Line #39 Literature/IAmLegend


1	[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/f011115979d8ddccbf16a18bd77b0ac9.jpg]]
2
3	->''"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back."''
4
5	A 1954 novel by Creator/RichardMatheson. Set [[AfterTheEnd after an outbreak of a viral plague]] that turns both living and dead into creatures resembling vampires, the plot follows LastOfHisKind Robert Neville. An immune survivor, Neville spends his days hunting vampires, scavenging and [[DyingAlone struggling with loneliness]], and the nights being taunted by undead vampires that keep swarming outside his house.
6
7	Essentially the UrExample of the ZombieApocalypse genre. It was adapted to film four different times:
8	[[index]]
9	* ''Film/TheLastManOnEarth'' (1964) -- starring Creator/VincentPrice.
10	* ''Film/TheOmegaMan'' (1971) -- starring Creator/CharltonHeston.
11	* ''Film/IAmLegend'' (2007) -- starring Creator/WillSmith.
12	** ''Film/IAmLegend2'' (TBA) -- upcoming sequel to the above film, starring Creator/MichaelBJordan for the lead role.
13	* ''Film/IAmOmega'' (2007) -- a {{mockbuster}} of the other 2007 film, produced by Creator/TheAsylum.
14	[[/index]]
15
16	''None'' of these movies used the ending of the original novel: the first (starring Vincent Price) is the only one even close to rest of the story, with the others being comparatively loose adaptations. The Will Smith movie ''did'' film the original ending, but ExecutiveMeddling made them change it. Notably, the announced sequel is said to treat the original ending as canon.
17	----
18	!!This novel provides examples of:
19	* ActionSurvivor: Before the apocalypse, Neville was a humble factory worker, and he only survives the plague and collapse of civilization through luck and determination.
20	* AlasPoorVillain:
21	** [[spoiler:Ben Cortman suffers an extremely violent death that disturbs Neville.]]
22	** [[spoiler: From Ruth's perspective, Neville is indeed guilty of murdering sentient members of her species. However, seeing that his actions were merely misguided and he was a decent man, she gives him the means of ending his life peacefully]].
23	* ApocalypseHow: Around level 3 or 4, depending on how many types of animals aren't affected by the bacteria. [[spoiler:The revelation that some of the infected have retained their humanity might push it back to level 2. Maybe]]
24	* BecomingTheMask: [[spoiler:Ruth can't bring herself to hate Neville like the other infected, after spending time with him pretending to be a fellow human survivor.]]
25	* CannotCrossRunningWater: Neville tests this by constructing a trough to run water from a garden hose in his yard. Cortman sees it and gleefully jumps back and forth over it.
26	* CliffhangerCopout: The first part (January 1976) ends with Neville having barely escaped the vampires, but his car and generator are destroyed, severely limiting his mobility during the day and without a working freezer or lights, meaning he won't be able to hold out much longer. Then, at the start of the second part (March 1976), he is right back on his feet, as he found a new car and the generator wasn't so badly damaged after all, requiring only 1 morning to fix it.
27	* CutenessProximity: After spending almost two years ''completely alone'' and besieged, Neville encounters a dog - the first non-vampire creature he met in all that time. He keeps on trying to befriend the dog and capture it to lessen his loneliness, acting like a giddy child each time he makes progress.
28	* DarkestHour: [[spoiler:Neville's handwatch stopped. It's past dusk. The vampires already left their hideouts, while he tries to reach home. Which he left wide open, expecting to return few hours ago. While he does manage to get back into his house despite the odds, the vampires wreck his car, effectively leaving him unable to go far from the house, and destroy his generator, leaving the house, and his appliances, without power]].
29	* DeadpanSnarker: Despite being completely alone, Neville doesn't stop [[TalkingToThemself talking and thinking aloud]], solely to lessen the pressure of not having any companion.
30	-->Some things could go to pot, but not his health, he thought. Then why don't you stop pouring alcohol into yourself? he thought. Why don't you shut the hell up? he thought.
31	* DefiantToTheEnd: The main reason why Neville is alive and keeps kicking is ''spite''. He knows there are thousands of vampires out there to get him and nothing pisses them off more than the fact he's still alive. So despite being a suicidal mess, he makes damn sure to keep living. [[spoiler: When he's captured in the end and prepared for a show execution, he commits suicide rather than give his captors what they want, as a final middle finger to vampires]].
32	* DoingInTheWizard: The mythological traits of vampirism are all defined as either caused by the ''vampirus'' bacillum, or as a psychological reaction to the infected's [[GenreSavvy realizing they've become a creature out of a pulp novel]]. On one occasion, Neville observes a vampire climbing a lamppost and jumping off, and presumes that the individual believed itself to be able to turn into a bat.
33	* DownerEnding: [[spoiler:All of Neville's efforts are for naught, as the vampires have evolved to the point that they can stave off the more feral urges of their affliction and have even developed a new society. This means many of the vampires Neville had killed were, in fact, innocent people and he will never be accepted in the society because of this. The only silver lining comes from Ruth giving him a suicide pill to end his life peacefully before the vampires have him executed, but he will forever be remembered as a monster.]]
34	* TheDreaded: Neville is this to the Vampires. [[spoiler:Even when captured, many are terrified just by the sight of him.]]
35	* DrivenToSuicide: There are a few times where Robert contemplates just putting himself out of his misery, but one time is especially notable. [[spoiler:After he barely makes it home alive, which was trashed in the meantime by the vampires, he suffers a HeroicBSOD. In the following outburst of rage, he picks up his [[GunsAkimbo two handguns]] - which he knows are worthless against vampires - and goes gun blazing on the porch of his house. When he runs out of ammo and is swarmed, he has a last-second change of mind and crawls his way back inside the house. Not because he wants to live or is afraid of dying, but ''out of spite'']].
36	* DrowningMySorrows: Initially, Neville is one step away from outright alcoholism as a way to cope with his situation. He recalls how he spent the first few days after his wife died (and he already lost his daughter a few days prior) in alcohol-induced coma, only waking up to get hammered again. He probably did that again after [[spoiler:he had to stake Virginia and bury her ''again'']]. It also gets particularly bad in part 2, when his research yields no results, only more questions, and he begins to doubt his abilities as a researcher. He stays drunk for 2 days straight, and only snaps out of his depression when he sees an unaffected stray dog near his house.
37	* FeralVampires: While not entire mindless, the vampires are more animalistic than the standard modern depiction, though they still show some flashes of intelligence. The "feral" aspect goes as far as the book being cited as creating the zombie apocalypse genre, despite explicitly having blood-sucking, sun-killed, garlic-fearing vampires.[[note]]Though the depiction of vampirism is actually much more accurate to the medieval vampire legends than the glamorous undead aristocrats most people picture when they think of vampires.[[/note]]
38	* {{Flashback}}s: This time showing how his wife succumbed to the infection, and forced to drive to a government bonfire to burn his dead daughter. [[spoiler:And then when Virginia came back to him as a vampire]].
39	* GenreSavvy: ZigZagged. Neville knows and tests ''some'' of the folk remedies against vampires. But it still took him a few months to realise [[spoiler:it's easier and more efficient to just drag comatose vampires out into the open for the sun to kill them]]. He face-palms himself upon figuring this out.
40	* GhostCity: Los Angeles has a human population of one.
41	* GoMadFromTheApocalypse: Neville is one of the earliest examples in literature. He has three distinctive stages of his madness: the initial depression that drives him into reckless, suicidal tendencies, the eventual [[ItGetsEasier hardened behaviour]] and ultimately, after a really long TimeSkip, he's MaddenIntoMisanthropy by the sheer loneliness and lack of any interaction with any other human beings.
42	* GoodAllAlong: [[spoiler:The partial vampires, that Neville didn't even know existed to begin with.]]
43	* GreyAndGrayMorality: [[spoiler:Neville argues that the sentient vampire society enjoyed killing the undead vampires. Ruth, however, argues that Neville also enjoyed killing. Ruth rationalizes the brutality as an inevitable part of a new civilization.]]
44	* GunsAkimbo: Deconstructed. In one of his {{Sanity Slippage}}s, Neville picks up his two pistols and goes gun blazing on his own porch. [[spoiler:He is almost instantly swarmed, even before running out of bullets, and barely makes it alive back inside]].
45	* GunsAreWorthless: Bullets only make entry holes, quickly "glued back" by the fluid the vampires are full of, making small caliber rounds utterly useless for harming them.
46	* HeelRealisation: A rather poignant one [[spoiler:in the ending, as Neville realizes, with horror, why the people who came after him are about to execute him- he was killing vampires who were beginning to stave off the worst urges, and thus terrified the survivors - and civilization's last hope.]]
47	* HeWhoFightsMonsters: [[spoiler:Neville eventually discovers that some of the infected people have discovered a means of suppressing more dangerous effects of the vampire bacteria, and that many of the vampires he's been killing during his daytime hunts were fully sentient and innocent people. He's pretty much ''their'' monster of legend, thus the title.]]
48	* HumansAreCthulhu: [[spoiler:How the partial vampires view Neville. In their eyes, he's an unstoppable monster from the old world slaughtering dozens of innocents during the days for seemingly no reason at all, and through his deeds, he becomes a monster of legends the same way vampires were for the humans, hence the title.]]
49	* TheImmune: Neville's immune to the plague.
50	* ImmuneToBullets: The dead vampires (ones not infected while alive) have this, due to their wounds healing instantaneously, whereas stakes (and other impalings) keep the wound open.
51	* IgnoreTheFanservice: It's stated that some of the female vampires will expose themselves in an attempt to lure Neville out. He doesn't take the bait.
52	* KillItWithFire: The government ordered the bodies of everyone who died to be burned in huge bonfires, in order to stop the spread of the bacteria that caused the vampire plague (since that was the only way they knew that could kill the bacteria).
53	* LastOfHisKind: Neville is apparently the last uninfected human in the world, due to being TheImmune.
54	* MonstrousCannibalism: The vampires outside Neville's house often attack and feed on each other.
55	* NeonSignHideout: Played for drama for a change. Every vampire in LA knows where the last normal human in the city lives, so each dusk the vampires start flocking around Neville's house.
56	* NextSundayAD: The book was published in 1954 but takes place from 1976 to 1979. Normally such a big gap would lead to a TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture scenario with some sci-fi tech mixed into an otherwise contemporary setting, yet there's no mention of any technology more advanced than what was in use at the time the book was published.
57	* OhCrap: Never in history of horror literature more has been achieved by four simple words, right [[CliffHanger when a chapter ends]].
58	-->[[spoiler:The watch had stopped]].
59	* OminousLatinChanting: Ominous classical music more like. Look up the full names to the music Neville plays to keep his mind off the vampires; ''Scönberg Transfigured Night, The Year of the Plague, Bernstein Symphony No. 2 (The Age of Anxiety), Schubert Symphony No. 4 (Tragic)...'' Emphasis on ominous, as he uses the music to drown out the hell the vampires break loose outside his house every night.
60	* TheOnlyOneAllowedToDefeatYou: Neville seems to adopt this stance towards his vampirised neighbor, even if there isn't anyone else out there to defeat him. [[spoiler:When the partial vampires get to him first, Neville naturally doesn't take it very well]].
61	* OurVampiresAreDifferent: It's stated the vampires are dumb. Not zombie-dumb, but still idiots, running on instinct alone. Ben Cortman is an exception to this, and Neville latches on to finding out why to keep him sane. He finds:
62	** Almost all of the traditional wards against vampires are apparently psychological. Garlic may or may not be a sort of anti-placebo effect, though Neville notices vampires coughing and choking whenever they're hit with garlic powder. Neville further hypothesizes things like the cross and mirror to be a result of extreme self-loathing. The cross has no effect on his Jewish neighbor, but as soon as he gets out the Star of David and a Torah, Ben begins panicking and doing everything he can to get away from the symbols.
63	** The vampires may be believing their own pop culture. Neville witnesses one vampire leap off from a street light and hypothesizes he was trying to turn into a bat.
64	** Vampirism is caused by a bacteria. There are two distinct variations: those who were infected while still alive, and infected who have reanimated from the bacteria. Living vampires are vulnerable to everything a human is vulnerable to, but dead vampires' lack of a heartbeat causes a vacuum that seals off any wound that isn't large (such as small arms fire). Hence why stakes are so effective: they force the wound open and bypasses the vampire's regeneration.
65	** Dead vampires crumble into dust when staked or otherwise killed. Neville remembers talking to a black gravekeeper who talked about vacuum-preserved corpses - any introduction of air would cause the corpses to crumble into dust. (The author may have been speculating about methods of preservation that were not yet in practice here.)
66	* OutlivingOnesOffspring: Your daughter and wife are slowly succumbing to an unknown disease, while you are perfectly fine yourself. Nobody knows what's happening with them and you can only watch as they get worse and worse. Until one day you have to dump your daughter's body into a massive, government-run bonfire due to biohazard. And before you even have any time to recover from that, your wife expires too.
67	* ProductPlacement:
68	** Willy's Jeep station wagon is Neville's vehicle of choice. [[spoiler:It [[DestroyTheProductPlacement gets smashed]] later, after which he replaces it with exact same model]]. Ironically, the car was discontinued from production in 1965, while the book opens in [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture 1976]].
69	** Sears is the main source of tools for Neville - he even loots a lathe from it. [[spoiler:The lathe gets wrecked along with the wagon]].
70	* RidiculouslyCuteCritter: The mongrel little dog Neville found and tried to tame.
71	* SanitySlippage: Neville gets dangerously close to tossing himself to the vampires several times.
72	* ShootTheShaggyDog: Contained within a single chapter (and involving a literal dog to boot!) that thoroughly cements how hopeless this book's world is. While Neville spends weeks painstakingly endeavoring to gain the trust of the lone dog he discovers living in his neighborhood, [[spoiler: the dog becomes very ill. He nonetheless manages to bring into his house to treat it, which earns him a lick on the hand. The chapter soon ends on the line: "In a week the dog was dead."]]
73	* TheSiege: Neville's house is besieged by endless hordes of vampires. [[PunctuatedForEmphasis Every. Single. Night.]]
74	* StakingTheLovedOne: [[spoiler:In the book, Neville has to do this to his wife after she had already died from the plague and he buried her body because he couldn't bear to burn her like he had to do to his daughter. She then comes back as a vampire trying to kill him and he has to kill her all over again, this time presumably by staking]].
75	* SurvivorGuilt: Robert has this to the point of suffering several [[HeroicBSOD breakdowns.]]
76	* TalkingToThemself: Obviously, since Robert is apparently the last human alive and has nobody else to talk with. The constant, deadpan monologues are in fact the main source of humor in the book.
77	* TapOnTheHead: [[spoiler:Ruth]] knocks Neville out with a wooden mallet after he discovers [[spoiler:she is infected]]. Despite getting hit three times, he suffers only a splitting headache upon regaining consciousness.
78	* TechnicallyLivingVampire: People infected with the vampire bacteria while still alive remain alive, though the bacterium can also reanimate corpses.
79	* ThereIsAnother: [[spoiler:Subverted. When Ruth comes along, it appears that Neville might not be the only unaffected person still alive... And then it turns out that Ruth is TheMole for the partial vampires sent to spy on his defenses. Any and all survivors succumbed to the disease, and only stave it off by way of medicine.]]
80	* TimePassageBeard: Neville stops shaving and grows a beard during a two year TimeSkip.
81	* TitleDrop: At the very end, no less. The meaning of the title is also intensely creepy; see HeWhoFightsMonsters above for details.
82	* TookALevelInBadass: After a modest TimeSkip, Neville goes from being a normal guy who happens to be immune to the vampire bacteria and uses alcohol to cope to a muscled vampire-slaying beard-toting badass. in that time he's killed numerous [[spoiler:partial]] vampires and figured out their weaknesses and origin. Though his social skills have gone out the window from so many years of not talking to anyone. He also starts going Jack Bauer on his neighbor, what with the chair and the Torah.
83	* UnbuiltTrope: Not only is it the UrExample of the zombie apocalypse, but it also deconstructs the notion of the last human survivors trying their best to preserve the species. In this world, the monsters have become the norm, and the last human is simply a relic of the past.
84	* VampireHunter: Robert Neville hunts vampires during the day by staking them when they sleep.
85	* VanHelsingHateCrimes: Neville assumes that all of the vampires are bloodthirsty killers. [[spoiler:It's only at the end of the story that he learns that some of them have actually retained their sanity, and they view him the same way he views the infected.]]
86	* TheVirus: Well, a bacterial infection, but other than that, the trope is played straight.
87	* WorkingClassHero: Unlike all the adaptations, where Neville was made into a doctor and even an officer, in the book he's but a factory worker who self-taught himself into being a scientist. It's made into a plot point with all the pain, time and effort it takes for him to educate himself and gain proper lab practice, or even operate a microscope efficiently.
88	* YankTheDogsChain: When he comes across an apparently unaffected dog out in the sun, Neville practically gets taken over with CutenessProximity as he plans to win over the thing and keep it as a pet. [[spoiler:It doesn't end well.]]
89	* ZombieApocalypse: Pretty much the UrExample, despite being written fourteen years before [[Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968 the modern pop culture zombie]] was introduced. The vampires act more like the popular depiction of zombies than traditional vampires.
90	** It's been said that Creator/GeorgeARomero got his idea for ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968'' after reading the book. This is a myth; much like his ''Resident Evil'' script, Romero never actually experienced ''I Am Legend'' himself, he had someone explain it to him instead, which explains why ''Night of the Living Dead'' resembles the work in so many superficial ways without actually containing any of its subtext.
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Context Literature / IAmLegend