Keywords

Introduction

First published in 1954, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend has been deeply influential not only in the genre of the post-apocalyptic but also in vampire fiction more broadly. Telling the story of Robert Neville, the assumed only survivor of a pandemic that sees humans turned into vampires, it explores the boundaries between human and monster through Neville’s treatment of the vampire figures and his attempts to find a cure. The novel tracks Neville as he works on the cure while continuing to hunt and kill vampires, as well as exploring his experience of loneliness. This is briefly abated when he finds a survivor, Ruth, but he quickly learns she has been infected and there is a new group of vampires who are trying to rebuild society. They capture him, triggering a realization that he is holding on to an old idea of what it means to be human, and kills himself before the vampires can. It ends with Neville positioning himself as a legend, on account of the fear he has inspired through his hunting of these vampires, becoming a monstrous figure himself. Matheson’s novel shares its DNA with Stoker’s Dracula, writing about the vampire(s) from a human perspective, and in doing so, it exposes the divisions between us and them that monster narratives so often revolve around. Like Dracula, I Am Legend focuses on a protagonist who is cut off from society. Unlike Dracula, however, the novel foregrounds the science behind the mythical figure and, in doing so, keeps the vampire firmly at arm’s length, in contrast to many other vampire narratives.

This could be why the novel has been positioned as classic sci-fi, despite the figure of the vampire more often residing in horror. Matheson’s I Am Legend is a story that blurs the boundaries between genres, offering possibilities of being read in multiple ways. This chapter will explore some of these ways, including through the lens of post-apocalypse, science and disease, race, gender, and religion. Each approach offers ways of thinking about what both the figure of the vampire and the story itself offer to society at different historical moments, through its framing, evident in the different adaptations of the text. Throughout, we will touch upon the first film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and the most recent Hollywood adaptation which shares the novel’s title, I Am Legend (2007). The ideas have resonated in other texts, with Night of the Living Dead (1968) being perhaps the most famous example. However, we can still see its influence in more recent texts, like the Netflix series Daybreak (2019). I Am Legend’s version of the vampire and the world it resides in presents a terrifying possibility of the future that shows humanity as both vulnerable and dangerous.

It is maybe because of the multitude of adaptations of I Am Legend and the influence it has had more broadly that it continues to be such a key part of the history of vampire narratives despite the relative lack of engagement with the vampire within the text. I Am Legend is arguably understood as a web of texts now: very rarely is Matheson’s novel separated in discussion from the adaptations it has resulted in, with each adaptation allowing for a re-understanding of the ideas present in the novel as well as the cultural moment it is being used in. The collective texts of I Am Legend present a post-apocalyptic tale that explores the tension between definitions of the self and other and the more divisive categories of us and them. Although the representation of the “hero” and their respective “vampires” may have altered, the possibilities the text offers for exploring otherness and anxieties about the future are key.

Post-Apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic narratives have continued to evolve as their relevance to societal moments shift and change. Very often they explore the fundamental makeup of society, examining ways in which we have structured ourselves and our understanding of others. As Elizabeth K Rosen argues, “apocalypse is a means by which to understand the world and one’s place in it” (2008: xi). The post-apocalyptic may deconstruct these societal elements and, in turn, rebuild them. This often results in an othering of a specific group, or it may be that an other is already present, perhaps as the source of the apocalypse themselves. This emerges in apocalypse narratives, with Barkun noting that the distinction between righteous microcosm and evil macrocosm is crucial to the formation of the apocalyptic (1986: 91). We see this through the us/them dichotomy established in I Am Legend and its adaptations. Although apocalypse is a religious idea, linked to the biblical stories in Revelations, many of the narratives we may have encountered take a more secular approach. Daniel Wojcik divides apocalypse into two distinct camps: meaningful and meaningless – with the former linked to Christianity and the latter a secular approach (1996: 297). Perhaps this may link to the ways in which the different iterations of I Am Legend approach the theme of the post-apocalyptic, given the various links to religion, which will be explored later.

We may have imagined the end of the world many times, but we have also imagined what comes after. These narratives theorize how we might bring about the downfall of society as we know it and what would take its place. These stories allow for an examination of the limitations of the structures we have in place, critiquing, or, in some cases, endorsing, the societal structures currently operating. Early examples of it in the form of literature include Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), but the primary examples within our culture emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Specific historical moments can be linked to the outpouring of these fears through cultural narratives: the invention and deployment of atom bombs, global warfare, or rapid industrialization threatening understood societal structures. These found their expression in literary narratives exploring the aftermath of nuclear warfare (Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, 1959), global warming (Ballard’s The Drowned World, 1962), and a virus (Matheson, I Am Legend, 1954). I Am Legend’s place in the timeline of these narratives is within early approaches exploring the impact of science on the world. Many include a monstrous threat resembling Matheson’s vampires.

Subsequent post-apocalyptic narratives have been more dominant in the medium of film and television, perhaps influenced by the adaptations of Matheson’s novel. Films include Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Mad Max (1979), 28 Days Later (2002), and The Road (2009). Television’s most famous recent example of the post-apocalyptic is the long running The Walking Dead (2010–2022), and others include Y: The Last Man (2021), Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), and The 100 (2014–2020). Many of these take elements from the 1954 novel and its adaptations.

The 1954 novel came at a time where films were reflecting fears and anxieties of the Cold War and post-Hiroshima, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Them (1954). As Matthias Clasen notes, the book “extrapolates from the kind of anxieties that grow particularly well in the shadow of a mushroom cloud” (2010: 317). Matheson’s version of the post-apocalyptic results from disease, but the implication is that like the atom bomb, it is created by humans. Robert Neville doesn’t give an explicit history of what led to these vampires, but in flashbacks to a time when his family were still alive, we are given enough information to piece it together. As he says: “Between the storms, and the mosquitoes, and everyone getting sick, life is rapidly becoming a pain” (Matheson 2001). He attributes some of these to “the bombings” (Matheson 2001), leading to an explicit reference to war from his wife Kathy: “And they say we won the war” (ibid). Matheson here makes the social context for the novel explicit and links to the historical moment. It adds to a body of narratives, noted above, commenting on the anxieties provoked by the war, and the global tensions ongoing at the time. In his own words though, Matheson does not address these historical factors specifically, but rather states that the book is about “the individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive” (q. in Clasen 316). This is in line with most post-apocalyptic narratives, which can be read as explicitly linked to their context or, more broadly, touching upon existential themes.

Through the repetition of the endlessness of his experience, the desire for connection with someone else, the reader gets a sense of the isolation Neville feels. Due to the positioning of the protagonist, the novel does not deal with the explicit rebuilding of society that many post-apocalyptic narratives do. Instead, it focuses on the individual response, which makes it stand out from many other narratives within the genre. The post-apocalyptic scenario of Matheson’s novel may be read as a broader metaphor for the human condition: How do we process our relation to the world, our changing relevance, and deal with loss? In the film adaptations of the novel, however, the framing of the post-apocalyptic is altered each time, meaning there are specific elements that can be read as defined by their cultural moment. We will turn to those now to think about how they in turn may shape the understanding of I Am Legend and the figure of the vampire more broadly.

The first adaptation comes in the form of The Last Man on Earth in 1964. It sees the protagonist, Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price), coping with the aftermath of a plague. Like Matheson’s novel, it deals with the monotony of isolation, doing so here through the use of silence in the opening scenes, as well as the visual device of the calendar. This sees the days as things to be survived, or gotten through, rather than lived. The film generically is placed more along the lines of the sci-fi horrors of the 1950s, utilizing similar approaches including the music, flashback sequences, and pacing. There are elements of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) here: both imagine the upheaval of society, with the threat coming from a mutation of the human body, and center on a particular male experience disrupted by a (coded as) subversive female character. The opening of the film features shots of empty streets to communicate the absence Morgan feels. This is like the other adaptations, but something not lingered on or indeed opened with in Matheson’s text, with the isolation coming from Neville’s experience. In The Last Man, it seems as though this needs to be firmly established visually – to show the post-apocalyptic setting – to emphasize the emotions of the protagonist. This is not to say that adaptations must be exact replicas; this is fallacious, as adaptation scholars have noted. But examining these differences and putting them into context allow for a closer understanding of how the adaptation is being used in its cultural moment and what it in turn says about the text it adapts.

Matheson helped write the script for the film but was not happy with it, ultimately distancing himself from the production (his screenwriting credit being listed as “Logan Swanson”). There are several points that follow the novel closely: the killing of the vampires during the day, the flashbacks that explore his past, and the relationship with the dog, each adding to a grim tally of loneliness. However, the ending of the film, which sets a trend for the future adaptations, shows him as the cure. Nicola Bowring argues that the ending to the novel, a “complete reversal of position of self and other,” isn’t there in the film adaptations because it would be “problematic” to represent in visual media (2015: 134). Unlike Matheson’s text, which engages with questions of progress and hierarchies, The Last Man reads like a struggle with emerging power structures by framing the protagonist as the cure for the apocalyptic event. After he is captured by the group of vampires who are aiming to rebuild society, he is surrounded and about to be killed, denouncing those around him as “freaks” and “mutations.” Rather than think of himself as legend, or myth, as Matheson carefully does, The Last Man returns us instead to more base questions of existence. “I’m a man. The last man,” he utters before he dies. Society as we know it has been eradicated through this final death. (Filming for this took place in Italy, which added another layer of meaning to these changes in society represented in the text. The black robes of the “new order” function as a commentary on the rise of fascism.)

The Omega Man (1971) takes a similar position to the framing of the post-apocalyptic. The protagonist, Robert Neville (Charlton Heston), is seen in the opening shots of the film driving through streets in a (nice) car, smiling. Briefly, it suggests that he is happy to have full control of the space; in some senses, he is playing out a fantasy many viewers may have had of acting without consequence. (This is seen in “Homega Man,” The Simpsons parody, discussed by Justin J. Roberts.) He looks, to an extent, healthy: instead of the terrors of the post-apocalyptic, it seems initially to be focusing on the possibilities. Critics like Sully link this to fears of overpopulation: “By the beginning of the 1970s, it is possible to identify the emergence of a properly global and unprecedentedly popular self-consciousness of world population” (2016: 91). There is a certain pleasure derived (in both the audience and the character) in the lack of people in these opening scenes.

Unlike The Last Man on Earth, Omega Man engages with the vampire differently, giving them an ability to speak and have conversations, bestowing a level of intelligence on them unlike all other texts in the I am Legend web. In Matheson’s novel, there is often what is termed by Louise Nuttall as a “group mind” for the vampires, which “reduces our attention to the mental states of the individuals involved,” thereby urging us to empathize with Neville (Nuttall 2015: 34). Omega Man attempts to cultivate not empathy but a sense of division between human and vampire that stands in for questions of alterity. The vision of the post-apocalyptic in Omega Man rests on two things: the protagonist is set apart from the vampires clearly, being a savior-like figure, and, secondly, that the vampires are threatening not just because of their ability to kill but also because of their difference and ability to manifest this through intelligent means. Vampire narratives over the years have moved between the two, often offering either a more traditionally monstrous figure who is skilled in slaughter, and so establishes a dynamic of predator/prey, or they are exceptional by means of their intellect and manner of thinking, aligning more with sociopolitical differences. The latter has arguably been the more popular in the last few decades, but the vampires of Omega Man are an example of them that precedes this more recent trend.

The vampires, however, are still hard to empathize with in that they are viewed as a group, being denoted the “family” in the 1971 text. The “family” has been read in multiple ways by critics. Those in charge wear outdated robes that recall monks, simultaneously evoking ideas of traditional religion and a threat to the contemporary status quo. The move toward a more communal way of living and absence of individuality is linked to fears of communist takeover (Heyes 2017). It also links to the context of the time, being linked to the Manson family trials happening around the same time (Heyes, Bowring). The leader of the “family,” Jonathan Matthias, is a white former news anchor, and the dress is in part reflective of the desire to destroy all technology and return to a simpler time. That the family also contains black members who are featured prominently onscreen, as well as the other group of survivors being comprised of mostly non-white people, speaks to the changes society is undergoing and that Neville is facing. He is becoming a relic of sorts, and these new groups, who borrow “black power rhetoric in [their] speeches” (Crago 2019: 338), represent a manifestation of the fears of a “post-white future” (Crago: 341). The specific elements of race will be dealt with later on – the reconfiguration of society in Omega Man, however, is the key thing and is perhaps made the most explicit in this film. Unlike the other texts in the Legend web, the vampires (though vampire is a looser term in Omega Man, which refers to them as mutants) can articulate themselves and thus specify their threat.

Like 1971’s Omega Man, the 2007 I Am Legend posits a post-apocalyptic vision that seeks a return to the status quo. This is partly down to its historical positioning, as Robert Booth argues, the “post 9/11 post-apocalyptic film...reinforces the hegemony of the state” (17). However, as Sophie Fuggle argues, this precedes 9/11, as apocalypse discourses “end up endorsing a conservative…neoliberal agenda concerned with maintaining the status quo” (2014: 31). The film similarly opens with Neville driving in his car through the streets of New York (rather than LA as was seen in Omega Man). Primarily, this ties in with post-9/11 anxieties, though the choice of city – one we imagine as densely populated – allows for the same kind of enjoyment of the absence of people. (Equally, there are arguments that NYC was chosen because it was “hard to make L.A feel empty” (Beale, q in Subramanian).) The spotting of wild animals (presumably escaped from the New York Zoo) and the overall greener hue of the streets of New York (missing from other iterations of the text) also imply that humanity itself has been a plague and nature is now able to reinstate itself in our absence.

The film sees Robert Neville, a military scientist (Will Smith), navigate the New York setting as he tries to find a cure for the plague that has infected the world. In this tale, it emerged after a cure for cancer began to mutate, resulting in the monstrous figures who are the threat here. Neville spends his days alone, and the themes of isolation so prominent in Matheson’s novel are perhaps most keenly felt in this adaptation. At one point, Neville begins to make conversation with the mannequins in a video store, evidently placed there by him to establish a sense of human presence. His emotional response to this gives us far more empathy for him than emerged in either The Last Man or Omega. His role as a scientist gives an explanation as to why he is able to find and engineer a cure for the virus – which perhaps suggests that science is, in fact, the answer, when undertaken by an agent of the state .

I Am Legend positions the post-apocalyptic as barren, lonely, and quiet and indicates that the threat is coming not just from the vampires but from the absence of others. The focus on the scientific aspects is key to a certain subset of the post-apocalyptic: the use of science as a trigger/cure for the apocalypse implies humanity has some form of control over it, as opposed to acts of god or the supernatural. The vampires within I Am Legend and its web are not supernatural in the ways in which they are coded in other narratives (i.e., being able to fly, or turn into a bat, or possess abilities to hypnotize), and so the destruction of them feels more possible. They are also seen, through their origins, as a product of humanity’s arrogance. The events of I Am Legend take on more resonance in a world that has engaged with a pandemic recently.

The virus plot of all versions of I Am Legend raises questions about how we understand the boundaries between self and others, as the COVID-19 pandemic has also shown us. There is a “threat to identity” posed by the virus in the text, as Laura Diehl argues (2013: 93). A virus, particularly one that transforms the host, changes our relationship to our bodies, rendering us alien, other, to both ourselves and the world around us. The use of the virus in the text works well with the metaphor of the vampire given its ability to transform a human body into a vampiric one. It also provides a different way of thinking about the boundaries between the human and monstrous, self and other. The scientific approach strips it of morality and attempts to demystify it in the process. As Clasen notes: “Matheson goes to great lengths to rationalize or naturalize the vampire myth, transplanting the monster from the otherworldly realms of folklore and Victorian supernaturalism to the test tube of medical inquiry and rational causation” (323). This desire to be able to categorize, control, and understand something that causes great fear is natural, and so Matheson’s efforts are ones that readers may find relevant in the current moment. The looming specter of science and technology, however, is not confined only to our world now – as noted earlier, there are various cultural anxieties linked to scientific ideas and technological development that have impacted the text(s). To think through this in more detail, we will turn to examining the role of science and disease in these narratives, as well as their link to the vampire.

Science and Disease

Matheson’s novel is arguably the starting point for thinking about science and the vampire (see Wilkins 2018). Within his text, we are witness to vampires that are void of humanity, reduced to a collection of symptoms and terrifying behavior. This allows for a neat categorization of the vampire, which, as a figure that often resists or transgresses boundaries, is a big ask. Matheson’s text and the scientific approach to the vampire within it could be argued to be a rational approach to the post-apocalypse. By positing science as both cause and cure for the plague, it strips the figures who are threatening of their symbolic power, reducing them to illness markers instead. Neville looks for signs that those he encounters (including the dog) are not infected and carefully watches for signs they have changed. The neatness of these categories is one attempt to understand the difference the vampire represents.

Equally, the idea that science or a scientific approach can contain the threat is not evident. This is a story in which “science has run amok” says Erik Smetana (2011: 174). We see this with the origins of the plagues in the story and its adaptations: science has simply gone too far and with mutations of viruses comes the realization that we do not have as much control as we think. Matheson’s text comes at a time when fears of a Cold War – again, related to science going too far – are being mediated through other cultural narratives. We only need to look at the films of the 1950s to see the link. Although heavily related to fears of communist takeover, the connection is made explicit through many of the narratives: the cold rationality at the heart of these threats (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still) speaks to larger fears about an essence of humanity being stripped from us by science. We do not want to be reduced to a collection of symptoms or a disease.

The novel clearly influenced subsequent narratives of the scientific vampire, which in turn arguably shaped the adaptations of the text. We see early popular examples in the form of the Dark Shadows television series in the late 1960s, through to prominent vampire films of the 1980s that attempt to frame vampirism as either scientifically understood or an attempt by humanity to use science in “the wrong way.” These include 1983’s The Hunger and 1984’s Lifeforce. While very different films, they both show different approaches to the vampire than the dominance of the Hammer Horror/blaxploitation vampire in the 1970s. Again, this is an era in which US/Soviet tensions were running high and scientific developments were putting the understanding of humanity under threat. We also see a number of scientifically informed vampire films in the late 1990s/early 2000s, including Blade (1998), Underworld (2003), and Daybreakers (2009). Each uses the framing of a virus or genetic mutation as the cause for vampirism. While these films also offer commentary on other social issues, such as race or climate change, the use of science offers a way of thinking about the vampire and the issues it mediates from a different perspective. As Christina Wilkins noted, in these films, “Vampirism is a virus, a contaminant, yet it allows there to be a search for a cure, unlike narratives where there is no underlying scientific cause” (2018: 170). The search for a cure represents hope, despite, paradoxically, it being linked to the very thing that caused the threat in the first place.

It may be then that the scientific approach to the vampire in these narratives is an attempt to impose order. By curing the virus of vampirism, we can return to the status quo, or so we might think. However, these stories tell of a post-apocalyptic world – one which is difficult to understand and has changed irreparably. As noted, there may be a rebuilding, but there cannot be a return. No wonder then that these narratives so often turn to a kind of nostalgia. By attempting to categorize or impose an order, the scientific approach to the vampire could be said to strip some of the moral judgments from the narrative. Rather than good or evil, there is simply infected and uninfected. However, this is not what we see in Matheson’s text. The vampires are routinely referred to as “bastards,” and because Neville’s daily purpose is to rid the world of them, the reader understands them to be “bad.” Scientific approaches may at first attempt to remove moral judgments from our understandings of events or people, but our actions and our ways of classifying soon begin to say otherwise. In dealing with threats, we begin to dehumanize. The “group mind” of the vampires Louise Nuttall noted invites us to empathize with Neville rather than the vampires (Nuttall: 34). An us/them, infected/cured mindset is therefore established.

Alongside this, the notion of blame shifts, with a sense of monstrosity attached to those who are infected. However, as Wilkins argued, “the scientific vampire is [perhaps] not the monster in these narratives. Because they have been ‘infected,’ they are victims, and primarily, they are following their vampiric instincts. Giving a scientific basis for the condition of vampire allows the fault to lie with those who let it spread for whatever reason” (2018: 170). There are various approaches to science within each of these iterations of the I Am Legend story, but a question we might ask is: Is science ever not monstrous?

The answer seems to depend on the version of Neville undertaking these experiments to find a cure. Matheson’s Neville is not a trained scientist, positioning himself as distinct from them in his discoveries: “The scientists had been right, then; there were bacteria involved” (80). Yet he learns all he can from trips to the library, setting up his own version of a lab, experimenting and puzzling out the question of the vampire. There are several points where Neville curiously holds up mythical aspects of the vampire and attempts to explain them scientifically. Ultimately, though, this scientific approach, and the dehumanizing of the vampires that it entails, leads to them seeing him as a “black terror to be destroyed” (160). He has become monstrous in his scientific quest to eradicate them. Dr. Robert Morgan in The Last Man on Earth is, however, a scientist, giving more of a “plausible” explanation for his scientific discoveries to audiences. The lab being the central location for his work on finding the cure puts him in a more official position, and as more representative of a scientific approach, unlike Neville’s more renegade one in the book.

Again, in Omega Man , Neville is a scientist, but this time he is a scientist in the military, making him a representative for the state and bolstering his position of white male authority. In the film adaptations, Morgan/Neville’s blood is the cure. This difference from Matheson’s text positions the self as safe and reinscribes the “otherness” that these changes represent. The vampires remain a disease and humanity still plagued. This changes marginally in 2007’s I Am Legend. Will Smith’s Neville describes himself as a “soldier and scientist,” again explaining his ability to create a cure for the disease. Unlike the other two film adaptations, we see Neville experimenting on live subjects here. This adds a new layer to the understanding of science; although it is a vampire being subjected to these experiments, there is a focus on the emotional expressiveness of the figures throughout, creating a level of sympathy for them not present in other adaptations. As such, Smith’s Neville seems more monstrous, as does his weaponizing of scientific approaches. That the initial ending of the film acknowledged this – through a moment where Neville looks at the photographs of every vampire he has experimented on and begins to see himself through the eyes of the other as monstrous (an approach more closely aligned with Matheson’s text) – is interesting. However, this ending was switched for a more “heroic” one, due to test audiences not liking the implication of Smith as monstrous (Crago: 327).

The discussion of disease and cures cannot be understood without thinking of its context, including what Laura Diehl notes are the “the peculiarly American histories of bacteriological racism and virological politics” (85). While it comes across to an extent in Matheson’s text, Diehl argues that there is a link between the question of the biological and the boundaries of the self, and this reflects fears of the other. As she notes: “By linking the defense of biological purity with that of private property, Matheson writes a novel that denies Neville’s capacity to reproduce himself—the Other will inherit the Earth” (106). This question of otherness is realized through the representations of race and gender within the text and its adaptations, shifting as its social context does.

Looking Backwards: Race and Gender

Each of these texts has been read through a lens examining constructions and critiques of race and gender. That a white man is at the center of the text (though notably not in all of the adaptations) and is under threat by the changing society can be seen as an investigation of sociohistorical changes. This is arguably part of the post-apocalyptic narrative, says Barbara Gurr, wherein the narratives “frequently fail to imagine new experiences of race, gender, and sexuality” (2015: 2) and “reproduce conservative ideologies which shape how we ‘read’ social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality as natural and inevitable, perhaps even necessary for our survival.” In I Am Legend and its adaptations, we see this reproduction of ideologies through the creation of our empathy with Neville and the nostalgia with which we are expected to view the imagined past of the story. However, some critics take issue with the text being read as such. Clasen, for example, criticizes the readings of the story that see it from ideological perspectives, arguing that the book “is not a crypto-ideological tract” (318). Specifically, he is responding to Kathy Patterson’s view, which reads the vampires within the novel as representative of African-Americans (Patterson, 2005). Clasen tries to argue against Patterson’s view by listing the ways in which the vampire has been used metaphorically in the past. His point ultimately is that we do not really engage with the vampire; it is always on “the periphery”(318). The positioning on the periphery arguably lends more weight to it being read as countercultural.

The vampire has always occupied the space of alterity. A liminal figure, it moves between boundaries and categories – living/dead, human/monster. This allows it to explore multiple subject positions, which offers possibilities but also functions as a threat. We can see this element of threat in earlier narratives like Dracula, where the anxiety of infection and invasion comes from the foreign villain (see, e.g., Jiang and Zhang 2012). Patterson makes note of the various studies linking Dracula to anxieties of race – and raises the specific question of blackness in relation to the vampire, citing Whitehead who argues that “the monstrosity of blackness is one of the final contributions of the nineteenth century to the modern myth of the vampire” (q in Patterson 19). Dracula is also seen by scholars like Carol Senf as a response to changing gender norms, in particular the “new woman” (Senf 1982). Matheson’s narrative arrives in 1954, pre-Civil Rights bill, and second wave feminism, but still in a cultural moment that was wrestling with changing gender norms. Given this, it is perhaps not so surprising that the film touched upon the most for its exploration of race and gender is Omega Man given its proximity to such pivotal moments for societal change.

The post-apocalyptic as a genre faces fears of how society operates and the possibility of its change. After all, it explores the breaking down of society, the aftermath, and its rebuilding. As noted, these are often conservative; the genre itself however takes the threat of social change to its absurd extreme – the end of the world. We can see this by who is positioned at the center of these texts and who functions as threat. As Robert Booth notes, “The cinematic apocalypse is generally an exclusively white one” (2015: 22) and usually male, with a centrality of white masculinity noted by Ritzenhoff and Krewani (2015). The threat, however, is positioned differently. Again, given the vampire’s past use as representative of the anxieties of race, its use in I Am Legend – particularly in the context of a threat to “purity” and fears of extinction – offers an understanding of vampires as racial threat. This may be due to the initial themes of Matheson’s text, which, says Nicola Bowring, is a “study” on “how we interpret the other” (136). Vampirism has been othered throughout our cultural history. Despite recent attempts to humanize it (see Wilkins 2018, or Abbott 2016), it remains different and continually changing. As Nina Auerbach asserts, “every age embraces the vampire it needs” (1995: 145). We see this in the shifting representations of the vampire in these adaptations of the text, allowing us to think about what anxieties they mediate in its particular moment.

Each of the texts approach the question of race differently, or rather, it has been read differently. Patterson argues that while the vampires in Matheson’s text have “no obvious racial attributes per se,” “they are constantly referred to in connection with blackness” (20). With The Last Man, however, there is “no historical or political referent” (105) according to Sully. There are, of course, other ways to read these vampires but that they are reflective of their era and its attendant fears is clear. The positioning of the vampire as racial other in Omega Man is done so through multiple angles: the characterization of the vampires themselves, the treatment of the protagonist in contrast to them, and the broader fears underpinning the text. Exploring Omega Man, Sully argues that there is a fear of overpopulation and demographic change grounded in racialized anxieties “conjured by the siege of the last, white man in his townhouse” (106). Although the film opens with the absence of population, Heston’s Neville has to defend himself and his space from the threat of the racialized other. We encounter the family, who use black power rhetoric (as noted by Crago earlier), and the mythical status of the last white man who is untainted by the infection of vampirism. The vampire infection in Omega Man changes skin color to a vivid white, interestingly altering the black character’s appearance to an intense whiteness that stands in contrast to Neville’s pallor. Vampirism thereby stands in as a threat to the status quo, particularly a racialized and patriarchal one. This is linked strongly to the moment it was produced in. As Crago argues, the scholarship on the films of the 1970s shows them “respond to this confusion of normative hierarchies by portraying liberation discourses as dangerous to white men, to the nation and even to civilisation itself” (323).

This danger is represented through the threat to the white male body in Omega Man, which is grounded in the ideas of Matheson’s text. Although the links to fears of race may not be as explicit in I Am Legend, it still explores questions of change and how to move forward. However, arguably, the sense of moving forward is missing in Omega Man, or, indeed, in any of the other adaptations which remove the final ideas Neville has. Instead, the positioning as victim, as martyr for the cause of the past, shows that there is a refusal to move forward and as such is a condemnation of what is to come. The understanding of race in 2007’s I Am Legend is somewhat different, altered by Will Smith as protagonist, rather than Heston’s white body. (There is a discussion by Roberts on the implication of stardom and its impact on the hero in each of these texts which may be useful for readers.) The 2007 adaptation comes post-9/11, which had an impact on the way in which the post-apocalyptic genre was being mediated. It marked a shift in understandings of us and them and of our safety in the world around us. These discussions were tied to religion and race and channeled in a variety of ways, the vampire being one of them.

Yet 2007’s I Am Legend functions in some ways as a response to Omega Man, in that, says Brayton, “What distinguishes this SF film from conservative ‘doomsdays,’ however, is the extent to which hope is realized without restoring white normativity” (2011: 67). He continues, citing Kakoudaki, that “the racialized body holds the key to ‘national survival’” (Kakoudaki 127). Smith’s Neville is a military scientist and constructs a cure, establishing a path forward that reconstructs society differently but is not framed as this being threatening. Smith’s body in a role previously occupied by Heston supplants the white framing of the film, as well as having political implications due to his star persona (Roberts discusses this in more detail). Brayton links the positioning of the black body in this film to the events of Katrina in 2005, which were recent in the minds of 2007 viewers. The film, he argues, is “essentially a narrative of disaster and black survival” (70). The distinctions between us and them are inverted from the traditional approach. The vampires are conspicuous by their “whiteness” says Brayton. Indeed, the whiteness of the vampire bodies is almost painfully white, a marked difference between the vampires of the other adaptations (although Omega Man comes close, linked to a refusal to accept the future) and Matheson’s text. This is in opposition to the “degeneracy” linked to bodies of color in white dystopias, as Brayton argues. Yet, King argues that the film offers a “reinscription of racist logics” (q in Heyes 12), and Subramanian argues that there are the setting and characterization “indicate a desire to shy away from racial themes” (2010: 52), leading to a “confused” portrayal of it. This may be because, as Heyes notes, the vampire “tends to refer back to a subjugated population rather than their subjugators” (16). The context of the post-9/11 and the framing of the vampire as terrorist (see Heyes, Wilkins, and Subramanian) alter the reading of the figure from its literary context.

Interestingly, while there may be differences in the approach to race in the adaptations as time has gone on, the aspect of gender has remained a thread noticed by many critics. Although 2007’s I Am Legend offers an inversion of previous dystopias with regard to race, it aligns itself with other societal structures, such as national security, and the hegemonic masculine ideal. Says Brayton of the ending, “[Smith] embodies a stalwart masculinity that is memorialized in the final moments of the film,” which also “excludes women” from the national recovery (73). Perhaps this is because, says Crago, “it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of a patriarchal social system” (323). Each of these narratives features a lone man at its core, with the discussion of women being focused on them primarily as a sexual object. Masculinity is partly tied here to heterosexual sexual desire, and some readings have argued for Neville’s “traumatic recognition of his queer sexuality” in his “monstrosity,” with his murderous impulses a repression of sexual feeling for his neighbor, Cortman (Khader, 2013, p532). Matheson’s text foregrounds the struggle with his desires (“And the women… .Did he have to start thinking about them again?”(16)), presenting his treatment of women as a union of sexual and violent urges that are enacted upon the vampires. When Neville is taking a vampire for experimentation, his thoughts turn to this:

He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn’t care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he’d come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God’s sake! He flared back. I’m not going to rape the woman! (54)

The us and them distinctions are perhaps seen most clearly through the lens of gender. After all, in each of the narratives, the possibility for change – the meeting of a survivor who tries to offer a link to a way forward however that looks – is always female. The female vampires as experiments position them as threat, perhaps because of more Freudian interpretations with the penetrative nature of the fangs representing a masculine threat. In The Last Man, the female character is seen as sexual object, as in Omega Man. Both function as a challenge to the status quo of the heteronormative white man. As noted, although this element of race is stripped in 2007’s adaptation, Anna, the survivor woman Neville meets, is only a “courier of hope” (Brayton 73). With the ending of Matheson’s text being the outlier, we might say that this is a text that offers the possibility for change and progression, much more so than the others. However, it also the text with the most explicit rendering of otherness around femininity. This perhaps could link to the refusal to move forward, and the clinging to “traditional ideas,” represented at various points in these texts as religious ideas framed nostalgically.

The story itself centers around a look back, a realization that the protagonist must move forward, and the element of redemption which is frequently linked back to religious ideas, tying it back full circle to apocalyptic narratives. We see this looking back in the protagonist’s attempt to “cure” the vampires – for old blood lines to be reinstated in order for society to return to what it was. The events of the post-apocalyptic film represent the errors humanity has made and so offer a fictional redemption for us to surpass those events. Who and what is redemptive indicates the ideological perspective of the film. In the case of Omega Man, Heston’s Neville is the redemptive figure by his Christ-like sacrifice at the end (made painfully obvious by his pose and the location of the wound he receives). Says Justin Roberts, “Omega Man’s Neville takes the lone salvation of The Last Man on Earth’s Morgan and raises it to Messianic status” (2016: 46). While both films may involve a nostalgia for the past, a desire to return, the element of religion underpinning this only becomes explicit in Omega Man, despite Last Man’s oddly religious hues through its ending. This is continued in I Am Legend, according to Nicola Bowring: the “Christian aspect of legend” is most strongly shown in this film (137). This comes primarily from the tribute from Anna at the end of the film, where Neville is redeemed by his sacrifice – again, taking on Christian connotations – and becomes written into legend. Heyes also notes the visible church in the colony Anna makes it to at the end, suggesting Christianity is the solution, is redemptive.

The move toward these Christian elements is unlike Matheson’s text. Indeed, in one flashback, Neville finds himself in the midst of a religious event. There is a mass of people in the tent he finds himself in and a preacher who shouts: “unless we become as little children, stainless and pure in the eyes of Our Lord…we are damned!” (107). Neville eventually escapes the tent, which is full of “violent ranks” and screams. The framing of religion as hysterical response to threat again is in line with other post-apocalyptic narratives, or, indeed, narratives wherein monsters have taken hold, be it zombie, vampire, or other. In each case, there is a need to return to traditional ideas – religion being the most common traditional underpinning we have – to neutralize the threat of change. Amanda Howell links vampires and nostalgia through the perspective of disease and in the return to religion and rituals these tales enact (Howell 2021). Yet, are I Am Legend and its adaptations a rejection of nostalgia? There is a sense that there is a looking back, a desire for the past – a restorative nostalgia in Boym’s terms (being a “return to origins”) – but this isn’t allowed in most of the adaptations as the cure dies with Neville in Last Man and Omega. Perhaps the 2007 adaptation functions as a turning point, which links with ideas of nostalgia being key in the post-9/11 moment.

Conclusion

There are many ways of reading I Am Legend, but understanding it through the various adaptations helps us understand how we frame the figure of the vampire, the understanding of our bodies and others, and how the definitions of otherness continue to define the boundaries of the world around us. While every reading of the text has not been included here, these different perspectives offer a springboard for exploring the continued popularity of the text and how it enables us to negotiate questions of identity. Although we’ve seen a change in the engagement with the vampire, and an increased focus on (and heroic positioning of) the protagonist, tracking these shifts continues to help us understand the structures we use to navigate the world.

Cross-References