The man who helped bring the world Idris Elba as Luther, Neil Cross, has not been resting on his tough nut cop laurels since the character helped kick his career to the next level. Now Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Ghost House Pictures have hired him to write the script for the new Day Of The Triffids film.
John Wyndham’s classic 1951 sci-fi horror tome follows a devastating time for humanity when the discovery of aggressive flora coincides* with a meteor shower that blinds a good proportion of the Earth’s population. Our sighted hero, Bill Masen, is in hospital recovering after being attacked by one of the rampaging stalk-ers and must try to help fellow survivors make it through an England now dominated by the plants.
Cross will be competing with a lot of history: the story has been adapted several times, though never completely successfully: a big Christmas holiday mini-series a couple of years back changed the ending horribly. Other films (particularly 28 Days Later) have borrowed its spooky, deserted city tone.
Last time Triffids was mentioned, Raimi was considering directing the movie himself. Deadline doesn’t say whether that’s still the case, but there’s always a chance Raimi will gravitate back towards it once he’s finished making Oz: The Great And Powerful.
It’s not the first big film assignment Cross has tackled. He’s also scripted horror thriller Mama, starring Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and Jessica Chastain, which is now plunging through post-production. And he's written drug-mule drama Midnight Delivery (which has Brian Kirk attached to direct), both for producer Guillermo del Toro.
*There's a suggestion that the two are linked, that the plants come from alien spores and the 'meteors' that blind the planet may be somehow connected to them. But that's not made quite explicit in the book and is often fudged in adaptations that prefer to have the plants as a human GM-creation.