I Am Legend

"The last man on earth sat in a room. There came a knock on the door."

Anybody who has known me for longer than a week knows I love Zombies. They rank right below Asian Babes in my LUNEMAP (List of Universal Nescessities for Existence on this Misrable Ass-backward Planet). Science Fiction is also on that list, although it too takes a backseat to Asian Babes.

Science Fiction and Horror have a very lightly-shaded gradient between the two, it's often difficult to tell which is a reflection of the other. The REALLY good ones blend casually into one another without jolting the reader out of his state of suspended disbelief, but there are few writers who can pull this off very well. I hate to say it, but Stephen King did his best work BEFORE he got off drugs. "The Mist" is an awesome blend of sci-fi & horror, and although he's written many excellent books before and since, that was his only foray into sci-fi.

Zombies figure highly into Sci Fi, in some form or another. And they're the perfect fall guy; they can be baddies, throwaway characters, obstacles, irritants, even antiheros. Check out the zombie video games popping up like crazy, particularly Stubbs the Zombie. You get to play as a flesh eating mulch sickle!

Except for some vague voodoo references, early Sci Fi & Horror didn't mention much about zombies. That changed with Richard Matheson.

Richard Matheson wrote the definative novel on the "Zombie Plague" craze that has attracted so many people, as well as inspired so many clones in some form or another. The original book was published as a short story in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1956, if you can believe that, and his work is still the most imitated version on the planet.

The name of the book is "I Am Legend" and for Zombie Apocalypse fanboys like myself, it is considered holy writ.

You would be surprised at the number of Movies and books that have taken thier cues from this humble little book. Here are a few that may surprise you:

The Last Man on Earth (Vincent Price)
The Omega Man (Charlton Heston)
Night Of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Land of the Dead
Night of the Comet
28 Days Later
Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich)
Shaun of the Dead (really a parody of Dawn of the Dead)

Every single one of the above flicks is a version of I Am Legend. The Last Man on Earth is the closest adaptation to the book, but you can see the same recurring template used in ALL the movies. George Romero blatantly admits that he stole Matheson's idea & just replaced Zombies for the Vampires in Night of the Living Dead.

I Am Legend was spawned in the era known as "The Paranoid 50's", a time that saw the emergence of other science fiction/horror/macabre writers such as Phillip K. Dick (Bladerunner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly) and Walter Miller (A Canticle for Liebowitz, not zombies, but one of my favorites) and the evolution of sci fi periodicals into digests, Science Fiction Analog being the single most popular today still in existence from those crazy McCarthy days. Fresh from the exhuberance of Winning WWII, we were looking for a new face of terror. America found it in the growing communist column, something alien they could point a finger at, and McCarthy led the charge. But McCarthyism played a large part in many of the stories that came out of that era, they were dark reflections of the current times, or satirical portrayals of the American public's passive cow-like stance during the famous "Red Scare".

Kinda like...Zombies.

Also kinda like...Today.

About the Book

I Am Legend is a unique book among the pulp flesheater genre it has inspired. It takes place in the then-future of 1976 and opens with the monotony and horror of the daily life of the protagonist, Robert Neville. Neville is noyhing special, just an ordinary guy who apparently was the only survivor of a bacterium apocalypse, the symptoms of which are very similar to Vampirism. He has no special powers, he just seems to have "gotten lucky", as it were. He lives in a house fortified against nocturnal attacks by the roaming infected, and scouts for food and supplies by daylight, killing the sleeping vampires he hunts for along the way. Every day he also makes repairs to his house, boarding up windows, stringing and hanging garlic, and disposing of vampires' corpses on his lawn.

Neville's psychological disposition is a significant element in the novel, and his struggles with despair imbue the character with intensity and gravitas. The author emphasizes that he is an ordinary, flawed man trying to deal with an extraordinary catastrophe.

Much of the story is devoted to Neville's struggles to understand the plague that has transformed everyone he meets except for himself, and the novel details the progress of his discoveries. In this regard, the novel is almost unique in vampire fiction in that instead of asking the reader to accept a supernatural explanation for vampire phenomena, the author strives to offer scientific basis for such symptoms as aversion to garlic, craving of fresh blood, and resistance to bullets but vulnerability to stakes and sunlight. The aversion to mirrors and crosses (or, in the case of one vampire of Jewish origin, the Torah) is classified as psychological.

Eventually, we discover that while Neville is the only person immune to the bacterium, he is not the only one still ALIVE. The Vampires, gaining a foothold in sanity, have formed a society around the darkness they must live in, and eventually return to a semblance of civilization in their world. It turns out that the Vampires who were attacking him were the more mentally disturbed ones, who didn't take the transition well psychologically, and went mad. Others are just evil people to begin with, who simply became Vampires. Like in any other society, there are good and bad people, and there is usually a governing law to guide them. However, Neville has no way of knowing this is what is occurring, and during the daylight hours he cannot tell the difference between the two. All he sees are monsters.

Thus, along with the evil vampires, he has been killing these sane, logical people who happen to be infected with Vampirism, and instilling himself into their society like the Zodiac Killer, or the Son of Sam.

He becomes a source of terror to the Vampire community, (who are now simply, "the population") since he can go abroad in daylight (which they can't) and leaves their dead behind. These still living “Vampires” capture Neville and reveal their nature to him, and how monstrous he appears to them. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become the last of a dead breed; a mythical figure that kills vampires while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, and when he realizes this, he also understands that there is no place for him in this new world: He is a freak.

The excellent part of the book is that it doesn't alienate the reader from anyone; We feel as sympathetic towards the Vampires at the end as we do towards Neville at the beginning. We see their side as well, and Matheson doesn't make us choose one or the other. Both are monsters. Both are human.

The protagonist's name, Robert Neville, is an anagram of "Terrible Novel". Richard Matheson considered it one of his worst, and didn't think it would do well at all. He went on to write several more novels and screenplays, "What Dreams May Come" probably being the most well known, although you may have heard of "Stir of Echo’s", and a few Star Trek scripts.

Today, Matheson is known as the father of the Zombie Nation, and I Am Legend has become his most famous book.

Film Adaptations

I Am Legend has so far twice been adapted onto film, with mixed results.

In 1964, Vincent Price starred as Dr. Robert Morgan (rather than "Neville") in The Last Man on Earth. This, in my opinion, was a pretty good version, and my personal favorite. Matheson wrote the screenplay for this one, but the rewrites were changed so badly that he did not want his name to appear in the credits. In fact, he actively tried to have the production shut down. The pseudonym "Logan Swanson" appears instead.

In 1971 a far different version appeared with Charlton Heston as the Omega Man. Matheson had no influence on the screenplay for this film, and it deviates from the book in several ways, particularly in removing any vampirical elements, except for the creature's extreme sensitivity to light. Taking place in a similar time-period as that of the novel, the movie revolves around Colonel Robert Neville (played by Heston), an apparently lone survivor from the fallout of a biological war between China and Russia, who fights nightly battles against infected evil albino mutants. Heston portrays a military biomedical researcher who escapes infection by injecting himself with an experimental vaccine.

The infected are extremely photosensitive, and only venture out at night to feed and conduct their purging of technology, art, science and everything else they have deemed "evil". Neville is forced to hole up in a townhouse - his actual home in Los Angeles - which is stocked full of weapons and modern conveniences. After he discovers a small group of young survivors, he attempts to develop a serum from his own immune blood that will save them from reaching the final "tertiary" stage of the disease.

It has been suggested that the film parallels the story of Christ and the Crucifixion; there are disciples, a betrayer, a Mary Magdalene figure, a Pilate-judge, allegories to the persecution by the Pharisees and the salvation from the Blood of Christ, and even a spear being thrust into the main character. The "omega" in the title references the final letter in the Greek Alphabet (implying, like the 1964 version that Neville is the "last" man), which is also connected to Christianity. This version, while not a cinematographic masterpiece, is considered the far superior of the two adaptations by most film critics.

Since the mid 80's there have been several attempts to do a true adaptation of the book, but it has fallen through at various stages. Writers, actors and directors have walked off, quit, or fought over script and subject matter changes.

A Ridley Scott adaptation was scheduled for production in the late 1990s, but fell through due to an inflating budget (upwards of $100 Million, considered tame by today's soaring price tags). I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to get in on it, but his commitment to other projects like the fecal "Terminator 3" kept him out of it.

Now it's finally being made into a movie. They have already started shooting. Will Smith is playing Neville.

At first I was a little rattled by this...I mean, he's WILL SMITH. Neville is an ordinary guy. He's Joe Everyman. He doesn't know Kung Fu. Will Smith is fucking WILL SMITH. Although I like most of his movies...This isn't a "superhero" role. I didn't want him to get all hip-hop with one of my favorite books.

But as I was sitting there contemplating my Hemlock & Arsenic Milkshake, a friend from Homepage of the dead (find them on my sidebar links) who is working on the movie emailed me a working version of the script they are using.

It's awesome.

You can check it out HERE.

It's already been cleared through channels, so nobody is going to get killed for downloading it or anything. It's also been changed a dozen or more times by now.

But it looks good. Hell, this might be one of the (pitifully) few that Hollywood actually gets right.