How the dead live

>> I Am Legend is the latest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic zombie novel

LAST MAN SITTING: Will Smith

by MATTHEW HAYS

If nothing else, the sheer endurance of the cinematic zombie is impressive. As many times as the critter seems to be able to get up onscreen and keep slaughtering and devouring, audiences seem willing to line up around the block to shell out for the carnage. Like the horror genre itself, zombies seem particularly capable of being born again, remade, morphed into different forms, often with titillating results.

Since Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), zombies have been having a seriously bloody comeback, managing to be played both for genuine chills in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and for laughs in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Fido (2006) and for both chills and laughs in Land of the Dead (2005). Stay tuned: zombies have proven such potent inspiration for filmmakers, Bruce LaBruce will premiere the first gay zombie film, Up With Dead People, at Sundance in January.

Given the budget and star wattage involved in I Am Legend, the third big-screen incarnation of the 1954 Richard Matheson novel of the same name, zombies appear to have the mainstream stamp of approval. Here, Will Smith—one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars—awakens in a desolate and depressing Manhattan, holed up in a fabulous Washington Square condo with an elaborate lab in the basement (this place is so incredible, it’s the main threat to suspension of disbelief in the middle of a zombie movie).

There, Smith tries to figure out how to cure the only-comes-out-at-night population of their blood-born disease. The clear offspring of vampires, these zombies are nocturnal and dine on human flesh—and Smith, for whatever reason, is immune. Director Francis Lawrence artfully cuts to a series of flashbacks, in which we see the panic that sets in for Manhattanites, including Smith’s wife and daughter. The President is heard through radio address (sounding a bit like John McCain), advising that New York is effectively being quarantined; cue the bridges surrounding the island being blown up (is there anything CGI can’t do?).

I Am Legend works extremely well, which is testimony to the resilience of Matheson’s novel, as well as an indication of current widespread anxieties about contagion and possible catastrophe. Naturally, it begs comparison with the earlier adaptations. The screenplay lifts some elements from The Omega Man (1971), in which Charlton Heston played the good doctor who searched for a cure and fended off the zombie invaders (who looked like a cross between a group of hippies and a cult).

But the 1964 version, The Last Man on Earth (which starred Vincent Price), offered a unique twist on the storyline. Somewhere along the line, Price learns that the zombies he’s been knocking off by day are, in fact, functioning beings with their own culture, people who have as much right to live as he does—they’re just different. In other words: hey, it’s an alternative lifestyle. All those stakes you’ve been putting through people’s hearts were entirely unnecessary.

Forget that in this era. Like the Heston model, the zombies Will Smith faces off against are without any redeeming qualities. They’re just mean, fighting-mad, rabid, ill-mannered creatures, unable to reason beyond a bullet between the eyes. In a way, it’s too bad. It seems the need to hate the Other is so extreme, movies that have it this way are easier to write and less trouble to sell.

I Am Legend opens this
Friday, Dec. 14

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