I Am Legend

"I Am Legend is a book from the 1950s which is probably well known now because it was made into a film last year. It’s been made into a film three times and none of the films have actually got why this book works. With the last film you knew it was going to be rubbish as soon as the writer and the director said: “Oh there are not going to be any vampires.” The whole point of the book is that it’s about vampires! If you take them out it’s like saying, “We’re making Gone with the Wind, but we’re not setting it in the South after the Civil War! “ I Am Legend is the most important vampire book which is a science-fiction novel.” It’s not quite the first but it is the most important vampire book which is a science-fiction novel . These are supernatural creatures and they are beings of a different order who are suffering from a kind of blood disease which has strange side-effects. They are allergic to light and they need blood to feed. You need wood to destroy them because that allows air to get into the wound. It’s all reasonably well thought through with this notion that the whole world could suddenly turn upside-down. As the title suggests, the human is the monster in this world. If everybody is the vampire then a last lone normal person would be terrifying. It’s also the story of a serial killer. The character is a vampire slayer who goes through the book killing vampires. It’s a short and perfectly formed book. Richard Matheson wrote a bunch of other things I really like. He is a real model of streamlined 1950s efficiency. He writes the way Americans used to make cars – every little piece is perfect. It’s a book you can read in about two hours and there is nothing you would change about it. Absolutely. It’s no coincidence that his books are the ones that are being turned into films. Every couple of years someone makes a film of one of his novels and he is still alive and still writing. I suppose so. But then again in this particular field the good stuff is recycled endlessly. It may well be that there aren’t that many stories that you can do as movies. All these work. And most of them have actually been made into films several times. I think Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde may even hold some kind of record for the number of times they have been made into films."

"Absolutely. The monsters in the book are more like vampires. But the interesting thing about I Am Legend is that it is an apocalyptic survival story. The main character thinks that he is the last human being left on earth. One of the things that I discovered in the course of researching this topic is that zombie stories are not really about zombies any more than Harry Potter is about magic wands. The zombies are merely a background detail. They are a way for us to explore what happens to human beings when they are placed under incredible stress. I think about this book as highly significant for zombie apocalypse for two reasons. The first is that George A. Romero was very clear that I Am Legend was a source for Night of the Living Dead . He was inspired by this story of a person who is menaced by supernatural monsters and is trying to retain his sanity and figure out how to remain human. The second is that I had a chance to interview Mark Protosevich who was the original screenwriter on the Will Smith film I Am Legend . He also thinks of it very much as a zombie apocalypse story. For Mark, there was an overriding question as he wrote the film about what it means to be a survivor. He did a lot of research about people who were in extreme survival situations. He talked with many people who were on death row, or in isolation in prisons. He asked them about their experience and what they did to retain their sanity. Yes, in the movie he’s living boarded up in a brownstone house in New York. Every day, he makes the rounds and repairs the damage. In Mark’s film version, the hope that Robert Neville has is not that he’s going to find a cure for the virus, but that he’s going to find another human being. Yes, it is very bleak. In general, there the two sorts of endings you get with zombie apocalypse stories. The first is the nihilistic ending. It is the end of everything, and the human race is finished. We find that in some of the Romero movies, and in the novel I Am Legend . In the second sort of ending—including the film version of I Am Legend —the human race is going to continue. Here, Tolkien’s concept of the ‘eucatastrophe’ is relevant: the idea that even in this disaster there is the possibility for human growth and change. Theologically, that’s what the apocalyptic narrative is about. It’s a sort of cosmic reboot. If you’re faithful and, frankly, lucky, then you will get to the other side and see the new world, whatever that is. It’s a very unusual ending in which he reflects on what he must appear like to the monsters he has been hunting. They were monsters for him and now he thinks about what he must be to them: a vengeful person who has sent so many of them to an early death—a second death. I think it could. Robert Neville develops a strange sympathy with his antagonists. He reflects that although he thought that he was doing the right thing for his species, actually he might be the destroyer. This is unusual, because most zombie narratives don’t encourage us to question the difference between us and the monster. “Robert Neville develops a strange sympathy with his antagonists…. This is unusual, because most zombie narratives don’t encourage us to question the difference between us and the monster” The problem post-9/11 is that we tend to monsterise the people to whom we find ourselves opposed. Many of our large action spectacles encourage us to do that: the villains tend to be things that you can kill without feeling remorse. Think, for example, of the Ultrons in the Avengers films. We think of them as being soulless, and therefore when we destroy them we don’t take on the same sort of moral culpability as we would if we were to kill a human being or a sentient creature. Ultimately though, zombie narratives are probably more useful when we think about human encounters in these stories. That’s where our opportunity to leap across boundaries and think about whether we’re going to encounter the other with compassion or violence arises."