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Hair-raising horticulture: A guide to plants in early horror
On National Plant a Flower Day, put on your gardening gloves and grab a crucifix as we examine the roots of herbal magic on screen.
12 March 2021
Frankenstein (1931)
Long before The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Day of the Triffids (1963) or Little Joe (2019), the horror genre featured an absolute menagerie of strange and fantastical flowers. In contrast to Cold War era sci-fi, where plants were bent on humanity’s destruction – take the carnivorous vegetable-creature in The Thing from Another World (1951) or the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), for example – plants in early horror came to humanity’s aid as poisons, antidotes and talismans against the creatures of the night. This breed of herbal magic is as old as folklore itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest written stories, mentions a mystical flower that grants immortality to anyone who eats it.