They Are Legends

An overview of the novel "I Am Legend" (1954) by Richard Matheson and the films it inspired

The Novel

The novel that started it all was written in 1954 by Richard Matheson, one of the great American writers of sci fi and horror genre. 

You wouldn’t think it when you look at it but I Am Legend is one of the most influential novels of the 20^th century. Coming in at only 160 pages it had an enduring impact on the pop culture ever since, and its reverberations can still be felt now in such works like 28 Days Later (2002) or The Walking Dead (2010) for example.

And that shortness of text took me slightly off guard, since the book pictured in the photo at the top of this entry is actually a collection of short stories, the first of which is I Am Legend. So, wrongfully believing the novel is as long as the collection, at 312 pages, the ending of it surprised me and seemed abrupt. I wanted it to be longer. Instead I launched straight into another short story and I was wandering as to what is suddenly going on, until I figured it out.

Since I'm trying not to reveal too much of the story, I wont give away how it ends. But we can discus other things about it. The action is set in futuristic Los Angeles, spanning 1975 to 1979. No disco balls here though.

The main character is Robert Neville. The Last Man On Earth (or TLMOE for short) as far as he is aware. An apocalyptic event destroyed the world as he knew it to be. He lives day to day, surviving boarded up in his house, as the people infected by a plague and turned into vampires besiege him every night, until the first rays of sunlight hit L.A. The vampires are led by Ben Cortman, his former co-worker at the plant.

We now take it for granted but what was revolutionary about it when it was first published was the scientific reason for the apocalypse. That the vampirism in the people is the result of the disease caused by the bacteria spread by dust storms and mosquitoes. Yes, it is disease that wipes out humanity. Much like weaponized Ebola virus would if it had the chance. Instead of killing people as fast as Ebola would, the disease in the novel turns them into vampires. Yet…

This is not just a novel about a lone survivor battling and fending off vampires. It deals with deeper human issues, such as loneliness and effects of isolation. With alcoholism as a result of trying to beat it. As well as sexual repression and lack of intimacy with a member of opposite sex. That is…

Until Ruth shows up and enters his life. The object of his desire the moment he sees her.

The flashbacks to 1975 when the outbreak first started, or pre-apocalypse, is an important part of the novel as well as in all 3 official screen adaptations. The story during a post-apocalypse, or “present time” is set 1976 – 1979.

Neville is immune to the disease, but not to acts of physical violence during night time, against which he fends off with crosses, garlic and mirrors. However, during day time, when vampires are in state of hibernation, it is Neville who is on the offensive. He methodically clears the streets of L.A. from vampires holed up in their own houses. It is a thankless, never ending task of finding them, driving wooden stakes through their bodies, or dragging them outside, to be destroyed by the sunlight.

The vampires themselves are agile and posses decent amount of intelligence. Female vampires even provoke him with their naked bodies, striking sexy poses to lure him outside. The vampires can run and climb up the walls and trees like vampires in the folklore can, but they can’t turn into bats for example, giving it a dose of realism. They are realistic vampires, not mythological ones.

The real origin of vampirism is not really confirmed, but Neville has reinvented himself as sort of an amateur doctor who, after repairing his home fortress, spends a lot of his free time trying to research the bacteria and to find the cure for the disease.

Things go on like that, but as both Neville and the vampires will soon discover, there is another, third group of characters in this whole story.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel things get bogged down for awhile after a seemingly uninfected dog enters Neville’s life. The dog element will later feature prominently in some of the film adaptations. In the novel it just didn’t work for me.

For entertainment, Neville listens to his gramophone records in the evening as he drinks himself to sleep, seated on a couch in front of a wall with a mural painted on it. The mural depicting a tropical beach somewhere, sometime… When life was better.

Two Strands

From this then revolutionary idea, two separate artistic strands came out, depicted on the big screen and later TV. The first strand depicts The Last Man On Earth and that is what this blog entry is about. TLMOE was officially depicted in 3 films and we will go through them all one by one further down. But first, let us take a brief detour into the second strand this novel inspired.

The Zombie Strand

In 1968 George Romero and his group of artistic companions created Night of the Living Dead. It turned out to be another revolutionary improvement on the already revolutionary idea. Romero and his partners introduced a game changing twist on the idea…

The diseased are not vampires. They are zombies. The undead. The modern zombie genre as we now know it was born. Where the undead are driven by instinct, lumbering around, looking to eat flesh.

In Romero's own words:

"I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend. I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you're going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn't use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it."

That zombie strand in turn later split into two sub-strands as well. Romero kept making his own brand of undead films, that spawned remakes later on, sticking to his own ideas about what zombies should be and what motivates them to do what they do.

However, one of Romero's partners in the original 1968 film, John Russo, had his own ideas and made his films with zombies which were a bit different. After a falling out they settled in court after a protracted legal dispute. John Russo kept the right to make his zombie movies but under The Living Dead brand to differentiate them from the Romero’s Of The Dead branded films.

Regardless of the falling out Romero and his former partner in crime had, the entire zombie strand that came out of Matheson’s novel is still going strong and well. It is very much alive and breathing. The spirit of it lives in absolute hit TV series The Walking Dead which has been running since 2010 based on a comic series running since 2003.

With the Digital Revolution that elevated video games as the new form of entertainment vying for dominance there are also video games like Dead Island (2011) and others.

Now let us check out all the official films…

The Last Man on Earth (1964), dir by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow

Is played by Vincent Price and the character’s name was changed to Robert Morgan. Matheson is credited as the writer of the novel that is mentioned by it’s full title. However, Matheson also worked on the screenplay for this particular film, but was dissatisfied by the final product after seeing how it all came out. To disassociate himself from the project before the theatrical release, he used the pseudonym of Logan Swanson instead of his real name for the screenplay credit.

If you read the novel you will understand why. Yet, it is not that the film in itself is bad. It just doesn’t come off the way Matheson had envisioned it. The way he wanted it to look. In fact, story wise, this film follows the novel the closest out of the three films made.

Matheson also felt that Price was miscast for the role. Well… Yes and no. Better to say; Price does a decent job of it, like the other two actors portraying TLMOE do, and he brings his own acting style to the role. The bottom line is; if you were a film goer and a horror fan in 1964 and saw this movie, there is a good chance you’d be entertained by it, and that is all that matters.

TLMOE is renamed as Doctor Robert Morgan, who works in a medical research center and has no military background, unlike the portrayals that will come after him. The other two doctors who will be immune to the disease and become TLMOE.

The story is set in L.A. with present time in 1968 and flashbacks in 1965. Vampires are his enemies again, just like in the novel. Well… They are classed as vampires, but… In movements and behavior they fully resemble zombies as we know them now, when they attack the house where Doctor Morgan is holed up in. And you can’t clearly see those signature fangs all vampires have, so they might as well be zombies.

And here is the key moment or reason that inspired Romero to depict his plague victims as zombies rather rather than vampires. Because it has already been done to an extent here and… It works!

It leaves me wandering if the Italian filmmakers, who made this film in Rome, have done it unintentionally or not. Yet, it still works. 

Maybe there was something that was lost in translation when the Italians first red the script. The actors, who were all Italians with the exception of Price, and who had their lines later dubbed in English, suppose to act like vampires, but they came off looking like the living dead instead. Not just that, but the vampires they portray look less intelligent, slow moving and more brain dead than the ones in the novel.

The film still touches on themes of human isolation, loneliness, desperation, but… There is no excessive drinking here. No lengthy dwelling about it all. No nudity and certainly no sex. It is 1964 after all and the film reflects those times.

Ruth, who is Morgan’s love interest, appears here too. So does the dog, which played such great role in the novel. This time it looks like a poodle or a similar smaller breed. Dog scenes are mercifully short for practical and time constraint reasons.

As a film, it is an OK entertainment, and it is nice to watch it immediately after reading the novel, just to see how they had adapted it, what stayed in what got cut out.

Oh, and for the fans of The Walking Dead… Remember that iconic scene in the pilot episode of Season 1, where the dead wife returns back to the house where she died and starts turning the door handle? The door handle scene that even made it into Season 1 title sequence?

Well, this film is where the idea for it originated from. This is where it first appeared. The Walking Dead series makers even dropped in the little homage clues like the character playing the husband being called Morgan.

 

The Omega Man (1971), dir by Boris Sagal

In the opening credits it states that the film is based on "a" novel by Richard Matheson, but it doesn’t feel the need to mention the title and identify which one exactly.

TLMOE is played by 48 year old Charlton Heston and the character’s name is again Robert Neville this time. He is a full colonel in the US Army and a doctor to boot, achievements that are plausible for a mature man like him to have attained at that age.

Heston being Heston, he won’t be playing characters that are obviously emotionally breaking down, like in the novel, so his Doctor Neville is a much more psychologically collected hero that uses a machine gun as his main weapon of choice, instead of wooden stakes, garlic, crosses and mirrors.

As Neville, he is a tough guy that spouts funny one liners, yet Heston manages to pull it off in his own way. I can guess that Matheson didn’t quite expect Heston’s portrayal of Neville to be what he originally had in mind either but I can also imagine the following reply from Heston to Matheson;  

"Look Matheson, if you have a guy that survives for two years in post apocalyptic world, he needs to be tough and he needs to shoot back at his enemies. He is not going to just sit down in his bunker and drink himself to sleep. The only way the vampires will take Neville’s gun away is from his cold, dead hands.”

And… Heston would be right. On that level, Heston’s portrayal works.

The story’s present time is set in 1977 with flashbacks of the outbreak set in 1975. This time the cause for the plague and humanity’s downfall is germ warfare between the Soviet Union and China.

Neville’s enemies are The Family. Instead of being vampires, they are portrayed as a religious cult of albino mutants that live by night and fear the sun. Much like vampires do. They are the most intelligent of all of Neville’s adversaries portrayed in the novel and films.

The Family have intelligent conversations amongst themselves and with Neville, which is usually induced with a new religious dogma that totally rejects science as they blame it for the state that they had found themselves in.

The Family even has an impromptu court and legal system. So, they won’t just kill Neville outright. They will put him on trial first if they can. They are nocturnal creatures, dressed in black robes with hoods that make them look like numerous grim reapers wandering the streets of L.A. in the night.

They even evoke some semblance of respect if not outright fear. Or rather, fear not of what The Family can do to Neville but that such a cult could really spring up in the event of any real cataclysmic event befalling the Earth. The mutants are led by Matthias, the cult leader and former news anchorman, who now has a new role as a kind of a bishop in this new world order.

This being 1971, things have changed since I Am Legend was last depicted on the big screen seven years prior. It was made in the wake of the sexual revolution, Woodstock, Summer of Love, with Vietnam War in full force. That was also the time of the rise of all sorts of new religious cults that tickled the minds of the baby boom generation, some of whom were all too willing to question the old, established Abrahamic religions of their parents. And to join such cults.

And this film reflects that age and time. Neville doesn’t just listen to gramophone records, but watches movies in the cinema during day times too, when vampires are sleeping. Movies he screens himself, operating a projector. Woodstock (1970) being the one we see in the cinema at the beginning.

But he is alone and he plays chess against himself too. Alcohol seem to be plentiful and Heston apparently has no problem with handling it. After all, if he can handle the mutants, why wouldn’t he be able to handle J & B whiskey?

One of the things that comes at you straight away as the evidence of changing times is the presence of African Americans in the film. Yes, Black people finally show up here. The filmmakers were obviously aware of evolving race relations of the times and are much more sensitive towards such issues.

It is a much more inclusive cast. Other children human survivors TLMOE encounters seems like a rainbow of races, with White, Black, Native Americans, Asian, and other survivors in there.

African Americans have a chance to play characters with some more flesh to it, as oppose to typical roles such as slaves on a plantation or residents of a run down inner city hood with no perspective.

The first major one is played by Rosalind Cash. She is Lisa, TLMOE’s love interest. Much younger than Heston at 33 and very pretty. Hey, so what if she is 15 years younger than him. It's the end of the world, right? Age, race and class no longer divide humanity as much as obvious divisions between the remaining humans, of whom there doesn’t seem to be many, and the mutants out to get them.

Lisa is no little helpless damsel in distress. She is tough, she is mean, she handles her hand gun so expertly that Heston is highly impressed. Yes, she certainly shoots back at the mutants.

The second prominent African American is Brother Zachary. And by Brother I don’t mean that as a monicker for a Black male person, but as a term used amongst the members of a religious order. Like The Family where Brother Zachary is Brother Matthias’ main henchman. His second in command. So in that regard too, on a story level, you got to give it to The Family for being racially inclusive in their mischievous ways.

So African American’s are playing either the good guys, or in this case with Lisa, the good girls, or the bad guys as in case of Brother Zachary. Whatever the artistic and role requirements expect of them.

That of course is not the only reason or way this film reflects the changing times. The other one is much more relaxed sexual mores and depiction of nudity. With Rosalind Cash being comfortable at showing her naked body, after she and TLMOE hook up in his private pad in the hills above the mutant infested L.A.

It is easy to dismiss it now that so many years have gone by, but this film has a certain undeniable charm to it. Apparently it is Tim Burton’s favorite film. The humor with one liners is intended, but…

There is also some unintended humor here, early in the film. After TLMOE is tried and convicted by The Family in their mock court of heresy, they take him to be burnt at a stake. As a witch I guess?

And Heston is wearing this long white pointy hat, almost like a dunce hat but longer than that. He tries to wrestle himself free from his restraints and while he does so in that pointy hat it all just looks unintentionally ridiculous to such an extent that it made me crack up laughing several times as I kept rewinding the segment to watch it again.

At one point the dunce hat falls off of Heston and it doesn’t reappear in further scenes. Yet I felt Boris Sagal, the director of this film (and father of Katey Sagal who played Peggy Bundy) probably wanted Heston to wear the dunce hat for the duration of that scene sequence.

You know… To emphasize the dichotomy of situation, and maybe even state the obvious in cinematic sense, with The Family all looking like grim reapers wearing black hoods contrasted against TLMOE’s white pointy hat. But Heston probably told Sagal a word or two about not making him look like a complete idiot. And good thing he did if he did.

But look, don’t think I’m knocking this film down too much because of that humorous vignette. It is something I can’t resist writing about. This film does have a certain charm to it for sure, and it is very brave for it’s times. It has new ideas, some minor nudity and Heston enjoys his drink here and there without sinking straight into alcoholic binges. Thankfully, there are no bad dog scenes.

I Am Legend (2007), dir by Francis Lawrence

Finally, only 53 years after it was written, the novel’s title is fully used. Therefore Matheson being credited as the writer of “the” novel this time. The Last Man On Earth is Will Smith, and this movie again shows how far we’ve come that we have an African American not just in the movie, but playing the lead character.

Smith is Doctor Robert Neville, a virologist and as appropriate for his younger age of 39 than Heston’s 48, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, who like the other two Doctors is also immune to the disease and works to find a cure for it.

He too battles depression and loneliness and in that regard the character is the closest to Matheson’s version. This being a new age where emotions are much more freely expressed, Smith displays an appropriate amount of weakness for the audience to be able to identify with him fully. After all, he is only human, like his audience is.

Yet, he has two great weapons on his disposal when he roams the streets. A modified, sleek looking modern rifle that comfortably slings off of his shoulders and which he wields with expert precision. The other great weapon faithfully at his side is Sam the dog. His faithful German shepherd. Tell you what, that dog is a star too. In the flashback scenes Sam is played by another German shepherd puppy, depicting the time before Sam grew up. The whole dog element in the story is fully brought to it's full potential and works perfectly.

The location is the star in itself. No longer does TLMOE stalks the streets of L.A. during daytime. He is now doing it in New York City. And I mean real New York City, not that computer generated fakery that human eye can always somehow recognize. The filmmakers didn’t want to fake NYC. They used the real thing.

Therefore that feel of watching post apocalyptic NYC that came right out of that great speculative fiction TV show Life After People (2008 - 2010), where it is depicted how the world would look like if people suddenly disappeared and nature started reclaiming urban centers. Well, grass and trees grow wild in Manhattan, deer and lions that hunt them roam the streets too.

During day time that is. During night time something else roams the streets of New York, looking for TLMOE’s hide out.

The story’s present time is set this time in 2012 and flashbacks in 2009, keeping in tradition of making the whole thing futuristic from the point of view of release of the novel or the film.

The cause for the plague? Again, in keeping with tradition, another pressing issue that affects humanity and has killed millions of us is used as the reason for the plague. Cancer. Well, the cure for cancer that has gone wrong. Cancer is a health issue that strikes home for many today.

The film opens with Doctor Emma Thompson revealing in a TV interview that after 10,009 successful test trials she had created a cure for cancer, by using the so called modified Krippin Virus that attacks the cancer cells and cures the patient.

In a slight jab at today’s corporate media, such a ground breaking news announcement of discovering the cure for cancer, something that would automatically guarantee a Nobel Prize win in Medicine, is made after the sport anchors give their expert analyses and opinions about that year’s Super Bowl.

Well… The cure for cancer turns out to be a disaster as the Krippin Virus mutates, becomes airborne and wipes out most of humanity in short order. Those who survived seem to be only TLMOE and the Darkseekers who are his enemies, led by Alpha Male.

Darkseekers too can be classed as mutants, but there are no intelligent conversations and philosophical debates here between them like with The Family. More animal than humans, they growl, they snarl and they are very, very fast. They want to kill TLMOE. He wants to survive and find the antidote for the Krippin Virus. It’s as far as it goes between them.

Yet, the story is powerful and Smith does a great job as TLMOE. The best of all. His Neville is cool and collected when he needs to be, but with obvious signs of being psychologically affected by isolation of human contact.

TLMOE no longer plays gramophone records or watches movies in bulky film projectors. Instead, he watches DVDs and listens to Bob Marley CDs. On a symbolical aside, Bob Marley himself was a victim of cancer at age of 36.

Neville makes a run to video rental store now and then to pick up movies in alphabetical order. On one occasion, he returns Martin Scorcese’s GoodFellas (1990) in it’s place on the shelf, remarking to Hank the mannequin he interacts with how he is making his way through the “G’s”. Shrek (2001) also features in the film later, and Neville can recite it’s script line by line.

There is no sex, nudity or excessive alcohol consumption here. There is no need for it. Not in this day and age where adult entertainment on the internet is only a click of a mouse button away and where modern world is saturated with it.

It would just get in the way of telling the story. We want to watch TLMOE blasting away the Darkseekers. It just wouldn’t suit the big blockbuster depiction and Smith's clear cut image as a family man to put too much sex into it.

There is a woman in the film of course, Anna and her son Ethan, but they are representative of the whole humanity as oppose to Anna being purely his love interest. 2007 film version has the best story, the best depiction, great production values…

One thing that some people reported as getting in the way of fully absorbing the story at times is CGI, or Computer Generated Imagery of the Darkseekers. The filmmakers opted for fully CGI depiction of them, modeled on actors in those CGI suits with dots, as it made the entire filming effort easier and safer to make in real life New York City.

One of the crew members remarked that after placing real actors and extras into real Darkseekers costumes, the entire performance looked like the attack of the angry mimes in the screen test. Therefore the CGI version.

The first time I saw this movie I remember how that CGI jumped at me. Specifically how those elongated Darkseeker jaws looked ridiculous and over the top, but… Seven years since and our entertainment has changed.

You can’t avoid CGI any more and most people kind of got used to it to an extent. Still, your mind just knows somehow that it is watching a pixel and not a real thing. And there is another unpleasant thing that rears it’s ugly head unexpectedly, called the Uncanny Valley Effect. It is something that most filmmakers are aware of by now and are trying to avoid it like hell when dealing with CGI or animation. It is best noticed with celebrities who have botched or less than successful facelift procedures.

But apart from the Darkseekers and few things here and there, producers stick to the real things, real actors, real New York City. And in turn they have created an awesome work of art and entertainment.

Final Word

The Last Man On Earth and the novel that spawned the films have their place in film history. Yes, the zombie strand still keeps going after the final film featuring the character of The Last Man On Earth was produced. You can argue that the full potential of TLMOE strand is too restrictive and already fully realized.

After all, if TLMOE joins other survivors and wanders the post apocalyptic world he is no longer TLMOE any more, right? What you have is The Walking Dead instead.

But still… There is something about that idea. The only person in the world, surrounded by monsters at night… It’s truly a scary concept and there could at least be enough potential left for a prequel.