WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the novel and the three film adaptations.
The current pandemic has us all locked in our houses while our major city streets stand eerily empty and, naturally, it puts us in mind of an apocalyptic movie.
For me and probably a lot of folks of my generation, it’s The Omega Man.
The Omega Man was a 1971 American post-apocalyptic action film starring Charlton Heston as a survivor of a global pandemic. A border conflict escalates into worldwide biological warfare, which kills most of the world’s population. U.S. Army Col. Robert Neville, M.D. (Heston), is a scientist based in Los Angeles. As he begins to succumb to the plague, he injects himself with an experimental vaccine, rendering himself immune.
By August, 1977, Neville believes he is the plague’s only immune survivor. Struggling to maintain his sanity, he spends his days patrolling the now-desolate Los Angeles, hunting and killing members of “the Family”, a cult of plague victims who were turned into nocturnal albino mutants. At night, living atop a fortified apartment building equipped with an arsenal of weaponry, Neville is a prisoner in his own home.
Well, aside from the albino mutants, you can see why this film resonates with a lot of people today. The scenes of Heston wandering a deserted Los Angeles, driving cars through showroom windows, going to a movie theatre and setting up the projectors to watch the documentary Woodstock over and over again just to remind himself what the world was like when it was filled with people… well, we can relate.
The Omega Man was the second adaptation of a novel by Richard Matheson called I am Legend. The first was The Last Man on Earth (1964) which starred Vincent Price. Filmed on a limited budget, The Last Man on Earth was shot in Italy with a predominantly Italian cast and crew. The screenplay was written in part by Matheson, but he was dissatisfied with the result and chose to be credited as “Logan Swanson.”
Matheson wrote the novel in 1954. The novel received mixed reviews at first but was influential in the development of the zombie-vampire genre and in popularizing the concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease. Besides the two movie adaptations (as well as a third adaptation in 2007 starring Will Smith, which we’ll get to in a minute) the novel was also an inspiration behind George Romero’s cult classic Night of the Living Dead in1968.
Matheson calls the assailants in his novel “vampires”. Their condition is transmitted through blood and garlic is a repellent. Because of the scientific rationale for the existence of the “vampires”, though, the novel influenced the zombie genre and popularized the concept of a worldwide zombie apocalypse, but readers and filmmakers have gotten caught up in that aspect of the story and have missed the entire point of the novel.
Matheson deliberately uses the term “vampire” and even has his main character, Neville, reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He dismisses the novel as superstitious nonsense and concentrates on the rational and scientific explanations. In doing so Neville misses the insight that he does not gain until the novel’s final chapter, the insight that all of the film adaptations fall short in apprehending.
The entire point of I am Legend is that the main character, in carrying on his one-man campaign against what he perceived as mutated aberrations of humanity, has missed the fact that the “vampires” are now the de-facto “normal” inhabitants of the earth. The virus mutates. Humanity mutates into a new society, one that is brutal and primitive, yet well on their way to revolutionizing the idea of humanity.
The point of Matheson’s novel is this: If a society of vampires is normal, than one who hunts down the vampires is the aberration. It is Neville himself who has become the monster and the new society clamours for justice. The populace wants to see him executed for his brutal murders of their families and friends. It’s a realization that he does not come to until the final chapter and it is a point that almost all screen adaptations have missed.
The movies cannot get past the vampires (or zombies) enough to make this point. In each adaptation the main character dies trying to save the rest of humanity (wherever they are) with a serum derived from his own blood. The movies’ version of Neville becomes the saviour of humanity who is sacrificed in order that society may be restored to something like normal. The filmmakers never seem able to make that leap of perspective that Matheson builds his entire novel around.
As Matheson puts it:
They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.
Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces—awe, fear, shrinking horror—and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones…
…A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
I am legend.
Now, I said I was going to mention 2007’s I am Legend and I will only because the ending of the Director’s cut of the film comes closest to capturing Matheson’s intent. Will Smith’s Neville returns the vampire woman he was curing with his own blood to her husband who has up until that moment been behaving like a typical zombie-vampire (albeit rendered in atrociously bad CGI). It is after this that Smith’s Neville realizes that he has been the monster according to the creatures.
But that’s as far as it goes. Neville’s blood still holds the key to saving those uninfected and normalcy promises to return to the world. It is assumed that the CGI monsters will eventually be wiped out and normal, run-of-the-mill, red-blooded ‘Murican type humans will soon be free to roam God’s Green Earth thanks to Neville’s sacrifice and a good deal of military might. It is the novel in title only and probably the worst of the film versions.
