Still on a Vincent Price kick, so today I'm featuring his 1964 film, The Last Man on Earth.
Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, the sole survivor of a worldwide plague that has transformed humanity into a race of blood-thirsty vampires. While Morgan struggles to fight off hordes of the infected and find a cure for the disease, he discovers that he may not be alone as he once thought.
The Last Man on Earth is based on I Am Legend, a ground-breaking novel by Richard Matheson. The book would be filmed again as The Omega Man in 1971 and as hamfisted religious propaganda in 2007. Of the three adaptations, Last Man is probably the most faithful to the source, which is no surprise considering Matheson himself worked on the screenplay. (He's credited as "Logan Swanson", as he was unhappy with the finished results.)
It's also the most influential film of the three, the progenitor of the zombie film as we know it today. George Romero has cited I Am Legend as major influence on Night of the Living Dead, and its clearly where the idea of an undead apocalypse originated. Both works also feature a siege of the undead on a barricaded home, and force the protagonists to deal with loved ones returning from the grave to feast upon them. But the stark black and white imagery of The Last Man on Earth suggests that the film adaptation and not the book was the primary source of inspiration for Romero's own movie.
You can watch The Last Man on Earth via the embedded player below, or visit the film's Internet Archive page to download it directly. And if you haven't read Matheson's novel, I urge you to do so. It's influence on both the vampire and zombie genres cannot be overestimated, and I believe it is one of the first works to explore vampirism as a scientific instead of spiritual disease. But most importantly, it's a damn good read.
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