I finished reading I Am Legend, the Richard Matheson book. I have to say, I liked it but I didn’t love it. I was surprised by how much the main character, Robert Neville, was tempted to have sex with the vampire women who lurked outside his house at night. Not a detail you find in any of the films. Neville’s torment and loneliness is palpable. Matheson makes a distinction between the infected who are still alive and the dead who have risen, but it’s not always clear. Neville goes out during the day to kill by staking the infected and the dead alike, and that is his downfall. I liked the way Matheson has Neville make a scientific connection between known vampire mythology and what he witnesses in the novel. There’s a rational explanation for almost all of it. Neville’s efforts to understand the virus that’s caused his world to go to hell are fascinating. The sequence where he finds and befriends a dog is touching and heartbreaking. But the ending didn’t satisfy me. The introduction of the character, Ruth, so late in the book, and the revelation of her true nature, threw me off. Was it meant to be ironic, tragic, hopeful? I couldn’t quite get the tone.
After that I watched the film The Last Man On Earth, the first film adaptation of the book, on my PVR. Weirdly, going by the time stamp on my PVR, I recorded it exactly one year ago. This Italian film was made in black and white in 1964 and features Vincent Price in a star turn. It follows the book quite closely, with the first section where Price is alone being probably the best. I like the way Vincent’s Neville character casually picks up the bodies of a man and woman outside his home and dumps them into his car. They’re ‘played’ by real actors (not props) but Price handles them as though they are rag dolls. In a later scene, just before the long flashback that shows Neville’s life before the outbreak, he watches home film footage of his family. The camera stays on Price and his reaction as he moves from laughter to tears to fear. It’s a fabulous piece of acting. Who doesn’t love Vincent Price? The film repeats the sequence with the dog, and the ending with Ruth and her ‘new society’ is intact, along with my lingering sense of confused tone. This is compounded by the film suggesting the possibility of a cure for the infected from Neville’s blood, but it goes wasted with Neville’s death. As such, it ends on a more bleak and nihilistic tone than does the novel. Neville doesn’t even get say ‘I am legend’ in this version.