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Bing Lu

Professor McClure

Writing 39B

05/02/2018

To save or to kill: the living dead in contemporary horror genre

I Am Legend is written by Richard Matheson and published on 1954 as a science fiction

horror fiction. Instead of being categorized as a traditional gothic horror genre with previous

vampire literature, this book has influential developments as a vampire literature transition to

science fiction horror and was chosen as the vampire novel of 20th century. Matheson portrays a

very novel character: the last human on earth. The protagonist, Robert Neville’s loneliness and

depression during his survival from the human extinction is revealed from different aspects in

this book uniquely. Matheson depicts the last man on earth to have a contradictory personality

that was build up by the alienation from the species and the ongoing psychological pressure from

surviving. Robert Neville’s battle between the vampires and him is supported by his strong will

to live and was ended by his acceptance to the current world and the fact that he becomes the

more threatening monster rather than the vampires. What Matheson is trying to tell the readers is

that there are no absolute enemies or companions, but just different groups of people who pursue

different interests. Giving one more choice and trying to understand and compassionate others

can lead to a more peaceful world. The main idea of this book connects with the alienation and

the understanding between people in the real world. The genre and the themes of this story will

be discussed in the following contents.

As the last man on earth, Neville is ironically not the hero of the story but the

representative of the art-horror monster because of his extraordinariness. Neville is extraordinary

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because he is the only one of a species and his behaviors are not common as human’s. Neville

assumes that he is still in the world that is dominated by human beings and he puts all his effort

in fighting the vampires and experimenting the cure to the vampirism in the three years of

struggling. On page 72, Matheson writes, “He (Neville) had to find something! Goddamn it! he

raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!” (Matheson 72). Neville believes in that if he can survive

from the plague, there must be a reason and he can find the reason. For the faith that he can

probably turn his world back on again but not to accept that the current world is considered

normal, Neville presents extraordinariness in the new community that consists of vampires and

mutant human-vampires. On the other hand, Neville says “I’ve killed off most of them, but they

manage to keep a few ahead of me” (Matheson 126) when Ruth asks him why there are so few

vampires outside his house. It shows his mass killing on the vampires which makes him stand

out from the vulnerable humanity that he is supposed to have. Noël Carroll, one of the most

influential American philosophers on contemporary philosophy of art, in The Nature of Horror

claims that the horror genre, “the monster is the extraordinary character in our ordinary world”

(Carroll 52). Neville’s behaviors in the three years after the plague cannot be categorized as

normal in both the former world and the world that dominated by mutants, so his

extraordinariness makes him the monster of the fiction.

Neville is considered the monster of the book also by his threat to the new society. The

mutant semi-vampires are building up a new and organized system to start a new race, but

Neville is immune to the vampirism. The new race will consider Neville as an intruder of their

governing the new society and a threat to their safety because he is capable of killing vampires.

Ruth says “men can learn to enjoy killing. That’s an old story, Neville. You know that”

(Matheson 156) to remind Neville of his potentially formed obsession to violence and he is the
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real threat to the world. In the letter that Ruth wrote to Neville, she says Neville is the one who

killed her husband (Matheson 143), so he is threatening to Ruth and her community. During the

last talk between Ruth and Neville, Ruth tells Neville that his face is frightening when he chases

her at the first meet (Matheson 156). Carroll points out that if the monster is threatening, the

carried-out emotion will be fear (Carroll 55) which corresponds to Ruth’s instinctive reaction of

running and fighting when she first encounters Neville.

The impurity of Neville also helps to make him the monstrous being in the story. In The

Nature of Horror, Carroll states that “we speculate that an object or being is impure if it is

categorically contradictory” and “many monsters in the horror genre are contradictory in terms

of being both living and dead” (55). Matheson gives Neville the power to live for three years but

at the end of the story, Neville doesn’t escape from his inevitable death as he was told in Ruth’s

warning. It is hard to judge if Neville really wants to live or die because his consistent intention

to confront the vampires and his despair of living all alone. The dog that Neville encounters is a

turning point of his will to continue the struggle. When the dog shows up unexpectedly in

Neville’s world, his last hope to survive the extinction is on. However, the dog is not an

exception from the destined death. Neville tries to reach out to the dog but without resolution

which shows his hesitation between thriving and giving up. When the dog dies, Neville has given

up the last hope. On page 101, Matheson writes, “the intense hope about the dog was not the

answer and never had been” (101) and “unless he put himself under the ground, the only way he

could go was up” (100). Neville comes to realize that he has to confront the death but not hiding

from it. The dog is the sign of Neville’s termination of being contradictory about to live or to die.

The last unexpected element that Neville runs into is the female mutant vampire, Ruth,

and she should be considered the hero in the fiction due to her extraordinariness. Ruth presents
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her extraordinariness in a different way of Neville’s because she is in fact an ordinary character

in the new society and race but she is the only one who shows compassion in the whole story.

She has faith in her new society and accepts the new form of existence of the vampires as the

dominating race. However, she compassionates and understands both the old race and the new

race. In the letter, Ruth writes “when we were together in the darkness, close to each other, I

wasn’t spying on you. I was loving you” (Matheson 144). Ruth shows her compassion to Neville

even he killed her husband because she knows that both the mutant vampires and Neville kill for

the same goal of surviving. She offers help before Neville gets caught and gives him a choice of

ending his life by himself rather than pathetically exterminated as a monster to respect his efforts

to the survival. This scenario is ironic because the one with the evil power is kind and

compassionate and the protagonist is monstrous and alienated.

Ruth represents the hero but not the monster in the story also because she is not

threatening or impure. She is potentially dangerous to Neville because she belongs to the group

that Neville wants to kill and wants to kill Neville. However, the fear arises from Ruth rather

than from Neville when they first meet. This shows that Ruth is not threatening to either side

because she doesn’t hurt anyone on either side. As Carroll illustrates in The Nature of Horror,

impurity is performed if the element is “categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory,

categorically incomplete, or formless” (55). Ruth is none of the above because she shows faith

and loyalty in her own community and she is a character with pure motivates.

This story is categorized as a horror genre fiction because of the monstrous existence of

vampires and Neville himself sets the theme in a frustrating background. In the first part of this

book, the author mainly describes Neville’s and the vampires’ daily routines and gives a

fundamental setting of the story to show the audience that Neville was lonely and desperate in
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every aspect but still trying his best to avoid death. Matheson starts off with Neville’s daily

activities: fixing what was damaged in the house by the vampires at last night, hanging garlics

for defense, getting life supplies, reading and drinking at night. These repeating days and the

freedom is oppressed tightly by the limited schedule between the vampires’ attacks every night

make Neville seem like a free man but in fact worse than a prisoner. This book is not considered

the traditional gothic horror genre because there are not much scary or bloodcurdling scenes.

Instead, the author is trying to show the audience the invisible monster behind the protagonist’s

loneliness and the darkness caused by fear and depression. Neville has grown a contradictory

personality under huge inhumane pressure throughout his survival. Horror works don’t have to

be necessarily scare the audience to reach the criteria of this genre. Noël Carroll in The Nature of

Horror claims that the genre of horror is designed to elicit and engender the emotional state of

horror (Carroll 52). Carroll also makes a point that the emotional responses of the audience are

supposed to be parallel as the characters (Carroll 53). It means that the readers will feel happy

when the protagonist feels happy and will feel scared and pressured when Neville is struggling

from the vampire attacks. The readers may not be scared by the plots and settings of this story

but Neville is created to live under the forces of death and loneliness. Therefore, the audience

will make emotional response to the gloomy and dark settings that make the fiction stick to

horror genre.

Horror genre stories always include monstrous characters or elements that are mostly

supernatural monsters with terrifying appearance and violent actions or the inner fear that is

manipulating the main characters, but the monsters in this book have some transformation that

make it fit in the science fiction horror category. In I Am Legend, the monsters seem less horrific

and more realistic. The figuration of the vampires in this book is not vicious enough to scare
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Neville or the audience because even if they have the power to kill Neville, the vampires can be

easily constrained by things like garlic and the cross. As a contemporary science fiction horror, I

Am Legend has much less vicious supernatural objects but presents the horror genre by showing

an ironic monster, the inner monster of the protagonist. In the Introduction to Dark Night's

Dreaming, an English professor Tony Magistrale and an American writer Michael A. Morrison

claims that the monsters in contemporary American horror have transformed into a more human-

like representative and are less exotic than the monsters in horror prior to 1960 (Magistrale and

Morrison 6). Matheson does not use the terrifying appearances and violence to conduct a horror

story but by creating a monster that is “seething on the inside, but one of us on the outside”

(Magistrale and Morrison 6).

Loneliness and depression is the main theme of I Am Legend. Neville is characterized as

the only human being left on earth and such loneliness cannot be experienced by any of the

readers so Matheson uses large paragraphs to describe how does Neville live his life without

communication to outer world in the beginning of this book in order to give the audience a fuller

image of the last man on earth. In the author’s description of Neville, compelling himself to read

and playing the music loudly was his only methods to shut himself from the cricked world

outside. Matheson’s purpose of providing this scenario is to characterize the protagonist’s dull

life and his internal inhibition and this reveals the extraordinariness of Neville living in this

world. In Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend,

Mathias Clasen, a Danish scholar of horror fiction, says that “Matheson taps into an intuitive

understanding of human nature when a man is trapped in a severely threatening environment and

is completely cut off from human beings, basic human needs are suppressed to extreme” (Clasen

315). Neville’s loneliness is cause by his stereotyped daily routines, endless battle with the
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vampires, lack of companies, helplessness to change the current situation, and his loss of his

loved ones.

There are people with the same goal and contradict with each other in every industry and

objective unity may not be achieved in every circumstance. Battles and competitions between

different groups or individuals will always cause someone to get hurt and overwhelmed in

similar situation, lonely and helpless, as Neville does. Matheson characterizes each character

without absolute positivity or negativity to tell the audience that judgement is the termination of

every issue, mutual understanding is.

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Works Cited

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol.

46, No. 1. (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00218529%28198723%2946%3A1%3C51%3ATNOH%3

E2.0.CO%3B2-Z. Accessed 15 Feb. 2018.

Clasen, Mathias. “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I

Am Legend.” Philosophy and Literature, John Hopkins University Press, 2 Oct. 2010,

muse.jhu.edu/article/595660. Accessed 15 Feb. 2018.

Magistrale, Tony, and Morrison, Michael. A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary

American Horror Fiction. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2007.