Richard Matheson: He is Legend

Today - June 25th, 2013 - the world lost a truly talented writer by the name of
Richard Matheson. I never knew the man, not personally at least, but if Ray Bradbury was correct in his appraisal of the writer/reader relationship, I grew to know him through his words.

My first memory of hearing the name 'Richard Matheson' was when my father introduced me to the story of I Am Legend. Sure, this is how many people discover a writer, flicking through the yellowed pages of an ageing book, but not for me - my father simply told me the story.

I have many fond memories of my dad weaving wonderful tales, some his own, others from a variety of well known and not so well known writers, but this memory - sitting across from him late one Friday night when the rest of my family was in bed - is one of the most striking and dearest to me. There I sat on the edge of my seat transfixed by the story of a man - the last man - fighting against loneliness, paranoia, alcoholism, grief, and the undead.

I think I was around ten years old and at the time had a particular fascination for the mythology surrounding vampires. I was well versed in the lore. Yet I Am Legend was different. I had grown up watching the plague ridden shadowy figure of Max Shreck's Nosferatu ascend the stairs in surreal, nightmarish fashion; Bela Lugosi's exotic aristocratic Dracula manipulate and taunt with the curl of a finger and a stare that Rasputin himself would envy; cowered at the sheer presence and venomous sneer of Christopher Lee's domineering interpretation of Stoker's villain; and obsessed over the MTV, Goonies, and Breakfast Club influenced vampire youth films of The Lost Boys, Monster Squad, Fright Night, and Vamp. All wonderful films, but Matheson's I Am Legend stood alone, because to me his vampires were real.

It was the first time that I had encountered a scientific take on those pesky bloodsuckers. The first time that any writer or filmmaker had grabbed me by the throat so viscerally, throwing me down a flight of stairs into a dimly lit cellar where something alive but not alive stirred. You want vampires son? Well here they are. There was no escape, no clambering into the sunlight above to the welcoming faces of civilisation; no, the world was dead, and our hero was all that was left. No hope for redemption, no way out.

It stunned me.

You want vampires son? Well here they are. 

For years I had cheered at the sight of Peter Cushing's Van Helsing defeating Dracula and his minions in a variety of elaborate set-pieces. In Joel Schumacher's - a name I would scorn after his molestation of Batman - The Lost Boys, even our loved ones could be saved if bitten, just as long as we disposed of the head vampire to extinguish the curse, of course. All was well  by the end of my favourite vampire films (with the exception of Polanski's wonderful Hammer homage, The Fearless Vampire Killers) but Matheson's tale of post-apocalyptic earth, engulfed by a vampire-like disease, where things never could be set right, was a revelation to me.

The conclusion of I Am Legend remains one of the most bastardised by filmmakers to this day; producers and studios seemingly unable to grasp that the public will accept something other than the fairytale all-is-well ending. Sometimes things go bad, and yet in those final sentences of the book when all seems lost, there shines a small fragment of the potential for hope. When I did finally read Matheson's masterpiece, I was shocked by its brutality once more, frightened by its realism, and utterly impressed by its ingenious conclusion.

Do not mistake this for a lack of appreciation for the adaptations of I Am Legend which we have already been given. As a horror fan I love Boris Sagal's action orientated take seen in the 1971 film The Omega Man; and other than the terrible ending and pointless CG of Will Smith's I Am Legend, I found it captured the loneliness of the book well, at least for the first 45 minutes.

Yet it was left to the 1964 adaptation The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price to most closely follow the book. The film was marred by a low budget, being shot in an Italy masquerading as the streets of America, and some decidedly dodgy set designs, and yet, it still manages to be great. We should not be surprised by this, seeing as Matheson wrote the original drafts of the screenplay, unfortunately though they botched the ending and the author decided to remove his name from the credits for that very reason. Still, the film is in the public domain and well worth a watch!

Morella, is that you?

While a brilliant author in his own right, it was in television and film that Matheson's work was most well known, at least to me. One of my favourite films as a kid was one which I taped off of the television. I remember sitting watching it on a warm summer's day; the perfect environment to take in a suspenseful tale about an average man being hounded, stalked, and preyed upon by an unseen truck driver through an American desert.

people can just flake out and decide to kill you for no good reason?

The film is Duel, and it gave a young Steven Spielberg his first foray into making
a feature film. The story is essentially Jaws in a desert, with the brilliant Dennis Weaver portraying the under-siege and anxiety, paranoid fuelled character of David Mann, as he contends with a rusty oil truck, spewing out venomous fumes, stalking and harassing him down long, isolated tracks of deserted highway.

The story of Duel is so simple, and yet to me it was terrifying. I think at a young age I was aware of the power of people, that crossing the wrong individual could be dangerous. In Duel, David Manning as a simple, disgruntled moment with a truck driver on an open road, and this results in him being hunted, his life in jeopardy. That idea of an unrelenting juggernaut, revving its ancient engine and groaning with each movement, threatening to kill an innocent man who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, threw me for a loop!


So, let me get this straight, people can just flake out and decide to kill you for no good reason?

As a kid, that idea shook me to my core. I think it's one that I still carry with me today.