"The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" is a short horror story written by H. G. Wells. It was published in 1894. This is not a well-known story of his, but there was a particular reason I wanted to read it.
The story follows a man named Winter Wedderburn (I hate his name) who collects orchids of different varieties. He lives with his female cousin, who is also his housekeeper. These are the primary players in this short tale. One day, Winter wakes up and has a strange feeling like something unusual or special will happen to him. This feeling comes more from leading a rather boring life.
He goes out and purchases a number of orchids, but one of them is very strange. This particular orchid seems to have been found next to a corpse, which really puts off his housekeeper. She does not want to have anything to do with it.
Winter then spends some time taking care of it. It begins to grow some leaves which the housekeeper thinks looks a little like human fingers, but Winter assumes it's all in her mind. He continued to spend time in his hothouse, tending to it.
One day, the aroma coming from the plant makes him pass out. His housekeeper checks up on him, and sees him laying on the floor of the hothouse, with the orchid reaching its tendrils down to him. He is bleeding from several places. In an attempt to help him, the scent produced from the plant almost causes her to pass out as well, but she proves smart and breaks the windows of the hothouse to air it out.
She smashes the orchid, pulls the tendrils away from Winter, and rescues him just in time to get a doctor. At first, it looks like Winter won't make it because of the loss of blood, but he does actually survive. At this point, the story suddenly ends with absolutely no explanation about what Winter went through (which bothered me a bit).
I'll be honest: the story is somewhat interesting, but it's lack of explanation hit me as mildly frustrating. Obviously, though, this strange orchid fed on human blood, and that was the point. So why did I read this weird story? Well, apparently, it is widely believed that this obscure story by H. G. Wells was the chief inspiration for two films called "Little Shop of Horrors." I'm not even joking. Most people don't even know that those movies were based on anything but a script.
Of course, those movies were far removed from what H. G. Wells came up with... and they are objectively better. That said, I don't actually recommend this short story, but I do recommend you see either of those films, especially the one from 1986. I just feel the movie's inspiration was just too underwritten to be of any real notability other than it's connection to what it ultimately inspired.
This blog was written on April 16, 2025.
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He probably thought keeping what the orchid was a mystery made the story scarier... and he probably didn't have an explanation he liked anyway. Interesting that though the story itself was a failure, it inspired great successes.
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