Editorials
The End Has Come: Standing Alone as ‘The Last Man on Earth’
Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I Am Legend is among the most enduring, flexible, and durable stories in all of horror. It continues to be remade in both official and unofficial capacities with each generation giving Richard Matheson’s seminal novella its own unique twist suited to its current fears. The first, and to date most faithful, adaptation of I Am Legend is The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price in the central role of Robert Morgan. Ironically, this adaptation was disowned by its original creator for several reasons and, though it is the oldest filmed version of the story, perhaps rings truest to us today over sixty years after its making.
Richard Matheson was first hired by England’s Hammer Studios to write a screenplay based on his novella. Unfortunately, the script he turned in was blocked by the British censors who, Hammer believed, were keeping an extra strict eye on them after the release of their gory (for the time) but also highly successful film The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Hammer would recycle the title of that screenplay, Night Creatures, and place it on a very different film some years later, but the screenplay itself was acquired by American independent producers Robert L. Lippert and Harold E. Knox. The script was also extensively rewritten by William F. Leicester who streamlined the story and made several changes to the dialogue. As a result, Matheson petitioned the Writers Guild to have his name removed from the film. They responded that he would not receive any residuals for the film if he did that, so instead he created the pseudonym Logan Swanson.
The changes in the screenplay were not the only objections Matheson expressed. He was also opposed to the casting of Vincent Price as the lead character, whose name change from Robert Neville was not the only difference from I Am Legend and Night Creatures. Price was, with only a few exceptions in the 40s and early 50s, a rather recently minted horror icon in the early 60s when The Last Man on Earth began filming. Most of his career had been spent in dramas, westerns, and noir films with occasional forays into horror like The Invisible Man Returns (1940) and House of Wax (1953). This all changed in the late 50s after he was “greylisted” by HUAC and found it increasingly difficult to find studio work. This was not a problem, however, for independent renegades like William Castle and James H. Nicholson, Samuel Z. Arkoff, and Roger Corman at American International Pictures who recognized his worth as a star—and his willingness to work for what they could pay. Though Matheson had seen Price cast in films he wrote before, he felt he was more suited to play buttoned-up, erudite types and, more importantly, too old for The Last Man on Earth. But the producers saw the success of films like The Fly (1958), The House on Haunted Hill (1959), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and knew they had their star.
Though the novel and the other official adaptations take place in Los Angeles, The Last Man on Earth was shot in Rome under the direction of Sidney Salkow, who worked primarily with Price, and Ubaldo Ragona who is believed to have been more the technical director, working with the Italian crew. The result is a kind of otherworldliness caused by the disconnect between the “anywhere America” setting implied by the script against the stark, sunbaked visuals of the Roman outskirts. This ultimately works to the benefit of the film giving it an extra dimension of distance from the Americans that would make up its primary audience.
The central conceit of I Am Legend came to Matheson when thinking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula is one vampire in a world full of humans, but what if that was reversed and there was one human remaining in a world full of vampires? Morgan is a kind of self-styled Van Helsing in this world but also completely out of his depth. When we join him at the opening of the film, three years have passed since a disease that turned humans into vampires swept the world. We see his routine: wake up at sunrise, make sure there is gas in the generator, make some wooden stakes on a lathe, put any bodies laying around in the car and drive them to “the pit” to be burned, kill any vampires he finds, collect supplies like fresh garlic and mirrors. There are no longer any pleasures in life, only canned food, endless routine, and boredom. When he sees his deceased daughter’s doll and the urge for anger rises, he tells himself, “I can’t afford the luxury of anger. Anger can make me vulnerable. It can destroy my reason, and reason is the only advantage I have over them.” Soon we see what a danger emotion can be.
In one of the film’s most powerful and ultimately frightening sequences, Morgan goes to a crypt to visit his wife, Virginia, who is sealed in a marble coffin. He falls asleep in the crypt and wakes after sunset where he is met by a horde of rather pathetic-looking vampires but manages make his escape. When he returns home, he finds another horde knocking at his doors and walls with rudimentary clubs. This is the same horde that comes night after night and is made up of former neighbors and friends including a young man named Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) who cries out each night for Morgan to come out. When the film flashes back to three years earlier, we also learn that Ben was one of Morgan’s best friends and co-workers. A man that he describes as being like a little brother to him. The man Morgan once protected and mentored now wants nothing more than to drink his blood and tear him limb from limb. But then, Morgan now wants nothing more than to drive a stake through his heart and burn his corpse in the pit on the edge of town.
The flashback sequence has become particularly poignant in the last few years as we continue to heal from our collective trauma of the COVID-19 years. Because of this, the film ultimately rings truer now than it ever has in the 60 years since it was first released. Modern viewers may well recognize friends and family in the characters depicted on screen as the various factions that have arisen in recent years. Morgan is a scientist, a man of pragmatism who wishes to follow the facts and only the facts. “I’m a scientist, not an alarmist,” he tells his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli) and Ben as he shows him a newspaper clipping that postulates that the disease that has spread across Europe may be passed by the winds, indicating that it will be in America soon. Ben Cortman works alongside Robert Morgan but is much more quick to embrace the alarmist rumors that are being spread around the world. In the current day, Ben would be a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, or at least someone sympathetic to them.
The scientific explanations for vampirism are perhaps dated but also bring a dimension of realism to the ideas of the film. But then vampirism is really a metaphor for something far deeper and more frightening: conformity. Robert Morgan is surrounded by creatures that look human but are monsters, and they want to make him just like them: mindless, pathetic automatons who feed on the weak and drain any traces of humanity they can. In the last section of the film, Morgan meets Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia) who is part of a New Order that has learned to temporarily vaccinate the disease but also see Morgan as a threat. They fear him because he destroys vampires and burns bodies. In their society he is a monster. He is legend, as the original title suggests. But he is also able to cure Ruth by giving her a blood transfusion, the antibodies in his blood destroying the virus. The New Order still attack him however because, as Ruth puts it, “the beginning of a new society is never charming or gentle.” Because they are blinded by their own conformity and afraid of Morgan because he is different, they would rather destroy him than admit they are wrong. And because of this, they ultimately destroy the only one who could save them all.
The vampires in both the novel and this film are very different from the powerful superbeings seen in most films. Instead, they are starving, weak, mindless, walking and talking corpses, much more what we think of as zombies in our post-Night of the Living Dead (1968) world. And this is perhaps the greatest influence of both I Am Legend and The Last Man on Earth. George Romero acknowledged that elements of Night of the Living Dead were inspired by Matheson’s novel, though it is unknown if he, co-writer John A. Russo, or anyone else connected with the film had seen The Last Man on Earth, but it is certainly plausible. Watching both films today the similarities are unmistakable though Night ultimately far exceeds Last Man in quality and impact on the future of horror. After the release of The Omega Man (1971), the second official film version of I Am Legend starring Charlton Heston, Matheson was asked what the best adaptation of his novel was and he immediately replied, Night of the Living Dead. Of course, we still feel the reverberations of Romero’s zombies to this day in the hordes of zombie variations from The Walking Dead, to World War Z (the novel and film), to 28 Days Later. The latest version of I Am Legend from 2007 starring Will Smith closes the circle and simply transforms Matheson’s vampires into zombies.
Still, despite its flaws (the dubbing certainly leaves something to be desired), The Last Man on Earth remains a striking film and feels even more relevant today than it did in 1964. In today’s world it can feel practically impossible to stand strong against the crowds that chide us to become “one of them.” This world can wear us down through the constant barrage of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright lies that flood our senses practically every minute of every day. We are surrounded by a rising tide that calls for us to fall in line or face the consequences. The Last Man on Earth is a call for nonconformity in a time of increasing demands for uniformity and a cry for sanity in an insane world.
In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
Editorials
Larry Cohen’s ‘It’s Alive’ Still Towers Over a 2009 Remake That Maybe Should’ve Stayed Unborn
When I write about remakes, I often bring up the word “justification.” What’s the impetus for the remake’s existence? Reinventing icons for a new generation, or benefiting from a few decades’ worth of special effects advancements? Often, there’s a reason that you can acknowledge and say, “Alright, I see what you’re going for.” That holds in Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive, which tries to reinvent Larry Cohen’s mutant baby B-movie of the same name in what I consider the worst possible way.
I didn’t say it had to be a GOOD reason.
I’ll start with Cohen’s own reaction to Rusnak’s 2009 update: “It’s a terrible picture. It’s just beyond awful … I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada.” A blunt take, but I agree. Rusnak justifies his remake by diverting drastically from Cohen’s exploitation-y flick about a newborn monster killinPreview (opens in a new tab)g Los Angeles residents, but it’s such a bafflingly weak reimagining. Cohen remains faithful to tenets of creature features while tugging at our hearts with commentaries about parents caught between morality and adoration, whereas Rusnak asks, “What if we punished a mother for trying to have an abortion?”
As Cohen says, cross the damn street.
The Approach
It’s Alive (2009) is one of those women-focused horror projects that make you scoff, derogatorily, “This was written and directed by dudes, wasn’t it?” Cohen’s original screenplay isn’t airtight, yet it does well to respect Sharon Farrell‘s “shaken mother of a monster,” Lenore Davis. Paul Sopocy and James Portolese, on the other hand, pen a screenplay that reductively focuses on Lenore protecting her bitey offspring, with a bent-out-of-shape abortion subplot thrown in. That’s not to say Cohen’s Lenore doesn’t display the same protective maternal instincts, but Rusnak plays in a sandbox of lame-duck tropes, dooming Lenore for the supposed sin of a mother’s love.
Teenage party-girl turned actress Bijou Phillips stars as Lenore Harker, a New Mexico college student who quits to live with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray), and raise their incoming baby. She’s ditching pizza nights and girl talk with bestie Marnie (Ty Glaser), moving into the Albuquerque woods, where Frank has a secluded homestead with brother Chris (Raphaël Coleman), who is wheelchair dependent. Lenore goes in for a pregnancy checkup, where she learns her unborn child has doubled in size, requiring a cesarean section birth. So the surgical team opens her up and extracts “Daniel,” only to be murdered by the newborn, found resting on Lenore’s stomach, taking a post-slaughter rest.
The immediate deviation is how Daniel is found nuzzling Lenore in the hospital, and doesn’t look “freakish” at first glance. Daniel comes home with Lenore and Frank, setting up the happy lil’ family dynamic. It’s no longer a conspiratorial hunt-and-hide scenario; the “home sweet hell” take on Cohen’s original. Which, frustratingly, dissolves the core suspense that Cohen achieves. For Daniel to kill, victims have to come knocking on Lenore’s door, which becomes a repetitive cycle of visitors and hidden bodies that remove any excitement and surprises.
Does It Work?
Rusnak earns points for trying something new. Remakes have historically been less willing to put unique spins on existing stories (see: Cabin Fever). But there’s also a question of retaining the essence of the source material. Why remake a movie if you’re going to spin so far from the original that you don’t even need to use the title? It’s the Child’s Play of it all. If you wanted to make a killer AI toy movie, why use the Child’s Play legacy to do so (outside of market familiarity)?
It’s Alive doesn’t fully abandon Cohen’s ideas, but it does feel thinner than expected. There have been plenty of killer baby movies since It’s Alive—Cohen hardly has the concept trademarked. What’s fun about Cohen’s It’s Alive is how Frank chases his mutant kin around Los Angeles, eventually into the sewer system, culminating in the Los Angeles (drained) river. Rusnak directs what’s essentially a one-location thriller that minimizes the scope to meet not only its lower budget, but lesser ambitions. Where Cohen pushes farther, Rusnak pulls back, losing the idiosyncratic quirks of Cohen’s superior It’s Alive.
There’s nothing wrong with a good chamber piece, but the psychological torments Sopocy and Portolese opt for are soft as fresh-out-the-bag marshmallows. So much of the film hinges on Lenore’s cover-up tactics when she realizes her wee one is a maneater, which becomes one-note in the process. Frank wanders around, ignoring red flags, and Chris is removed from the picture for a small bit to keep the massacre going. In both films, Lenore has trouble turning against her child—but Cohen is much more thoughtful about Lenore’s state through it all. Rusnak’s direction is short-sighted, rudimentary, and flat, as it has nothing interesting to say about the fears of parenthood that drive Phillips’ Lenore to nurture the vengeful child she once wanted to terminate.
The Result
In It’s Alive (1974), Cohen makes a point of referencing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as John P. Ryan’s Frank recalls having the epiphany that Dr. Frankenstein is the villain, not his creation. It’s what drives Cohen’s screenplay, as we learn how the doctors tried to kill the original baby, since its deformities made it look like a melon-headed, fang-toothed freakshow. There’s none of that in Rusnak’s remake, which diminishes the creature’s origins and motives to anger. It’s an uninteresting modification because the point of Cohen’s picture is to question what makes a monster, and how its creators process their hand in the chaos. Rusnak’s not interested in such explorations, except when the screenplay shoehorns what foolishly appears as an anti-abortion undertone when we learn about Lenore’s sketchy internet baby-be-gone pills.
Even worse, the technical merits of Rusnak’s It’s Alive are unfortunate. Credit to the original’s cast, because Ryan and Farrell bring dramatic acting chops that accentuate their film’s tragedy; a legitimate heartbreaker. None of Rusnak’s cast are hitting on such a high caliber of talent, especially since there’s nothing meaty about Sopocy and Portolese’s character designs. It’s very Horror 101: ignore the obvious, act gobsmacked when the obvious happens, and bring it home. Phillips has been better in films like Bully and Hostel: Part II (maybe even The Wizard of Gore), while Murray is your average 2000s straight-to-video throwaway boyfriend. The rest of the supporting cast, sadly, barely even register.
There’s a charm to Cohen’s monster SFX, whipped up by Rick Baker—but also an opportunity. Cohen decided to use this three-mirror-blur vision, seeing through the baby’s eyes to show the beast as little as possible. If Rusnak wanted to make a stronger impact, he could have gone all-in on Daniel’s appearance to say, “Hey, at least we developed a rad creature!” But, alas, Rusnak might show even less of Daniel. When he does appear in the basement, or leap out of a trash can in the film’s climactic finale, it’s CG augmentation that distorts a puppet reportedly crafted by SFX superstar Tony Gardner. Cohen accomplishes infinitely more by putting his then-girlfriend Elaine Parkyn in a full-head monster mask, a pair of pointed gloves, and a partial body suit that benefit from optical tricks—because practical always wins.
The Lesson
It’s not hard to wonder why Millennium Films lost faith in Rusnak’s It’s Alive and opted for no theatrical release. In a time when horror remakes were all the rage, Millennium buried It’s Alive so deep that it’s not even watchable or rentable on streaming (ain’t even worth Tubi). No hyperbole, this remake stinks with the stinkiest of ’em. It’s slight on innovation, filled with awful genre generics, and is a slap in the face to what Cohen accomplished. There’s something so fresh about a killer baby flick that focuses on the suit-and-tie-wearing father, who is forced to challenge the stern, macho gender roles of the 70s, and something so disappointing about a 2000s horror movie that falls right back into outdated mindsets.
So what did we learn?
- Yes, for the hundredth time, some of those 2000s horror remakes are as bad as the haters made them all out to be.
- Ex-David Lee Roth, Ozzy Osbourne, and Alice Cooper bassist Todd Jensen plays Lenore’s doctor for some reason (which I wouldn’t have known without the internet).
- You can appreciate a remake for trying something different, but you can also detest a remake for how poorly it does something different.
- Why does Daniel look like a baby shark (doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo)?
Watching both It’s Alive flicks back-to-back gave me whiplash. When John P. Ryan (as Frank) confronts his cowering, terrified child-monster in the bowels of Los Angeles, I nearly shed a tear. That whole scene really, as Ryan realizes he’s become the Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, and his miserable, deformed boy craves his father’s affection in a time of need. Then you have Rusnak’s film, which brutally kills the pro-abortion character, insinuates Lenore is being punished for trying to abort Daniel early in the pregnancy, and deserves to die with her demon spawn engulfed by the worst CG flames this side of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I just … kudos to Cohen for richly developing a sci-fi curio with a tremendous sense of emotional understanding, and nothing but thumbs down for Rusnak’s remake, which comes off as plenty boneheaded and hella halfhearted in the process.
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