Plants everywhere. Among them are the world’s largest and oldest multicellular organisms. While humans embrace their alien “otherness,” plants are almost always considered harmless in nature: they serve as food, home decoration, or just a backdrop.
However, some writers and directors understand that their “otherness” can also pose a threat. In huge numbers, as in forests and jungles, plants are fraught with darkness and danger. Sometimes people can imagine that individual plants can not only hide danger, but also be a danger. What follows are films in which plants are either our enemies or create places where our enemy hides and waits for us to enter.
10 ‘Keeper’ (1990)
Everyone is allowed to be wrong from time to time, but since the 1990s The keeper William Friedkin (who led French connection And Exorcist, two of New Hollywood’s greatest films) got both feet wrong. A film about a Hamadryad, an ancient green dryad that inhabits a tree and abducts children; constant script and plot changes meant they were never together.
True terror in the heart The keeper is that a tree—whether it is infected with a dryad or not—can actively harm people. It resurrects an old nightmare that our ancestors must have told for hundreds of thousands of years as they sat around fires surrounded by ancient forests that seemed to go on forever.
9 “Naked Jungle” (1954)
Director George Pal and director Byron Haskin made a great sci-fi classic War of the Worlds in 1953. The following year they got together to naked jungle starring Charlton Heston not long before he became a big Hollywood name. The film is about a giant horde of army ants roaming the jungles of Brazil, a horde that occasionally infiltrates villages and plantations (including that of Heston’s character), devouring everything in its path.
The constant threat of the horde is hidden deep within the jungle, a constant looming threat in itself, surrounding every settlement and bordering every river. When the horde finally appears in all its rampaging wave of deadly ants, it somehow seems less threatening and more vulnerable away from the jungle and in the open. This is proven when Heston sacrifices his plantation by blowing up the dam and washing away the horde.
8 Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)
Folklorists believe that the original Jack and the Beanstalk story may be over five thousand years old. The version that almost everyone knows today first appeared in the early 1700s. Fast forward to 2013 and this is Bryan Singer-The director’s cut appears on the big screen, mixed with another old tale, Jack the Giant Killer.
A good film, which, unfortunately, did not like the audience and critics, in Jack the Giant Killergiant beanstalks - and it turns out there are quite a lot of them - become bridges between our world with all its familiar vices and that “other”, more terrible place with all its unknown and therefore even more terrifying vices.
7 “Ruins” (2008)
Anyone who has plucked vines from masonry or trellis knows how sticky, thorny, and aggressive they are. Ruins is a carnivorous plant in Mayan ruins that infects humans with vine-like whiskers; once infected, the victim has no hope.
In this 2008 film, there is a scene in which the protagonist uses a knife to cut vines from his own body. It says something about the horror of tainted plants when that scene still pales next to the whole nightmare of humans being hunted for a little extra fertilizer.
6 “The Phenomenon” (2008)
The movie that pissed off the critics incident based on the premise of a B movie, which is fine since it was the director M. Night Shyamalanintention. As a self-defense mechanism against humanity, plants somehow develop the ability to create and then emit neurotransmitters that encourage humans to kill themselves in waves of mass suicide.
Silly premise aside, the real horror underlying the film is that something as seemingly harmless as a plant is capable of causing the planet’s dominant organism to self-destruct. The idea, if not the mechanism itself, is insidious, which is perhaps exactly what people should expect from plants.
5 “Shop of Horrors” (1986)
Oddly enough, the scariest thing in the film about a plant that wants to devour every person on Earth - “Evil Green Mother from Space” - is a dentist. Film based on the musical, which was itself based on the original 1960 film. Roger Korman the film of the same name became a hit after being released on video.
Beautiful songs and a terrifying plant that surpassed, but did not surpass Steve MartinA terribly sadistic dentist starred in a funny film that never loses its nightmarish poignancy, starring a plant that wants only one thing… to be fed.
4 ‘Annihilation’ (2018)
Annihilation both a great sci-fi movie and a great horror movie. The horror has a really intriguing scientific basis - the arrival of an alien organism that has created an area called the Flicker. Nothing that goes into the Shimmer comes back until someone returns.
Playing on humanity’s fear of being replaced, absorbed, or changed, the audience is taken through a familiar and exotic environment; he sees animals and plants that shouldn’t exist, including, horribly, plants that even look like humans. IN AnnihilationFlicker is nature transformed: if not an enemy, it still represents the end of all we know.
3 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956)
Considered one of the most important films in the science fiction canon. Body Snatcher Invasion this is a movie that survives, proving that a great idea combined with great direction and acting always makes for great art.
At the heart of this 1956 film is the great fear of not knowing, not trusting family, friends or colleagues, something sinister and malicious is taking control of your life and society from within. What better way to express this fear than a few pods of seeds from outer space that have fallen on the fertile and vulnerable Earth?
2 “Day of the Triffids” (1963)
John Wyndhamnovel Day of the Triffids this is the best story about plants and people ever written. Much of the grim anxiety surrounding human-eating mobile carnivorous plants has been rendered helpless by global blindness and the collapse of civil society.
The film also shows what is now considered old-fashioned and even unscientific: humanity’s constant struggle with nature. But if humanity now understands that it must work with nature and not against it, Day of the Triffids will always be there to remind them why they should.
1 “Apocalypse Now” (1979)
If Joseph Conradthe story “Heart of Darkness” - a treatise against imperialism and the dangers of isolation, then Francis Ford CoppolaX Apocalypse has come is its spiritual successor, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The film tells the story of an American soldier (Willard, played by Martin Sheen) sent deep into enemy territory to kill another American soldier (Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando), whose sanity has been shattered by both the horror of war and the jungle that hides it.
The environment in which these people fight is not just a metaphor: there is something deeply hostile in the jungle that goes back farther than the ephemeral worries and conflicts of humanity. As Willard says in voice-over as he heads towards his final confrontation with Kurtz, “Even the jungle wanted him dead. And that’s who he really got orders from.”
Source: Collider
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