the disaster, thus explaining why the dangerous plants hadn’t just been eradicated, adds a nice note of reality to the proceedings.
Getting back to I Am Legend, many viewers and critics noted that the first part of the film, the quiet section detailing day-to-day life in a post-apocalyptic world, was the best part, and that the movie was a whole was severely damaged by the thinking that it had to wrap up as an all-too generic special effects-driven action piece. Although obviously lacking the production values of a Hollywood spectacle—ignore the very early ’80s cheapie credit sequence, which promises dire things the program luckily doesn’t deliver—this should be the perfect antidote for those who wished I Am Legend had been more concerned with ideas than explosions.
