Part Two: Stay Off The Streets After Dark

"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes, they were in the streets before he could get back...he checked each window to see if any of the boards had been loosened...after violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely, a job he hated. In the backyard, he checked the hothouse and the water tank. Sometimes, the structure around the tank might be weakened or its rain catchers bent or broken off. Sometimes, they would lob rocks over the high fence around the hothouse, and occasionally they would tear through the overhead net and he'd have to replace panes...he went through the house for a hammer and nails... "

-Richard Matheson, "I Am Legend", (1954)

In the mid-1950s, when most horror films were still largely period-based melodramas from studios like AIP and Hammer, young American S.F./horror writer Richard Matheson, yet to concoct some of the most timeless episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and adapt the works of Poe to the screen for Roger Corman, brought "Nosferatu" to suburbia and changed the face of modern horror. Like then-contemporaries Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Jack Finney, Matheson saw horror as a powerful medium to comment on what he saw going on outside his own window, and not merely the stuff of drive-in programmers and hoary bodice-rippers.

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Richard Matheson

"I Am Legend" was a unique take on a familiar monster: by focusing on the protagonist and the specifics of his attempts to merely survive from day-to-day in a world overrun with vampires, Matheson captured not only Neville's terror, but also the utter banality of his life as he sought to amuse himself during the daylight hours, and maintain his home fortress when not raiding the library for evidence of how to reverse the vampire plague. In Neville's world, something as simple as misjudging the weather or misreading one's watch is as terrifying as coming face to face with the undead. The reader often wonders why Neville is driven to survive at all.

Stephen King has said of Matheson: "He was the first guy that I ever read who seemed to be doing something different than Lovecraft wasn't doing. It wasn't Eastern Europe, the horror could be in the Seven-Eleven store down the block, or it could be just up the street."

Matheson's personal formula for horror? "To me, fantasy at its best consists of putting in one drop of fantasy into a mixture that is otherwise realistic. And, once that drop of fantasy has been put into the mixture, I try to forget that I am writing a fantasy and write as realistic a story as I can, recalling, of course, that the springboard has been some offbeat concept." (as told to Marc Scott Zicree in "The Twilight Zone Companion", Bantam Books, 1982).

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Having lived through another nightly taunt from his former neighbor-turned-vampire Ben Cortman and his legion of bloodsuckers, Robert Neville, the last man on Earth, awakens at his usual time of five-thirty on January 16, 1976, sees the vampire sentries still waiting for him beyond the yard, and checks his list for the day: "Lathe at Sears, water, check generator, doweling, usual". Before driving to Sears in his Willys station wagon, he removes the bodies of two vampire women from his front lawn and cleans up the debris left by Cortman and his undead hordes:

"There was certainly nothing attractive about them in the daylight, he thought, as he dragged them across the lawn and threw them up on the canvas tarpaulin. There wasn't a drop left in them, they were the color of fish out of water. He raised the gate and fastened it...he went inside the house, washed his hands, and made lunch: two sandwiches, a few cookies, and thermos of coffee...when that was done, he went to the bedroom and got his bag of stakes."

Die-hard horror fans can surely see "I Am Legend"s influence on later horror film classics like George A. Romero's "Night Of The Living Dead" and "Dawn Of The Dead", Michel Soavi's "Dellamore Dellamorte" AKA "Cemetary Man", and recent video games like "Resident Evil" and "House Of The Dead" (which really do put the viewer in the POV of a survivor like Neville). For those of you intrigued by the concept and yet possessed by that lingering feeling that you've somehow seen this before, you might well have, since there have been two film adaptations so far, one from each side of the Atlantic [More]

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