In late 20th century Great Britain, a spectacular meteor shower blinds most of humanity, bringing society to a sudden, enveloping collapse. Unaware of the wider catastrophe, Bill Masen, Jonathan Duttine has managed to keep his sight while confined in a hospital with his eyes bandaged at the moment the storm of light erupts around the country. Bill works on a triffid farm, a place where mobile, carnivorous plants are cultivated for their oil, with their venomous stings kept intact to improve the quality of the product. Long before this crisis, Bill had been stung by one of these dangerous plants, and even though he wore protective gear, some of the poison slipped into his eyes. In the quiet hours of the hospital, he hesitantly peels away the bandages and slowly begins to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe unfolding outside.
Bill rescues Jo Payton, Emma Relph, from her blind captor and discovers that she had slept through the meteor shower, thus retaining her sight. Together they begin to navigate a Britain that has suddenly turned dependent on the newly blind for survival, their mutual hope tempered by the fear and confusion that now governs everyday life. They soon meet a small band of sighted survivors who have decided to leave London behind and set up a new community somewhere away from the chaos, determined to rebuild civilization from the ground up.
Yet their plan clashes with the views of Jack Coker, a sighted man who wants to keep the group in the city and help the blind rather than abandon them. Maurice Colbourne embodies this wary, calculating stance as he presses for a stubborn, London-centered solution. When the others reject his vision, he and a handful of sighted allies take a harsher route, capturing some of the group, including Bill and Jo. He assigns each captive to a different subgroup of the blind, and Bill is chained to two of his charges to prevent him from leaving them.
As if the human crisis were not enough, the triffids break loose and roam through the newly blind population, preying on people and spreading fear as they move. The dual threats of the carnivorous plants and an ominous, spreading disease push most of Bill’s circle toward ruin, with many of them dying and the remainder scattering to distant corners of the countryside. In the midst of this upheaval, Bill begins a determined search for Jo and ends up allying with Jack, who admits that his original plan did not succeed as he had hoped.
Their journey takes them across the English countryside, where they come upon fragments of the former group who had left London. The survivors’ moral divides surface again in a stark clash: those who stayed behind, led by Miss Durrant, refuse to accept that polygamy might be necessary to repopulate the world. This ideological rift complicates the search for a secure future, and the group continues to move, warding off a harsh and uncertain fate.
As time passes, Bill encounters a young sighted girl named Susan, who joins him on his trek. He eventually recalls Jo’s description of a place belonging to her friends in the Sussex Downs, and there he is finally reunited with Jo. After constructing a protective fence around their farm to keep the deadly triffids at bay, the couple settles down, creating a fragile but hopeful life for themselves and a small band of blind friends and their children.
Six years slip by, and suddenly Jack reappears, arriving by helicopter with news that shifts the balance of power. Miss Durrant’s faction has fallen to a deadly disease, but another faction has managed to secure the Isle of Wight and has driven back the triffids there. With the situation deteriorating faster where they currently stand, Bill, Jo, and their community of blind families and their children prepare to relocate to the safety of that island stronghold.
Before they can depart, a contingent of uniformed men arrives in an armoured car the next day. They belong to a group attempting to impose a feudal order, with sighted people placed as the ruling aristocracy over the blind. Their plan is to allocate more blind people to Bill and Jo, and to take Susan away so she can learn how to care for others within this new hierarchy. Bill seizes a moment of opportunity, getting the soldiers drunk and sabotaging their armored vehicle. By dawn, Bill and the rest of the group have driven away, leaving the gates open as the triffids close in, a sobering reminder that survival in this new world will depend on courage, resilience, and the stubborn hope of keeping faith with one another.
