Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #17 August 2015 | Page 30

meat being sold in a butcher shop just before the famines start, normally unarmed Bobbies carrying assault
rifles and gunning down hungry rioters, a mutinying
army unit killing their commanding officer and the
clever use of radio and TV snippets as exposition devices all help build up a chillingly believable world.

David is killed. The film ends on an ambiguous note.
John and his family are alive but the cost has been high
and survival is not guaranteed.
The film has a lot to say and it does so at maximum volume. Although adapted from The Death of
Grass by John Christopher (Samuel Youd’s pen name),
the film owes much of its urgency and imagery to Paul
Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. The 1968 best-seller
warned of wars, famine and societal chaos in the near
future (the Seventies and Eighties) due to overpopulation and resource depletion. Although Ehrlich’s predications didn’t come to pass, producer/director Cornel
Wilde effectively dramatises how increases in population and reckless industrial growth created social and
environmental stresses that could lead to disaster. The
film is replete with images of factories belching toxic
smoke into the sky. Rivers are choked with garbage
and dead fish wash up on the shore. The world being
swamped under a tidal wave of humanity. The virus
springs up due to pollutants in the biosphere. England,
and the rest of the world, quickly falls into chaos because the population has grown to the point that even
a disruption of food supplies is catastrophic.
The film is interesting for its message and its
unflinching portrayal of the fall of civilisation and the
return to barbarism, even if the budget keeps the focus
tight on a small group of people. The premise is powerful and still resonates. Although Erlich’s population
bomb never went off, the destruction of the natural
world and the impact of the ever growing population
and the by-products of civilisation on our environment
is still a concern. Whether it is climate change, pollution of the oceans, the destruction of aquifers, the rise
of megacities supported by fragile supply chains or a
whole host of other problems the species faces, films
like No Blade of Grass invite one to think about the
consequences of the world we’ve made.
The story plays out in a very believable fashion.
Characters have realistic motivations and the scenario
charting the fall of civilisation and the concomitant
rise of barbarism is plausible. The vignettes that chronicles H