I Am Legend is a short novel that did a lot. It re-invented the vampire. It reinvented the zombie. It offered a work of literature to the number of movies that expressed a growing paranoia of the world around them in the 1950s.
Writer Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, about the last man to survive a global apocalypse that has turned the rest of the world into vampires, was a hit and led to three eventual major film adaptations and inspired other well-known works of horror, including Night of the Living Dead. It might have even helped Matheson get a job as one of the main writers for the iconic series The Twilight Zone.
Matheson set the story in the L.A. suburb of Gardena, in reality a town whose large Japanese-American population had been rounded up and shipped to internment camps during World War II. It’s not known how much influence that had on a story whose main themes of grief, despair and loneliness can apply as easily to today’s internet-fueled isolation and paranoia as it can be commentary about the dislocation and isolation of Japanese Americans a few years earlier.
That’s why on the novel’s 70th anniversary, Halloween Every Night offers a few points to ponder in the moonlight as you wonder about the sounds outside.
