With a sickly green face gazing out from the hardcover, through the die-cut holes in the cardboard slipcase, it’s certainly a far cry from the cheaply-produced paperback edition that first carried Matheson’s words way back in 1954. If you want a pure, uncut jolt of creeping horror, you have to head back to the source novel, and the Folio Society’s new hardcover edition, illustrated by David McKeane, is arguably the most handsome-looking we’ve laid eyes on. (The less said about the cash-in quickie, I Am Omega, the better.) The Omega Man (1971) bizarrely changed the vampires to an albino cult 2007’s I Am Legend started off well, but then its CGI ghouls emerged, and the tension ebbed. Maybe this is why, of the four movies based on Matheson’s book, none have quite nailed its tone the first, The Last Man On Earth (1964), was faithful to a degree (right down to a neat twist on the blood-chilling conclusion), but Vincent Price’s brooding lead performance was undercut by its threadbare budget.
It’s a lean, intense novel, light on excessive gore but heavy on an overweening sense of dread. People who were once friends and neighbours are now blood-craving ghouls worse still, some of them actively goad him – their voices ring out at night, daring Neville to leave the safety of his house. I Am Legend‘s most chilling moments involve Neville’s solitary lifestyle: his carefully-maintained routine, his meticulous research – and how it’s often undone by his drinking and his despair at what the world has become. Through Neville, Matheson compares the curious split in the human mind – the rational part that analyses a problem and attempts to solve it, and the irrational bit that, even in a situation where getting drunk can lead to a fatal mistake, still craves alcohol. The protagonist’s greatest enemy, though, isn’t the army of monsters prowling around his house, but his own biting loneliness. Neville, seemingly the only uninfected human left, fortifies his house with all the things the creatures loathe, and uses his scientific knowledge to come up with increasingly efficient ways of disposing of them. Matheson imagines a near future where vampirism has swept across the globe like a disease like the creatures of legend (and Bram Stoker’s Dracula), they’re vulnerable to garlic, mirrors and crucifixes, yet the author comes up with clever, scientific explanations for each of them. In essence, it’s a vampire novel – but one that side-steps castles and capes, and instead tells its story from the perspective of a former plant worker and renaissance man, Robert Neville. It’s easy to see why I Am Legend would resonate with Romero, too.
0 kommentar(er)
