Richard Matheson is one of the all-time great writers of horror. From Duel to Stir of Echoes, his stories have repeatedly made the trip from the written word to the TV or silver screen (Duel in 1971 and Stir of Echoes in 1999). His most popular piece of fiction is the 1954 science-fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. The book tells the story of Robert Neville, the sole survivor of an apocalyptic plague that was spread by dust clouds and insects. The plague has made the rest of civilization into vampires. In the daytime, Neville explores the ruins of Los Angeles, but he must return before sundown because the night belongs to the vampires.
I Am Legend has officially been officially adapted for the screen on three occasions since it was published (as well as one unofficial adaptation and the countless pieces of fiction, comics, and film that were influenced by Matheson’s apocalyptic vision). Not one of the three adaptations is a perfect translation of the text but each has things about them that I enjoy. What’s interesting is how one of the film versions is the closest to the details of Matheson’s book but the furthest, I feel, from his intended tone. What I want to explore is how the films changed the ideas of the novel, whether those changes were successful, and if there is a lesson to be learned in how we reshape the details while keeping the core concept intact.
The first adaptation was titled The Last Man on Earth (1964) and hit theatres while the book was still relatively new. Horror icon Vincent Price played the lead character, here named Dr. Robert Morgan. The film was directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow. Matheson himself wrote the screenplay, but when the filmmakers made changes he did not agree with he changed his writing credit to “Logan Swanson.” It’s the most loyal adaptation and the only one to call the infected ‘vampires.’ But a low budget and a sorely miscast Price make it miss the mark.
The second adaptation, The Omega Man (1971), was directed by Boris Sagal and starred sci-fi icon Charlton Heston and the peak of his popularity within the genre. Heston loved the book and wanted to make a movie, apparently unaware that an adaptation had already been released less than a decade prior. In The Omega Man, the plague is caused by biochemical warfare between Russia and China, and the infected aren’t vampires but albino mutants who can’t stand the sunlight. The mutants have created a new society in the shadows and call themselves ‘The Family.’ The Omega Man is the farthest removed from the source material and is more a weird 70s action movie than a horror film in the typical sense. Though Heston’s Neville does believe he has a cure in the form of a vaccine, one gets the sense he’s more interested in fighting the Family than saving humanity. It presents some very 70s attitudes and themes which are fun to analyze, like free love, counterculture, and fear of foreign conflicts.
There were plans for an adaptation in the 90s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Ridley Scott. But a string of flops (including Arnold’s Batman & Robin) and the big budget required for an R-rated story of the apocalypse convinced Warner Bros. to pass on the project in the middle of pre-production (you can find unused makeup concepts from the Scott film online today). The film would bounce around in the studio for a while until Francis Lawrence got hired to direct the adaptation in the mid-2000s. I Am Legend (2007) stars Will Smith in the role of Robert Neville, who is a military virologist and the last living man in New York. The film begins with the hope that science has discovered the cure for cancer. Then the screen goes black and we next see the ruins of New York with a text that reads ‘Three Years Later.’ The vampires have been replaced by mutants again – poorly done CGI mutants, at that – but they maintain the fear of sunlight. Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a great monster movie right up until the monsters enter the film, at which point the lackluster execution damages our appreciation for the story being told.
Matheson’s Neville is an everyman. He’s a plant worker in the book, not a scientist as depicted in every film. He’s a capable hero because he’s super cautious and he has plenty of time on his hands to self-teach himself what he needs to survive. The change to scientist allowed the filmmakers to speed up the story and not have to feature Neville educating himself. Price, Heston, and Smith cannot be called ‘everymen.’ Will Smith is in incredible shape and was, at the time anyway, near the top of the A-List. Heston played Moses and his portrayal as Neville shows no real interest in appearing emotionally vulnerable. And Price, well, he’s Vincent Price; I love the guy but his voice alone makes him one of the most recognizable actors in cinema.
In addition to combating the damned, I Am Legend is a story about struggling on the edge of madness as solitary living and the stress of the situation threatens to tear the hero apart. Price’s scientist doesn’t show this. Maybe it’s the sleepy narration as he conducts his daily business of clearing the dead off his lawn but Price’s scientist comes across as bored more than anything else. And while I’m certain that boredom would creep in if you’re the last man on earth, it’s not really what the audience wants from its hero. Heston goes a different direction and plays Dr. Neville as being one bad day away from going insane. He talks to himself and the imaginary friends he’s set up around his apartment while playing chess, drinking, and shooting his gun at anything that makes a sound. Will Smith portrays Neville as a man dealing with crippling loneliness. He talks to mannequins in stores on a daily basis. On one particularly downbeat day, he begs a female mannequin, “Please say hello to me.” You can change a story’s tone just by changing the main character’s mood.
The animal companion is a source of heartbreak in I Am Legend. In the book, as in The Last Man on Earth, the stray dog is something that Neville tries and fails to bring into his life. Finally, the dog allows itself to be captured, only for Neville to discover that it has been attacked and infected. It doesn’t live long after that. It’s sad and cruel, but it doesn’t hit on a personal level the same way that the 2007 film does. The Smith/Lawrence film changes the dog’s role in the story. Neville raised the dog, named Sam, since she was a pup. She’s his only living companion. The dog is also the source of the film’s only smiles and its most suspenseful sequence when it chases after an animal and ends up lost in a building full of monsters. At the end of Act 2, the dog sacrifices herself to save Neville from infected dogs. At first Neville thinks he can save her with his newest vaccine but it fails. He kills the dog when she turns and tries to attack him. Speaking as a dog lover, it’s a tough scene to watch. But speaking for how it works as drama, I think it succeeds far better than the stray dog as seen in Matheson’s original novel. When Sam dies, the hurt is more personal for the protagonist and the audience feels it more, too, because we’ve come to love the pup, which cannot be said for a stray dog without a name.
The leading lady is a role that changes dramatically from adaptation to adaptation, with only The Last Man on Earth keeping the part the same as in the book. That version has Neville discover a healthy woman on the street, try to talk to her, only to lose sight of her (like the stray dog). When he eventually does speak to her, he takes her to his lab where he tries to determine whether or not she’s picked up the vampire virus. It turns out she’s infected and was sent to him as bait – she smashes him over the head and next thing he knows he’s waking up somewhere else. Now, despite being involved in a plan to trap him, the woman is not really evil and actually feels sympathetic to Neville — but more on that in a second. The Omega Man has an interesting take on the leading lady. At one point, Heston’s Neville is captured by The Family, and is then rescued by a ragtag group of survivors. Among his rescuers is a young African American woman named Lisa, played by Rosalind Cash. As he attempts to perfect his cure and help the survivor group, Neville and Lisa fall in love, culminating in what would be one of the genre’s first interracial kisses. This doesn’t get a happy ending, though, as Lisa becomes infected and welcomed into The Family where she eventually betrays Neville. The 2007 I Am Legend gives us the least plot-centric version of the leading lady; she represents hope, something Neville no longer believes in. As played by Alice Braga, Anna is a young survivor who shows up at just the right time to save Neville from the infected. There’s no romance here or any betrayal. Anna believes in the reports she has heard about a safe haven to the north and tries to convince Neville to join her in looking for this place. My take is that the 2007 character is the least interesting, because she enters the story saving Neville and her whole role continues pushing him in the direction of salvation (complete with some talk about God). Omega Man’s Lisa is an interesting twist on the original character, because it fulfills the same betrayal but adds new depth to the character before we get to that point.
Matheson’s monsters are clearly vampires and the same goes for The Last Man on Earth. You might even argue that some of the details of the vampirism goes too far by today’s genre tastes. For example, Matheson’s Neville theorizes that his immunity to the vampire plague is a result of having been bitten by a bat years prior. That’s… kind of silly. I don’t really know how modern audiences would accept that, as bats have moved farther and farther away from what we think of when we think of vampires. Similarly, Matheson’s and Price’s heroes must kill their foes with wooden stakes to the heart. It’s interesting because, in pulling out a wooden stake and pounding away, The Last Man on Earth instantly takes on a more gothic, spooky castle tone. The Last Man on Earth is also the only adaptation of the monsters who know Neville personally. They come to his house every night and his old friend shouts his name, taunting him to come out and greet them. In later versions, the infected either did not know Neville previously or did not even know where he lives. Matheson writes the vampires as fast moving but The Last Man on Earth depicts them as lumbering zombies. In this way, despite how they may appear, the infected of the 2007 I Am Legend at least move like the author intended them.
The Family of The Omega Man is fun in a cheap, nasty way. They’re not scary, they’re just weird. Led by former anchorman turned cult leader, Matthias, they rail against all leftovers of the age of man. They don’t hate Neville because he’s experimenting on them so much as they hate him because he is a remnant of that old world. Upon capturing Neville, Matthias speaks to his followers, “You see lying there the last of scientists, of bankers, of businessmen. The users of the wheel.” They look like a class reunion of the Village of the Damned kids and they speak with such grandeur that it’s difficult to take seriously. Roger Ebert wrote that the mutants, “are a little too ridiculous to quite fulfill their function in the movie. They make all the wrong decisions, are incompetent and ill-coordinated, and speak in an elevated “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” sort of English.”
2007’s I Am Legend is the only version to depict the infected as incapable of speech. They’re not vampires, they’re patchy skinned parkour punks who don’t like the sun. Much has been made about how bad the CGI is in this film, and for good reason. They look baaaaad… like a bunch of cheap CGI Woody Harrelsons running around, pissed off at Will Smith ‘cause he stole the alpha Woody’s girl. The way they’re hyped up and finally revealed, I expect audiences had much the same reaction in 2007 that audiences of classic horror movies had when the monster finally showed up and it was this melted tire travesty with zippers in plain view for all. Originally they were considering using people in makeup, but the crew said it looked like the ‘attack of the angry mimes’ and they opted for CGI instead. Apparently character actor Dash Mihok plays the alpha male infected but you wouldn’t know it because so little humanity breaks through the poor CGI exterior. Dubbed ‘Darkseekers’ in the film, they may look bad but their threat to the protagonist is very real and they surprise the audience a few times by revealing themselves to be more intelligent than we, or Neville, have believed them to be.
One of the coolest things about Matheson’s story is the ending. Neville is captured by the intelligent vampires who have formed a community in the dark. They view him as a monster, always capturing, experimenting on, and eventually killing their kind. They live in fear of him, much the same way that he fears them. His attempts at curing the infected and bringing humanity back from the brink are unwanted by the infected themselves, who have accepted that the world has moved on and that this is their new normal. He is found guilty of crimes against their people and is to be put to death. “They’re terrified of you, Robert, and they want your life,” says the book’s leading lady, Ruth, moments before she puts suicide pills in his hand so that he won’t have to endure the terror of a public execution. In the book’s final moments—in Neville’s final moments—he looks out over ‘the new people of the earth’ and recognizes he no longer belongs. He has become legend, a dark terror on a new world, and the book ends before he kills himself. It’s an amazing finale and a beautiful way of looking at heroes through the eyes of the ‘monsters.’ Yes, it’s very much a downer, but that’s part of what I like about it. Neville realizes that what little bit of humanity exists within the infected no longer wishes to be saved. His task is done and he is allowed to sleep.
None of the adaptations manage to capture the bleak beauty of the novel’s ending. The Last Man on Earth’s hero doesn’t really take responsibility for what he’s done and he doesn’t get that sad moment of reflection. He is killed by spears. Defiant to the last, he calls his killers ‘freaks’ with his dying breaths. The Omega Man has Neville fleeing his burning apartment. He stops in a fountain, aims his gun at the window, and is then impaled by a spear thrown from the balcony. Neville hangs on for a while, the fountain water turning red over time, and is able to pass along the cure to the survivor group as they make their way out of the city. He dies in one of the most blatantly obvious Jesus Christ poses ever seen in cinema. Like Price’s scientist, he goes out unwillingly.
2007’s I Am Legend has two different endings, both of which change things dramatically. In the theatrical ending, Neville passes along the cure to Anna before using a grenade to kill himself and all the Darkseekers that have broken into his home. It includes the suicide of the novel but not the understanding or the remorse. The far superior alternate ending is the only finale where Neville survives, but it’s also the only one where he fully comes to understand what he’s done. The Darkseekers look upon the faces of failed test subjects who died under Neville’s care and roar at him before demanding that he hand over the alpha male’s mate from the lab table. Neville does so, whispering his apologies to the alpha male as he surrenders the female test subject. The monster roars at him and Neville keeps his head low, understanding now that they have deeper feelings than he originally believed. The Darkseekers let Neville and Anna live and leave the basement. Neville then joins Anna in the search for her safe haven. It’s not what Matheson wrote, and it lacks the gut punch of all the other finales, but it does have the underlying message that the author was trying to get across.
There is no ‘best’ adaptation of I Am Legend. Every version has its good and its bad, with one fan loving this movie more than that and so on. The Last Man on Earth could’ve greatly benefited from a bigger budget, The Omega Man probably should’ve rethought the Family, and 2007’s I Am Legend needed better CGI monsters (and probably should’ve went with the alternate ending). I like every film, while also holding up the novel as my favorite version of the story. I Am Legend isn’t often thought of as one of those oft-remade sci-fi tales like Invasion of the Body Snatchers but it is a story that the studios enjoy digging up every couple decades. Maybe someday we’ll get a definitive adaptation of the novel. Until then, we can enjoy what the movies got right, analyze where they went wrong, and dream about the Ridley & Arnold movie that could’ve been.
