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Plant Pop Culture

A Garden of Horrors

Plants are ubiquitous entities: they surround us when we’re outdoors and we bring them indoors as bits of living decor. Except for the usual warnings to avoid the poisonous ones--“leaves of three, let them be”--plants occupy a neutral or even beneficial place in our lexicon.

The great era of exploration combined with the rise of intellectual inquiry from the 16th through 19th centuries brought adventurous Europeans into contact with many strange and unusual plant species in far-away locales. As the literary form of the novel developed, these mysterious plants took hold of human imagination and gave rise to a small, but enduring cadre of horrific plants.

Under the Punkah by Philip Stewart Robinson (1881): Born in India, this British naturalist, journalist, and popular author wrote of a fictional uncle’s travels through deepest, darkest Africa where the man encountered man-eating trees in Nubia. In the story, the tree captured and consumed one of the uncle’s native guides. The uncle used both his gun and his knife to kill the carnivorous tree, which fought back with blood-sucking leaves and prehensile limbs.

Sea and Land by J. W. Buel (1887): Buel’s “illustrated history” contains tales about a man-eating tree, the ya-te-veo, that plants with prehensile limbs that wave about and catch their victims to squeeze the blood from them. Human food is, of course, the preferred delicacy.

In the first volume of American magazine Current Literature, which ran from 1888 to 1913, ran a story by Karl Leche. Claimed as a first-person account of a scientific exploration, the author described a large bush with eight long, spiky leaves and six white tendrils that waved in the air. The story recounts a woman being sent to drink from the sweet nectar pooled at the base of the plant. The tendrils capture her, the leaves close around, and… burp.

In 2006, Scott Smith’s horror novel The Ruins was released in the USA and Canada. The story tells the tale of six tourists who encounter deadly, carnivorous vines protecting a ancient Mayan ruin. The vines mimic cell phone rings and human voices, exude a caustic sap, and drink blood. Creepy. The book was adapted to screenplay and the movie released in 2008.

Horror master Stephen King published “The Weeds” in 1976, about a farmer who discovers a meteorite and hopes that it will solve his financial problems. However, alien plant spores on the meteorite quickly grow and consume the farmer.

Little Shop of Horrors, a musical theater favorite from the 1960s, continues a long tradition that grew with discovery of the Venus flytrap in the 19th century. As the story goes, a shy botanist encounters a small plant, named Audrey Jr., which grows when he feeds it meat. The plant, of course, grows to gargantuan proportions and takes on its own malevolent personality.

Although not truly a plant herself, botanist Pamela Lillian Isley morphs from a shy, timid woman into the potent villainess Poison Ivy after being injected with experimental chemicals by her evil employer and mentor, Dr. Jason Woodrue. Other than the lovely and purr-fect Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, Batman never had such a lovely adversary. As for Woodrue, he injects himself with more experimental chemicals that turn him into an evil, plant-based hybrid called the Floronic Man.

In 1951, John Wyndham published his post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids. After a worldwide plague of blindness, an aggressive and carnivorous plant species, somewhat resembling the innocuous asparagus, rises to hunt human prey. Hollywood picked up the book and made it into a film. In 2001, Simon Clark published The Night of the Triffids, a sequel to Wyndham’s novel.

The film industry produced Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a cult classic, in 1956. The story’s premise centers upon an alien invasion from outer space of plants that produce seed pods which grow replicas of people, called “pod people.”

Hollywood didn’t stop with Triffids. For groan-inducing vegetable villains, look no further than Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)--the movie series (Return of the Killer Tomatoes [1988], Killer Tomatoes Strike Back [1990] and Killer Tomatoes Eat France [1991]), television series, and video game. This series features an invasion of intergalactic tomatoes that make strange noises and eat people.

For more cult science fiction, check out Dr. Who, the British series that began in the 1960s and continues today. The that features an episode titled “The Seeds of Doom.”

The Castlevania video game debuted in Japan in 1986, and features the hero, Simon Belmont, who travels to Dracula’s castle where he is beset by a large flowering plant that lures its prey with a naked human female figure.

Continuing comic book fascination with predatory plants, Justice League Unlimited, produced by Warner Bros. Animation, included an episode titled “Black Mercy,” in which a telepathic and parasitic flower reads its victim’s thoughts and possesses the victim’s mind with sensations of his or her greatest desire while feeding on the victim’s body.

Karen M. Smith