EDITOR'S NOTE: Don't call this article a remake of one I wrote for a magazine a few years ago--call it a "re-imagining!" The original draft starred Vincent Price. Will Smith stars in the latest version of Richard Matheson's classic novel, I am Legend, which opens December 14th. You can watch the trailer for it here.

Richard Matheson is one of the most gifted and prolific fantasists ever, and his television and film work helped the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres achieve a level of sophistication previously only glimpsed in literature. He adapted his own novel, The Shrinking Man, then objected when the studio abandoned the in-media-raise structure for a linear one and inserted the word INCREDIBLE into its title. His teleplays for classic TWILIGHT ZONE episodes assured William Shatner of an (over) acting career before STAR TREK came along. He wrote the screenplays for several Roger Corman films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, then returned to television to write several Dan Curtis (DARK SHADOWS) productions, including THE NIGHT STALKER, its sequel THE NIGHT STRANGLER, and the classic anthology TRILOGY OF TERROR (featuring that terrifying Zuini Fetish doll--available soon as a collector's edition action figure!). Latter film adaptations of his novels include SOMEWHERE IN TIME, WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, and A STIR OF ECHOES.

One of Matheson's most influential contributions to the horror genre was his 1957 novel, I Am Legend. A science fiction-horror hybrid, I Am Legend tells the story of Robert Neville, a suburbanite who becomes the sole planetary survivor of a deadly plague which transforms the global population into vampires. By day, Neville prowls the local supermarkets, homes, and office buildings, staking the undead with professional efficiency and searching for his nemesis, Ben Cortman, a former friend and neighbor. By night, he holes up in his home-turned-fortress, drinking heavily and listening to loud music while his former neighbors call out for him, his own name becoming a taunt: "Neville! Come out, Neville!"

As in many of Matheson's works, sexuality is dealt with on a frank level. Neville is tempted by the vampiresses who dance at his doorstep, hiking up their skirts and beckoning him to come outside. Driven to the brink of insanity, he contemplates suicide. Only when he meets Ruth, the Last Woman on Earth, does he regain some sense of hope. But his optimism is shattered when he discovers that his lady friend is a member of a new society of beings, neither vampire nor human, who regard him as a monster because of his deadly mission of vampire eradication. Ruth gives Neville the chance to flee, but after three years of defending his turf, he decides to stage his last stand at his castle. The ending is both thought provoking and nihilistic, and first time readers are likely to argue, "But it can't end like that!" While the book includes some fascinating scientific explanations for the existence of "real" vampires, it doesn't skimp on the horror, particularly in the flashbacks that dramatize the death of Neville's family life and the birth of his tortured existence. In one terrifying scene, after carelessly arriving home at sunset, Neville battles his way past Cortman's vampire horde to his front door, only to realize that he left his house keys back in the car.

In the early 1960's, Britain's Hammer Studios hired Matheson to script an adaptation of the novel for them, titled THE NIGHT CREATURES. The screenplay for the doomed project is included in Gauntlet Press' hefty (and expensive) limited edition tome, Bloodlines: Richard Matheson's DRACULA, I AM LEGEND, and Other Vampire Stories (the book also includes Matheson's novel). While generally faithful to his novel, the script does deviate from it: Matheson's screenplay is set in Canada, with the author subtly pointing a finger at a militaristic United States for the end of the world. In a larger point of departure, Neville is not executed at the end; rather, he is shipped off to a human blood farm. I found this ending very reminiscent of Matheson's TWILIGHT ZONE work, and unsatisfactory for a feature length motion picture.

The project failed to materialize when British censors objected to so much of the material that Hammer felt their issues could never be resolved. The screenplay was instead rewritten and produced as the an Italian film THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964). Matheson removed his name from the credits and William Leicester is listed as the screenwriter; Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow are listed as co-directors. THE LAST MAN ON EARTH stars Vincent Price as Robert Morgan. It's a faithful, if lethargic, version of Matheson's apocalyptic novel. The pasty-faced vampires resemble the ghouls from CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and their lumbering movements foreshadow those of George Romero's zombies in his Dead series. The film fails to portray Matheson's American suburbia-turned-Hell, and Price, who starred in the Matheson/Corman Poed adaptations for A.I.P., was miscast as the everyman turned vampire hunter.

In 1968, George Romero directed and co-wrote NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Romero has often stated that I Am Legend was his inspiration for the film, which utilized the concept of survivors holed up in a house fighting a horde of undead things trying to get in at them. Both creators portrayed the breakdown of society, but Romero threw several strangers into a farmhouse which none of them had ever seen before, while Matheson dramatized the dissolution of a single suburban neighborhood; the familiar turned into the horrifying. On Robert Neville's block, only his house stands among ashen ruins; he has burned the other houses to the ground so that he can see when his enemies are near. In Romero's world, the trouble comes from the inside as well as the outside, as the politics of his survivors tear the group apart. As in The Shrinking Man, Matheson uses his fantastic scenario to deal with one man's extraordinary loneliness.

In 1971, Warner Brothers released the second official adaptation of Matheson's novel, THE OMEGA MAN. Director Boris Segal (who was later decapitated by a helicopter blade on the set of the TV mini-series WORLD WAR III), and husband and wife screenwriters John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington, abandoned Matheson's vampires in favor of albino mutants, but retained the plague that creates them. Flashbacks dramatize the downfall of mankind, but they are markedly different from Matheson's. The filmmakers also jettisoned Matheson's suburban setting, shifting the action to Los Angeles.

Charlton Heston (who previously battled mutants in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES) is Neville, an apparently unmarried military scientist who injected himself with an experimental vaccine for a worldwide plague resulting from a biological war between Russia and China. Holed up in a brownstone turned pillbox, he goes on daily excursions hunting for the robed, mutant members of "The Family." At night, he walks around his apartment, talking to himself, playing chess with a bust of Julius Caesar, and sniping mutants from his balcony. Ben Cortman is replaced by Mathias, a former television newscaster turned religious leader who gathers the mutants and instills them with religious fervor; at his direction, they become night-time Luddites, eschewing technology and burning whatever remnants of it they find. To them, Neville represents a world that abandoned them.

Neville soon meets Lisa, a jive-talking plague survivor with an afro, and Dutch, a former med student, and several children under their protection. It doesn't take long for Heston and Cash to get it on, in a taboo-breaking scene that was a first for its time (much like the kiss between Bill Shatner and Nichelle Nichols on STAR TREK a few years earlier). The scene was edited from release prints, but restored for DVD. Neville and Dutch realize that Neville's blood can cure the other survivors, who are reacting to the plague at a slower rate than the mutants. In the climax, Heston is permitted to see Neville-as-Messiah through to the bloody end, and mankind earns a second chance.

Matheson dismissed THE OMEGA MAN outright, but it's an entertaining film that embraces many of his themes, and it's developed a cult following over the years. Director Segal, working with a limited budget, delivered some truly disquieting scenes as Heston drives around the deserted streets of L.A. (accomplished simply by shooting on Sundays!). Heston, who'd helped shepherd PLANET OF THE APES to the screen, blamed the film's box office failure on the "poor makeup" used to create the mutants. Indeed, when Anthony Zerbe as Mathias removes his sunglasses to reveal his glowing pupils, his eyelids and lips don't have any makeup on at all. Still, there's no denying the creepy sensation that accompanies this scene, similar to the "umasking" of the mutants in BENAEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES.

Heston delivers one of his best, cynical performances, machine-gunning every shadow that moves. The film is an encyclopedia of 1970's culture, which, while dating the film, make it even more interesting. One cannot help but chuckle when Heston inserts an eight-track cartridge into his car's stereo system after killing his first mutant in the opening sequence, or when he sits alone in an otherwise empty movie theatre, mimicking the hippie jargon onscreen as he sits through WOODSTOCK for the umpteenth time, or when Cash delivers her "freeze/honky/mother" Black Panther dialogue. Ron Grainer, who composed the DR. WHO theme, created an electronic score that spawned a cult of its own; the melancholy notes underscore Neville's loneliness and questionable sanity.

THE OMEGA MAN is political on many different levels. Heston's Neville, the first "one man army" in film, represents the establishment, trying to preserve a dead way of life. Not only does he maintain an armory of weapons, but he likes to don his military duds from the WWII film MIDWAY whenever there's trouble. Mathias's "Family" (no doubt named after Charles Manson's "Family") is intended to paint the counter-culture movement as backward rather than progressive, and Lisa and the other survivors are meant to show the Peace and Love movement as well meaning but misguided. We feel for teenaged Richie (ST. ELSEWHERE's Eric Laneuville) when he tries to save Mathias and his ilk, but we're not surprised when they turn on him: bad, bad liberal! The degree to which THE OMEGA MAN has earned its status as a cult film, and has inched closer to pop culture status, was evidenced when Michael Moore featured a clip of Heston blasting a machine gun from the film in his documentary about America's fascination with firearms, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE.

THE OMEGA MAN went on to influence its share of films as well. If NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was inspired by I Am Legend, then DAWN OF THE DEAD, with its attack on consumerism, was influenced by scenes from THE OMEGA MAN in which Heston goes shopping for a new car and new clothes rather than maintaining the ones he already has. It's on one such shopping spree that he first glimpses the commodity he most desires: Woman (Cash, who is none too convincing as department store mannequin). NIGHT OF THE COMET offered a satirical take on THE OMEGA MAN as two valley girls--precursors to Buffy Sommers in the film version of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER--battle mutants in L.A. after a comet wipes out mankind. And Stephen King, a curator of pop culture, was surely influenced by THE OMEGA MAN flashbacks, which show the plague wiping out mankind while commentators warn that National Guardsmen will shoot to kill looters, when he wrote similar scenes in The Stand. More recently, 28 DAYS LATER appropriated a plethora of images and concepts from I Am Legend, The Day of the Triffids , and Romero's Dead Trilogy (while it was a trilogy).

Several years ago, Mark Protosevich, who wrote the screenplay for THE CELL (2000), wrote a new screenplay adaptation of I Am Legend with that title. Ridley Scott, Rob Bowman and Mick Garris were at various times attached to direct, with Arnold Schwarzenegger among those tapped to star at one time or another. The draft I read was a blueprint for a big budget action film set in San Francisco after a miracle drug designed to cure everything from cancer to AIDS creates a race of bloodthirsty mutants (called Hemocytes, not vampires). The film restores Neville's dog and Ben Cortman from the novel, but follows THE OMEGA MAN's structure, with elaborate action sequences that recall THE ROAD WARRIOR and MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME more than anything Matheson ever wrote. Neville's background is similar to the one presented in the novel--he was a family man before his world went to Hell--but he is definitely a military man of action in his war against this new society. He uses as many gadgets as James Bond or Batman, some of them quite ingenious. Although Protosevich includes many clever touches, this version is even more removed from the source material than THE OMEGA MAN, and the climax is a ridiculous, mano-a-mano confrontation between Neville and Cortman, with the coda Hollywood's ultimate betrayal of Matheson's ending (which the previous versions preserved in some form).

A version of this script, revised by Akiva Goldsman (BATMAN AND ROBIN, LOST IN SPACE and I, ROBOT) is what will finally reach the screen this December, starring Will Smith as Neville and directed by Francis Lawrence (CONSTANTINE). The story is now set in New York City, perhaps in an effort to differentiate it from THE OMEGA MAN. I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic imagery, and I have no objection to Will Smith in the lead role, and discount pithy comments from those discounting the inevitability of comedic one-liners from him; Smith has demonstrated his commitment to serious material more than once (SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, ALI, and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS), and he's certainly better equipped to portray an American everyman than Shwarzenegger was. I will say that there is something troubling about seeing Smith and his pooch on the cover of the latest publication of the novel; I don't recall seeing Price and Heston on previous editions, and have generally enjoyed the illustrations that have graced the book over the years.

My concern is that this upcoming production will completely eschew Matheson's concepts in favor of the whiz-bang approach to filmmaking favored by Jerry Bruckheimer and his contemporaries. Reportedly, Goldsman's script restores some of Matheson's touches jettisoned by Ptotosevich, but you'd never know it from the trailer; the images of fighter jets bombing the Brooklyn Bridge seem as detached from the novel as Chuck Heston's military chopper in THE OMEGA MAN. The new film's advertising campaign--"The last man on earth... is not alone"--was copied directly from that for THE OMEGA MAN. And yet I am reasonably optimistic after viewing the second trailer; this looks like a serious film to me, even with all the CGI.

The irony is that I Am Legend is a short novel perfectly suited for film treatment without much need for alterations or updating. We'll soon see which big budget, studio vampire film better treats its source material: 30 DAYS OF NIGHT or I AM LEGEND. Perhaps The Asylum will surprise us all with its latest low budget rip-off, I AM OMEGA (Hey, that sounds like my title!). After all, the last time someone ripped off Matheson's novel, we wound up with a bona fide classic.