I have read plenty of vampire books in my research, but none were more interesting than Richard Matheson’s 1954 I Am Legend. It is a literary landmark in vampire fiction as it takes the science fiction craze of the Post-war era and combines it with older, literary vampires to create something entirely new. As it is also the Prometheus for the zombie apocalypse horror genre, I Am Legend has a legacy that can not be ignored. There have been three film adaptations of I Am Legend so far: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and finally I Am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith (with a potential sequel coming in the future). Despite three interpretations of Matheson’s work, all of them feel inadequate as faithful adaptations. So why, then, do all of the movie adaptations of this novel do it so much injustice? While most elements of the book are found in each film, I argue that they miss the core part of the book which centres around the abject despair and depression that Robert Neville faces throughout the novel.

Richard Matheson’s novel is more than a “what if I wrote Dracula but with more vampires” story, I Am Legend is a truly terrifying apocalypse filled with the bloodthirsty dead. In Matheson’s own words, it’s “the story of a man trying to survive in a world of vampires,” and nothing more¹. This isolation is truly the key to the whole story, because it creates this environment where Robert Neville goes through immense trauma even after the apocalypse starts. And this is where the problems start to arise with the film adaptations. Throughout all of the films, Robert is never truly alone. We do not get to see Neville have to make his house sound proof so that he can not hear the vampire women outside seducing him to open the door. We do not see his relationship with the dog really grow at all in any of the films, if the dog is even there to begin with. And although the leading men in all three movies are great actors, none of them truly show just how absolutely broken Neville is, and how much worse he gets throughout the story. This stems from the Hollywood system never really understanding why Matheson’s book works, despite taking in several of his scripts. Matheson said on the fascination with I Am Legend in Hollywood that, “I don’t know why Hollywood keeps coming back to the book just to not do it the way I wrote it. The book should have been filmed as is at the time it came out. It’s too late now.” While I support Matheson’s frustration with the adaptations that have come out, I disagree that it is too late to make a proper film adaptation. So much of the story rings true even today, just with new cultural and social implications. It would be worthwhile to have a brand new take on the story that truly characterises Robert Neville as a deeply lonely individual who crafts his own mundane hell.

1. “Richard Matheson Interview,” n.d., https://iamlegendarchive.blogspot.com/p/richard-matheson-interview.html. ↩︎