This element now plays as an AIDS metaphor, though the book was written 30 years before H.I.V. Matheson’s original concept, largely sidestepping its startlingly prescient, and philosophical, ending: In the book, some vampires have developed a pill that keeps the disease in check and allows them to live relatively normal lives. Then, in 1971, Warner released “The Omega Man,” a more expensive studio production, starring Charlton Heston, that made extensive use of Los Angeles’s deserted-looking downtown.īoth versions took certain liberties with Mr. “I Am Legend” was almost immediately optioned for the movies (Hammer Films in Britain originally owned the rights), but it wasn’t until 1964 that Vincent Price appeared in “The Last Man on Earth,” a low-budget version shot in Italy.

“And I explained vampires in biological terms.” “I thought if the world was full of vampires, it would be more frightening than just one,” he continued.

Matheson, now 80 and living in the Los Angeles area, “when I was a teenager and saw Bela Lugosi in ‘Dracula.’ ” It is the third film based on a book whose original impulse was to one-up the screen vampires of an earlier era.įirst published in 1953, the novel is a taut, realistic chiller about a postapocalyptic world in which germ warfare creates a biological plague that turns humans into bloodsuckers. As played by Will Smith, he is also one of the few noninfected characters in “I Am Legend,” a Warner Brothers production that has been shooting in New York for release in December.ĭirected by Francis Lawrence (“Constantine”) and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman (an Oscar winner for “A Beautiful Mind”), “I Am Legend” is testimony to the unexpected durability of Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name. Robert Neville, after all, thinks he is the last man alive in a time when a biological plague has created a race of night-crawling human freaks who would like nothing better than to penetrate his sanctuary. The kitchen is stacked top to bottom with what seems like several years’ worth of canned goods and packaged food, and all the windows have floor-to-ceiling retractable steel doors that can be locked down at a moment’s notice.

But the interior, actually a set inside a Brooklyn armory, is something else entirely. FROM the outside Robert Neville’s red brick home looks like all the other stately Greek revival town houses facing Washington Square Park.

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