Weirdhouse Cinema: The Last Man on Earth

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is
Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
we are going to be talking about the nineteen sixty
four US Italian co production, I Believe for American International Pictures,
our old favorite, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price,
the first of the three official film adaptations of Richard

(00:38):
Matheson's highly influential novel I Am Legend, the other two
adaptations being, of course, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston
from nineteen seventy one, and then I Am Legend same
title as the book, starring Will Smith from two thousand
and seven.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, and they're still talking about doing a sequel to
that two thousand and seven film, but will quite come together. Yeah,
or I guess maybe it's going to be a prequel,
you know how they do these days.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah. So The Last Man on Earth was the earliest
film adaptation of this book, and the only one that
Matheson himself had any direct involvement in. He wrote the
adapted screenplay from his own novel, though Apparently he was
so unhappy with how the film turned out that he

(01:24):
tried to distance himself from it and was credited under
a pseudonym. I think in the credits he's called something
Logan Logan Swanson or something.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. We'll come back to it.
We have it in the notes later on, which is.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Funny that he so desperately wanted distance from the film,
because I don't think this is a bad movie at all.
There are some clunky elements, and we can talk about
those as we go on, but overall, I think this
is a pretty strong film. In I think in critical
valuation it has the disadvantage of being based on a

(02:04):
really beloved and important novel, and so of course you
know you're going to hear from many fans of the
book that this movie, and in fact, none of the
film adaptations has really ever captured the feeling of the
story or fully done it justice. And on top of that,
when you're talking about Matheson's own reaction, I think we

(02:25):
can all be sympathetic about an author being sensitive about
adaptations of their own work. But among the weaker, clunkier
elements of the movie, I think there's a lot of good,
strong stuff going on here, and overall, I think it
really does work quite well. So Rob, maybe it would
be good to start off talking about the novel that

(02:48):
this is based on, because I actually haven't read it.
I'm somewhat ashamed to say, but you have right.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yes, yeah, Now I have to caution everyone, it has
been a number of years since my last full reread
of I Am Legends, so I'm going to be a
little shaky on some of the details. But I did
pull it off the shelf here. I've got my copy
right here for those of you with video access on Netflix.

(03:13):
And you know, it's one of these that I could
never quite the number of other hard copy books that
I have. I had to make those decisions like do
I need to keep on keep this on my shelf
or can this find a new home? I Am Legends
one I couldn't quite get rid off, even though I
haven't read it in maybe fifteen years. But yeah, it
is a great, great little book. It's one of those

(03:36):
stories you could probably make a case for being more
of a novella than a novel without getting too detail
oriented about what defines either. But it's a short book.
The copy I have actually has a number of short
stories sandwiched at the end of it, which I did
not know going into my initial reading of it. And
I was like, oh, my goodness, that's over. That's it.
There's like the fourth of the book remaining.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
It's almost kind of a nice surprise. And the thing
about a physical book is there's never any mystery about
when you're coming to the end.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's just oh, well that was it, and wow,
what an ending it is. Yeah, it's a terrific book.
It was one that I think was recommended to me,
like early on Internet days, when I was looking for
a really good vampire story and I had not at
that point been exposed to Matheson's writing. I had been

(04:25):
exposed to his screenwriting for television via The Twilight Zone,
but I didn't really realize it at that point. But yeah,
his his writing is special. It's highly influential. I think
we've referenced before how Stephen King is one of the
many writers who grew up idolizing Matheson and admiring his work.

(04:48):
He wrote in a sort of minimalist, straightforward style that
was also highly visual in a way that perhaps speaks
to the TV era he was writing in and sometimes four.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
But yeah, my under standing of his style is that
it's very clear and very plain. It's not given to
like flowery language and all the right right.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's like, for instance, I was talking a little bit
about the about the text before we started recording, and
I read you and JJ just a snippet. But it
can be a little underwhelming to read Matheson in snippets
like that, because so much of what works about his
prose is that he builds up a certain momentum and

(05:29):
it's just he's just pulling you along, and it's very
hard to put down a good Mathison story. It's like
this is, for instance, I Am Legend is a work
that I think a lot of people read in essentially
one sitting or in a weekend or something like that.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
Yeah, okay, so somebody who's a fiction writer more in
the sense of being a storyteller than a prose stylist. Yeah, now,
you know, I think not to denigrate his pro style, right, right,
And I'm sure there are.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Some gems in there. I think it's Borges who said
that every every writer in the world, old, successful or unsuccessful,
good or bad, has at some point written the most
beautiful line in the English language, like, you know, there's
some gems in there. I'm sure they're just He's not
necessarily the sort of author that that, at least I
think of in terms of like, oh, look at this
little quote, look at this sentence, But they're in there somewhere.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Now I am legend as in full as I remember.
It is admirable for its emotionally resonant vision of a
post apocalyptic existence, one where you get, you know, the
various bells and whistles we've come to associate with post
apocalyptic fiction, but the weight of loss and the rise
of hopelessness are absolutely not taken for granted in this work.

(06:42):
This combined with a very seriously minded or at least
grounded take on the vampire, and again an excellent writing
style that just pulls the reader right along.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yeah. So, I guess. As a brief synopsis and warning
ahead of time, if you've never read this novel or
seen any of the movies we are going to, this
will be a spoiler laden discussion. So if you would
like to read the book or see one of the
movies not knowing the ending, not knowing anything in advance,
you should probably pause here and go do that now.

(07:12):
So warning out of the way. Now we should give
a brief encapsulation of the story. Wait are we going
to use the Are we going to describe the movie
first or the novel first? I guess the broad strokes
of the novel are that it is about the story
of a man who finds that he is alone on
Earth after an apocalyptic plague. There has been a disease

(07:34):
that swept over the earth and has killed everyone but him.
He's the only one left, and then discovers that he's
not quite alone. He is alone as he believes as
a human being, but there are now other creatures. The
dead and the infected by this disease have come back
as various forms of vampires, and they conform in many

(07:56):
ways to the vampire legends of old. So they drink blood,
they have to hide from the sunlight, they fear mirrors
and garlic and crosses, so they're like the vampires out
of Dracula or any of these Gothic stories. But an
interesting thing about this story is that it tries to
ground the vampire the existence of the vampire purely in

(08:20):
naturalistic scientific explanations and from what I understand, I Am
Legend was incredibly influential in this regard. Now we now
this is a normal way to do vampire. There are
a lot of vampire movies and stories and everything that
do wear wolves and vampires and all kinds of supernatural

(08:41):
creatures as naturalistic phenomena with scientific explanations.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
To the point of tedium at times.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Actually, yes, I'm kind of tired of it now. But
from what I understand, this was once a new approach.
People hadn't really blended the elements in this way, and
to be fair, I think Matheson was not actually the
first person ever to do it, Like there were some
earlier stories that said, oh, you know, Dracula actually has
a disease that causes all these things. But the way

(09:11):
I understand it is that I Am Legend was by
far the biggest and most influential story early story like this,
and so his scientific naturalistic take on vampires was kind
of a revelation to other writers and they took that
sort of principle and lots of other directions.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
Since that's right, and I'll throw out the exact dates
here in a minute, but essentially we're talking about a
mid sixties adaptation, and the book is from the mid fifties.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah, I think the book. The movie is nineteen sixty
four and the book was nineteen fifty fours, I believe,
so yeah, yeah, Okay, so Rob, you'll have to confirm this,
because again I haven't read the book, But what I
understand is that the book goes into a lot more
depth than the movie does about these scientific explanations for

(09:58):
the like the vampire principles. You know, why certain things
happen to a vampire. So the vampire's aversion to crosses
and mirrors is explained as a form of psychological hysterical blindness,
And the aversion to garlic is explained in some way
that like the garlic actually, like the bacterium that causes

(10:21):
the disease is deathly allergic to garlic, and so on
and so on, so they actually keep all of the elements.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, yeah, and in at least some of these are
alluded to in the adaptation we're going to be talking about,
including the idea that the stake to the heart and
it has to be a wooden stake. It has to
be porous because it has to allow airflow into the body.
Cavity of the stake vampire.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Right, because I think this in the book, it's that
it's like an anaerobic bacterium, and so at like air
gets in and that kills it or prevents it from growing.
But I thought it might be good to talk about
a few of the other key themes of the book
and see how they also play out in this film adaptation.

(11:05):
Rob Again, you'll have to confirm from what I've read,
the book is a is very respected for its serious
take on loneliness and depression.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yes, absolutely crushing loneliness of both the emission emotional and
the physical kind. The depression tied in with that as well,
and also alcoholism. There's you know, some pretty rough stuff
in there, as our protagonist turns to drink and like
basically like it's like a day and night situation, right,

(11:37):
It's like at night that's when the dead come and
they don't just come, they speak to him. And you know,
he's turning to alcohol to try and like make it
through the night at times, but then that's eating into
his day as well, and there's this this like growing
fear and I forget how much of this is in
his mind or how much of it is in the reader,
but it's like you're losing track of your time here

(12:00):
and you're losing track of the shaky grasp you have
on the remaining order of the world. So yeah, it's
some really heavy stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, it's interesting how the vampires and the story can
serve I think as a physical metaphor for things that
people do deal with and like depression and alcoholism, with
anxieties that come especially in the night. You know, they
come and whisper to you in the nighttime, and then
you know, dealing with alcoholism there might be like it's
a crutch, a way of you know, numbing the anxieties

(12:31):
and so forth, but then ultimately multiplying them over time.
Another one of the themes that is very important in
the novel is the theme that is driven home by
the twist ending. It has a kind of twist which
is the moral inversion principle. There is an inversion where

(12:54):
you thought the story was one thing, that it was
about a victim or a hero versus you know, these
perpetrators or villains, and the ending causes a shift, a
shift in perspective that makes you actually see it the
opposite way. Rob could you describe that a little bit
in the book.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, yeah, And this comes down to the title I
am legend. This is these are the last words of
the book, and it Yeah, it involves the realization on
the part of Neville that the world he was fighting for,
that he was trying to preserve in his own way,
like it's just gone. And the enemy he's been fighting
they are the inheritors, they are the believe they're called

(13:34):
the new People, and to them he is the great adversary.
He is he is the monster that is going to
become a figure of legend that is going to become
like what Dracula was to to us, like he is
going to be to them. Uh. And he realizes that,
and there's and I guess in a sense there's kind
of a letting go at that as well, like the

(13:56):
world is going on without him. And yeah, and you can,
of course he's that a part in various ways concerning
just mortality in general.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So in a literal sense in the story,
he spends his time fighting for fighting against this vampire menace.
You know, he's going around the city driving stakes into
the hearts of these infected people who have become vampires
and he sees himself. He's like defending the last remnant

(14:25):
of humanity, which as far as he knows, is just himself.
He thinks. I think he holds out hope, maybe that
there are some other humans left out there, and he's
fighting the encroachment of the vampires. And at the end
he realizes like that he is the monster, that the
vampires are just what people are now, and he has
been killing them.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah. Yeah, I'd say another obvious big theme here is
this is another one that certainly Matheson did not invent.
He was not the first to do this, but it's
done very well here, and that is that the story
in any ways boils down to one human vers the world.
You know, and you know, obviously this is the way
it feels sometimes maybe you know, listener, you feel this

(15:07):
way at this very moment, like the world and everyone
in it, if they're not against you in a directed way,
they're at least against you in a manner of sort
of like environmental pressures. And it's not just you versus
the other world, it's also you versus the inner world
you know, that rolls in response to all the stimuli.
And so in I am legend and in the adaptations

(15:28):
this story, it is of course simplified through sci fi
and horror. The entire world has become the undead, and
when they're not actively moving against you, you have to
contend with the loneliness and depression and the desperation of
this world. You have to put in all of this
work just to survive against the onslaught that just won't stop.
So I think the story and its various film adaptations

(15:49):
have resonated with folks because it taps into that familiar feeling.
It kind of feeds it with fantasy. And there's probably
much to be said about how all right. You know, again,
we're talking of mid fifties book that's probably tying into
a certain amount of post war individualism. But then the
various adaptations are you know, I haven't analyzed the other

(16:11):
two recently, but you know, and there's probably something to
be said about the Omega Man tying into late sixties
early seventies individualism, and I suppose the two thousand and
seven Will Smith version is tying into something unique to
that time as well. I will add that I'm more
shaky about the will Smith version. I saw it only
once and I have not revisited it, though. I remember

(16:33):
will Smith being good in it, and I remember the
day'n Dead looking not so great.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
I've never seen that one. I hope I'm not being unfair,
but I recall some descriptions I heard about it years
ago that claimed that it sort of backs away from
the more introspective themes of the book and is more
kind of trying to be like a horror action movie.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I know there's been some re analysis of it,
and I know there's another one of these pictures where
they're deleted scenes and there's like maybe a different ending
and so forth. But again, I just have not explored
it since it came out. I just remember shaky vampires,
solid Willsmith performance. Yeah. All right, Well, if you would

(17:19):
like to watch The Last Man on Earth at this point, again,
the first adaptation of I Am Legend and the one
we're going to be talking about here today. It is
readily available wherever you get your movies. If you're looking
for a physical copy, Kale Studio Classics has a nice
blu ray edition that includes extras and including an alternate ending,
which we'll get into in a bit. I noticed that

(17:41):
some of the streaming versions out there are colorized or
seem to be colorized, And I'll just advise everyone that
this film was shot in black and white. But I
don't know at the end of the day, if it
being colorized makes a difference to you, if you're more
likely to watch it in color than black and white,
I don't go for it.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
Why not, Well, I mean, obviously you do whatever you want.
I would recommend the black and white. I think the
black and white looks good.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, But if it's like if you can only find
the color, I mean, I've done that before, where it's like, oh,
it looks like I'm watching this in color. In the
old days, you could at least turn down the knob
on the television and make something black and white again.
But I don't know. I don't know how to do
that with the smart TV. You know.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
This movie, especially for like an AIP production, I thought
the cinematography was pretty good. It has some nice camera
work in it, especially some a lot of eerie landscape
shots and settings. We'll talk about that when we get
into the plot section, but it does well. Something we
talked about in our episode on Night of the Comet,
which is effectively using the creepiness of emptied locations that

(18:47):
are normally full of people.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, yeah, and these are all going to be Italian location,
so I think we are install already. This is a
US Italian co production filmed in Italy, though it's perhaps
supposed to be La. I think other adaptations take place
in La. But that's what I thought.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, the novel is set in La or around LA.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
I think that sounds right, but I did not reread
the initial setting part of the book. All right, Well,
let's get into the people behind the film here. Starting
at the top, we have the credited director for the

(19:31):
Italian prints, and also he has a screenplay credit. We
have Obaldo Ragona, who lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen eighty seven,
Italian director, best known at least internationally for this film,
and this is only one of a handful of films
to his credit. Then we also have a director credited
for the US Prince, and that's Sidney SalCo, who lived

(19:52):
nineteen oh nine through the year two thousand, American director
of TV and film actor from thirty five through sixty five,
at least in film credits, and this is probably his
best known project as well. But he also directed sixty
threes Twice Told Tales, which had bencent Price in it,
and nineteen thirty eight She Married a Cop, tying back

(20:14):
to previous discussions on marriage titles and on the TV,
he directed numerous episodes of numerous shows, including This Is
Alice and The Adams Family.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
I married a cop from outer space?

Speaker 2 (20:28):
I mean I married a cop. I don't know. It's
like I know people who married a cop. Like, I mean,
there's a movie there, right, what's it implying?

Speaker 3 (20:35):
I don't know something about handcuffs?

Speaker 2 (20:37):
I don't know. I don't know the film all right.
The author of the original novel, as we've been discussing,
and also one of the early screenwriters on this production, is,
of course Richard Matheson, who lived nineteen twenty six through
twenty thirteen, American writer who is I don't know, It's
hard to say. Maybe best remembered as the author of

(21:00):
fifty fours I Am Legend upon again, which three films
have been based. He also wrote the excellent Haunted House
novel which and I have read this one Hell House
that was also adapted for film, though I haven't. I
don't think i've seen in the adaptation. But Hell House
was a really good read, and in that he kind
of does a similar thing that he does with I

(21:21):
Am Legend. He applies the sort of scientific reading to
a haunted house and it works pretty well. Let's see,
there's the thriller Duel, and then, of course there is
The Shrinking Man. He of course we previously discussed The
incredible Shrinking Man, the screenplay of which he adapted from
his own novel.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
And that is an excellent movie, very interesting nineteen fifty
sci fi film. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Yeah, So if you've been scared away from that one
just because the title sounds gimmicky and stupid, you know, Oh,
there's a tiny man. He's attacked by a giant house cat. Yes,
that definitely happens. But it's a really good picture.

Speaker 3 (21:59):
Yeah, Strange, emotional, thoughtful, unexpected. It's great.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah. So a number of his works have been adapted
for the screen duel. What Dreams May Come someone wrote
in about that one recently, and a Stir of Echoes.
He also wrote a lot of TV, including sixteen episodes
of the original Twilight Zone, including Nightmare at twenty thousand Feet.
He wrote for such shows as Night Gallery, The Original

(22:25):
Star Trek, the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Thriller. So at
this point, when The Last Man on Earth comes out,
Matheson had already seen definitely one of his novels rather
excellently adapted to the big screen, and he'd been writing
for film and TV for a while. He'd worked with
Roger Corman on several of his po films, including a
nineteen sixties House of Usher, which we previously discussed on

(22:48):
the show. I saw a quote from Corman. I mean,
this also says a lot about Corman, but I think
it also says a lot about Matheson. He said, we
always shot his first draft, or something to that respect.
It's like Matho is and was good, Like the first
script he got to you, it was good to film,
just script a screen right.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Then you can just imagine when Corman's talking about the screenwriters,
he really admires. He's talking about speed. Yeah, how fast
could they write? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:14):
How fast? And was it ready to shoot?

Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah? And by the way, I can't remember what I
said earlier, but I did make a note here he
was credited as Logan Swanson again because he was he
had some discomfort with how the film turned out and
wanted his name taken off, and maybe we can talk
about some more reasons for that in a bit.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah, let's see other screenplay credits. William F. Leicester nineteen
fifteen through nineteen sixty nine, American actor and screenwriter who
mostly worked on TV westerns, Which is not a knock.
I mean, you and I are both writers. If we
were living back then, we'd be lucky to be writing
TV westerns. There were a lot of westerns. And then

(24:00):
im Monetti also has a screenplay credit for the Italian version,
dates unknown. This was their only credit.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Okay, Furio, all right, is it time to talk about
Vincent Price?

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yes? Yes, we have of course talked about Vincent Price
before on the show. This is our seventh Weird House
Cinema selection. I believe to feature the legendary Vincent Price,
who lived nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety three, and here
plays doctor Robert Morgan, and in this adaptation it is
doctor Robert Morgan instead of doctor Neville or Robert Neville. Rather,

(24:36):
v Neville gets restored in subsequent adaptations.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Now, one thing that again, Robi, You'll have to correct
me if I'm off base here. A major difference from
the book to this movie is that in the book,
Neville is not a scientist, correct, like he is, I
don't remember what his profession is supposed to be, but
he's more of a regular guy. He's not an expert

(25:01):
in anything, and that when he learns about the you know,
the the bacterial causes of the vampire condition, this is
through like library research that he has to go and
do after the pandemic has taken over. And so they
kind of, I think, get around some of those requirements

(25:23):
in the movie by just making him have inherent expertise
in germs and disease.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
Yeah, this is my memory of the book as well,
that it had kind of and and I think you
probably see this echoed a bit in Stephen King's The
Stand the idea that in a post apocalyptic scenario, so
much working knowledge has been lost and to put anything
back together you have characters having to just like find
textbooks about like the electric grid and just learn from

(25:53):
from scratch how to fix it.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
And this, funny enough, this is something I often think about,
is if you did have to do something like that,
like recreate you know, electrical power infrastructure just from instruction
manuals and textbooks. What's not in the texts you just
know there are some things that people who work in
these domains know that it's never written down anywhere, and

(26:19):
nobody thought to write it down, but little things that
escape the formalization of knowledge that are actually quite important.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yea, yeah, well it's all in the cloud. So we're
good to go. If something happens. Yeah, that's a topic
for another episode. We might actually get back to that
in future episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind. But yeah, yeah,
I believe that that was indeed part of the original
flavor of the book. Yeah, and we cheat a little
bit on that by having our character just be an

(26:49):
expert in a doctor from the get go. Here. So again,
this was sixty four and this is prime Vincent Price territory.
This is the year that Mask of the Red Death
came out. Previously covered on Weirdhouse Cinema, a favorite of mine,
as well as another Corman Poe movie, The Tomb of Lugia,
And certainly with Mask, you know, we're talking about Corman

(27:11):
at his best and his most cinematically ambitious. But while
Mask is a violently, you know, colorful affair that takes
us to a different time and place, the Last Man
on Earth is you know, obviously a lot more dour, grimier,
lower budget. It's black and white, and it's set in
the depopulated, post apocalyptic shadows of our own world. It

(27:33):
was not a hit at the time, but has developed
a cult following, in part due to Price's stardom. You know,
we look back on anything Vincent Price was in, even
if it's a bit roll, even if it's not even hard,
and we're going to be interested just because he cast
a long shadow. But you know, also there's the prestige
of the source material. And I think as subsequent adaptations

(27:53):
of I Am Legend came out and all of them
maybe missed out in one way or another, we end
up looking back at this one and figuring out, well,
you know, what actually worked here, and what worked here
that maybe hasn't worked in some of the other adaptations.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
M Yeah, I got it. So one thing that I'm
sure we'll talk a bit more about is that Matheson.
From what I understand, he had a lot of respect
for Vincent Price, but he was not happy with Price
being cast as the main character. Robert Morgan here and

(28:29):
I love Vincent Price, but I can kind of see
what he's saying. I don't think Price is bad in
this I mean, I think he gives a good performance,
but it's a strange fit sort of. I mean Price,
really he just blooms in like a flamboyant villain role,
like the role of Prince Prospero in Mask of the

(28:49):
Red Death. Here he is you. His talents are made
use of somewhat strangely because he does so well having that,
you know, that flamboyant evil personality where he can kind
of have some Shakespearean flair to di menacing lines. Here
he is playing the exact opposite of that in every way.

(29:11):
He's playing a beaten down, broken down man who is
grimly going through the drudgery and violence of day to
day survival in a post apocalyptic world. It's just a
it's a weird role to think of and think Vincent Price.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean it's if you're being picky too.
You can also point out like Vincent Price's hair generally
looks pretty good, pretty dapper throughout the picture, even though
there's nobody to apply the palm made for yeah, and
not wearing a necktie seems to amount to post apocalypse
casual in this film. Like Yeah, in the the the

(29:51):
the bits that take place before the apocalypse necktie, but
then afterwards it's like, why am we gonna even bother?
The world's ended. I'm not wearing a necktie today.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Yeah. In the very he first scene where you meet
Vincent Price, he wakes up in his bed, uh, and
his shirt's unbuttoned. He's clearly supposed to be hungover, and
he's like his undershirt is out, like, well, this is
a different look for Vincent Price. But as he's going
about his morning chores, you know, checking on the generator
and stuff, he's tucking the shirt in and we're like
that there you go, Okay, Yeah, he's got to get

(30:19):
he's got to get you know, a little bit, a
little bit tucked in.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, and you got to tuck otherwise the vampires have
already won, right right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
You don't want to be easy to grab hold of.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah. So yeah. The I think part of Matheson's criticism
was that he thought that this character needed to be
a real everyman. And of course, you know, all of
this is obviously subjective, like what is an everyman? But
one way of teasing this apart is like, all right,
we're thinking about again mid sixties we're thinking about movies.

(30:54):
You know, what are you know, what sort of of
actor was he perhaps pulling for? Was he maybe pulling
for a a leading man type, you know, square job
leading man. I mean, that's that's not quite a mold
that Price fits with. In fact, you hear you read
about Price's career, like part of it, part of his
early goings was like sort of going out for those

(31:15):
leading man roles, and you know he had some of them,
He had some of them, but he was you know,
sometimes passed over for other actors because like, you know,
that wasn't what he was meant to be. You know,
Benson Price excelled in things like a little bit to
the left or a little bit to the right of that.
And if you're looking for more of a sort of
anti leading man sort of character actor role, sort of

(31:38):
a you know, a rugged character actor role, well you know,
they're they're very various directions. You could have gone in
for that, but you're you know, you're you're also you're
perhaps talking about a character actor who might play heavy
or might play a mechanic, you know, that kind of
like blue collar professional role, and you know Price would
be out of place in that casting as well.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
I mean, and there could be a problem here that
actually traces back more to the writing in the adapted
screenplay and not just to the casting. Because if the
problem is he wants the main character to be more
blue collar, kind of working class, but is written as
an esteemed scientist who's doing research on the you know,

(32:20):
trying to create the vaccine to save the world from
this bacterium, there's already a bit of a mismatch there,
And so then saying that, well, it kind of feels
more natural casting Vincent Price as this esteemed scientist than
it does as the blue collar every man. But that's
already there in the script.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think I saw an interview where he
hit some point said that Harrison Ford would have been
perfect casting for this character, you know, in some adaptation
or another. And you know, I can see that. But also,
I mean, yeah, Harrison Ford has that kind of every
man quality, but also he's Harrison Ford, like yeah, you.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Know, he's super naturally handsome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
So but yeah, I agree that, like, since the character
is written as a scientist, like Price can definitely play
a scientist, brings kind of an intellectual air to the role.
And then another way to look at it here is
that Price is already established as a horror as a
horror player and to a certain extent like a horror
horror villain. And therefore it makes sense given the ending,

(33:24):
Like at the end, there is this revelation that he
is the monster, he is the center of fear, and
maybe it's a little setting, a little fitting that we
have somebody like Vincent Price playing that role.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
I mean, there are places where I think Price really
excels in this movie, like in selling the more emotional
parts of the character, when he is when he's thinking
back on his family and feeling the pain and anguish there.
And then I think in the later parts of the

(33:57):
movie also he when he starts to seem a little
more monstrous to us, I think Price does well in
those moments, like in the moments where he's threatening to
the character Ruth who shows up later.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yeah, I agree, I yeah, Vincent Price is great in
this and it's this film is a treat for for
folks looking for a different sort of Vincent Price performance.
It's more melancholy, it is more emotionally grounded in a
you know, in a realistic manner. And then Also, I've
read that Price was really proud of his voice over
work in this film. So one thing to note about

(34:31):
the book is that much of it is just about
a single person, the last man on Earth, and so
there's a lot of internal internal monologue. There's there's scenes
where he's talking to himself, having conversations with himself about something.
And in this film, you know, they obviously if you're
going to adapt something like that, you're gonna have to
maybe depend on one tool or another, and narration is

(34:53):
one of the tools you can draw on. And so
you know, Price has a great voice. He excelled at
voiceover work, and so I think that works pretty well
here as well.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
If I have a major criticism of his performance in it,
I honestly I have to say his action choreography feels
pretty half hearted, Like when he's chucking the grenades, he
just kind of well, he just kind of tosses him
at the ground, Like, Yeah, I feel like you could
have put a little a little bit more heft into

(35:22):
the action scenes. I don't know, maybe that was a
deliberate choice for Presenta. It brings, you know, it conveys
his depression and loss of purpose the way he just
kind of, you know, chucks the gas grenades like he's
you know, throwing like bread at geese or something.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
All right, let's move on to the rest of the actress.
Here we have the character Ruth, who already mentioned, played
by Franca Batoya. She lived let's say, nineteen thirty six
through twenty twenty four, Italian actress, mostly active in adventure
and Sword and Sandal sort of films to have told,
I believe about ninety three.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Yeah, she did some comedies as well, and I was
looking at her biography at least on her wiki said
that she and her mother together founded an all women
Masonic lodge in Italy.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Oh wow, good, Okay, all right, then we all don't.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Know what that means. What do you do at a
Masonic lodge?

Speaker 2 (36:22):
I mean, I'm not a member. I don't know. I
don't know the secrets.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
It's a secret.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
I know that what. They're generally on the second floor
of a big old building. That's all. Oh okay, Yeah,
let's see. We also have the character of Virginia Morgan.
This would be the former wife of our main character, right,
played by Imma Danelli. Lived nineteen thirty six through nineteen

(36:47):
ninety eight Italian actress whose other credits include Umberta Lindsay's
spy movie The Spy Who Love Flowers, among some other
spy and adventure movies.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
Okay, there's an Umberto Lindsay movie that is a pretty
cheap ripoff of the Shining that I might want us
to come back and do.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
It's yeah, yeah, I've enjoyed some Lindsay before. Let's see
we also.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
It's got a good sawing off of a head.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Let's see. We also have the character Ben Cortman played
by Jacomo Rossi Stewart who lived nineteen twenty five through
nineteen ninety four, Italian actor here, oh, and then have
less to say about Stuart. But then the next actor
we have as a number of connections to various genre pictures.
I don't want to you know, mention again. Like for

(37:35):
us and for a lot of film fans, it is
often Italian horror of this era that resonates the most internationally.
So you know, no disrespect to the other actors. But
this next guy, m Berto Rejo who lived nineteen twenty
two through twenty sixteen. This guy is a he plays
doctor Mercer, has a very distinctive face in a face

(37:56):
that I think a lot of horror fans are going
to recognize from a number of popular pictures.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
So, for instance, he shows up in at least two
Argento films, nineteen seventies The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
and seventy one's The Cat of Nine Tales.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Both Jallo films that Argento did before he did Deep
Red the Jello we talked about this past January.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
He also pops up in Antonio Margareti's Castle of Blood
in sixty four. You've seen that one, right, Joe.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yes, I just watched this one this past October. It
was part of my Spooky Season selection, and I thought
it was very good, but very slow. So what I
loved about it was the gothic atmosphere, very classic Gothic
setting with candelabras and cobwebs and an old mansion and

(38:51):
suits of armor and all that stuff. And the plot
was actually kind of interesting because it continually raised questions.
It's a story about a who goes into a haunted
house that's supposed to be empty except for him. He goes.
They're sort of on a dare. I think he's a
skeptical journalist who his promise that he will be you know, paid,
paid a reward if he can spend a night in

(39:11):
the haunted House, like in the Simpsons episode. So he's
got to spend the night in the haunted House, and
he thinks he's supposed to be alone there, but he
keeps encountering people, and so the question is are these
people are they ghosts? Are they really there? What's going on?
And there's some interesting twists and turns. The downside is
I have more tolerance for slow moving movies than a

(39:34):
lot of people do, but even this one it felt
slow to me. So it has scenes of people approaching
a coffin very slowly to lift the lid, and they
approach incredibly slowly. So if you've got some time and
you're feeling patient and you just want to bathe in
the in the gothic atmosphere, I do recommend A Castle
of Blood.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
That one's fun, all right, and a few other titles that
Umberto was in that folks might recognize. The Knight Evelyn
came out out with the Grave from seventy one, Berta
Lindsay's Oasis of Fear and Mario Bava's Baron Blood in
seventy two, And these are just a few of the
Italian horror films he pops up in. But I'll mention
at least one non horror title that I found amusing,

(40:14):
the seventy three crime film No, the Case is Happily Resolved.
That one my maybe that hits differently in the original Italian.
But one of his final films was nineteen ninety seven's
Double Team, starring Jean Claude Van Dam, Dennis Rodman, Mickey Rourke,
and Paul Freeman, and directed by the great Sue Hark,
who've talked about on the show before.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
Well we got to get a trophy for this episode.
Having finally mentioned Double Team on the podcast, Yeah, I
think I've seen Double Team, but I don't really remember it.
But anyway, no offense to this actor. He is like
utterly forgettable in this movie. Yea, like nothing nothing happens

(40:57):
with this character. He's the ball at the at this
science lab who's like, we will find a cure and
they don't.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
All right. Then finally, the music here, the score, I
would say, is very set in its time and from
you know, this is subjective, but I'd say, certainly one
of the stumbling blocks to me was was the score.
It's just it's not not bad, but it's not pulling
me along here. It's it's you know, very traditional. It's fine.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
My favorite musical moment in the film is actually some
diegetic music when it's in the first scene when Morgan
comes home for the night for you know, to to
close himself inside his house and let the vampire siege begin.
He puts on a jazz record to listen to that

(41:49):
has some I don't know, it's very cool jazz record
and has some kind of horns which keeps playing in
the background while the vampires are banging on the windows
and saying let me in. And it's a cool juxtaposition
that will actually have some I think thematic significance later
in the movie. I liked that part.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, yeah, it just didn't do it for me. And
I think the ending too, doesn't hit as well as
it should in part because of the music. So I'm
gonna blame it a little bit here. But it is
the work of two individuals that we've referenced on the
show before because they were both involved in it, The
Terror from Beyond Space, and that's Paul Sawtel, who lived

(42:33):
nineteen oh six through nineteen seventy one, and Bert Schefter,
who lived nineteen o four through nineteen ninety nine. I think,
to varying degrees, both of these individuals work sometimes shows
up in films that feature stock music of the day.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Okay, well, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Okay. So the film opens on extremely eerie shots of
an empty city. Again, I think this is supposed to
be Los Angeles, but now that you say it was
shot in Italy, that makes sense. I see some Italian
looking buildings.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, the buildings do look very Italian at times.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
For sure. Yeah. So we see city streets and sidewalks
and apartment buildings, parks and playgrounds, shops and churches, all
devoid of human activity. And as we've talked about before,
this is always an interesting site that a movie can
show you to make you uneasy. Give you a place
that you usually only see when it's full of people,

(43:40):
now completely empty, barren of human life. And then in
this opening montage, we start to see bodies, human figures
sprawled on the ground, in doorways, on staircases, just everywhere.
And finally we arrive at a house. So outside the
house we see overturned patio furniture. There's trash laying all around,

(44:02):
and a couple of bodies collapsed face down in the driveway.
The windows of the house are battered and boarded up,
as if they've sort of been bashed in refortified many times,
and the camera approaches one of the windows, and then
we see through a gap in the splintered boards Vincent

(44:22):
Price as our protagonist, Robert Morgan, asleep in bed. It
does not look like he has had a peaceful night's rest.
He fell asleep in his clothes with his belt on,
and behind him there's an alarm clock that starts ringing
and he startles awake. The house is a mess. We
see pictures hanging crooked, so he's not taking care of

(44:42):
the place. There's furniture turned upside down for whatever reason,
almost like he's staged it as fortifications or something. There
are clothes and dishes and boxes scattered everywhere. He does
have power, though we see a glowing, bare light bulb
with no shade hanging from its power cord over a

(45:03):
nail in the wall. So again, a lot of spartan
and utilitarian arrangements of things in this house, and the
first line is a voiceover, Morgan says, another day to
live through, better get started. So even though he is
surrounded by death and he has been spared himself, he

(45:25):
does not sound thrilled to be living. And the credits
play while we watch Morgan begin his chores for the day.
So he's at first, he's hunched over. He hobbles slowly
into the kitchen and makes coffee. Again. They don't say this,
but there's implication of a hangover. Heat notes the date
on a massive improvised calendar carved into the wall on

(45:48):
the kitchen. In voiceover, he says, quote December nineteen sixty five.
Is that all it has been since I inherited the world?
Only three years? Seems like one hundred million? So, and
they emphasize the time just by like the bigness of
the calendar that he's carved into the wall, Like we

(46:09):
see he writes all the dates and it's like a big,
huge So his mourning includes a bunch of chores. So
he's got to check on the gas generator that he
uses to power his home. He checks on the freshness
of his door garlic. It's a big wreath of garlic
hanging from all the doors in his house or around

(46:31):
the outside of his house. We learn that garlic repels
his nightly attackers, and when it loses its pungency, he
has to go to the grocery store to get some
new garlic out of a deep freezer that he also
keeps running on generator power. He also checks on the
status of his door mirrors, so he hangs mirrors on
the doors of his home because it seems to drive

(46:53):
the vampires away. He says that they can't stand to
see their own image, and when they smash all the
mirrors that he has, he has to go out and
get more at the mirror store, which fortunately is very
well stocked.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, yeah, I even and this is this is good,
But like at this point in the film, I'm already
worrying about his supplies, you know, like, are these the
mirrors gonna hold up? And then the garlic. You go
through a lot of garlic here and I know you
have some frozen, but are you still growing some somewhere?
And then I'm like, and then I'm feeling a little
panicky myself. It's like, how difficult is garlic to grow?
I've never grown garlic. Is it easy? Is it hard.

(47:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
I was thinking the exact same thoughts that this movie
had me thinking. I don't know how you grow garlic?
What do you do? Can you just plant a bulb
in the ground?

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Yeah? Should I be growing it? I don't know. Is
this what Christopher Walken does? Does he grows on garlic?
Does he keep it frozen? Does he hanging on the door?
I don't know?

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Surely. Yeah. So another thing that Vincent Price has to
do every day is transmit on the radio. So every
day he gets on his radio and he sends out
signals on multiple frequencies, announcing his presence and hoping to
hear back from others fivers somewhere, but he never does.
No one talks back. And a nice detail in the

(48:06):
sound design is that the silence or the static that
is sent back on the receiver is not just nothing
or normal static. It is a painful ear splitting sound.
So it's like the silence itself. Is it inflicts harm? Yeah.
He also has to every day find and dispose of

(48:27):
dead bodies, so he picks them up from around the
grounds of his house, loads them into the back of
his car. Did we mention he drives a hearse, or
maybe it's just a station wagon, but he calls it
a hearse, and it looks like a hearse. Yeah. So
we get a close up of the dead bodies and
they don't look normal. They have a strange rat like

(48:47):
predatory look about them, but not with like elaborate creature
makeup or anything. I mean, they're basically human. They've just
usually they've got dark circles under the eyes, and they've
got something with the teeth, sort of looking kind of
rat like. And Morgan says, every day there are more
of them. They live off the weak ones and leave

(49:08):
them for the pit. So it seems every morning he
has to load these bodies into his car drive them
out to the pit, which is a giant, horrible hole
in the earth on the outskirts of town, in which
a perpetual fire burns, consuming the bodies of those he
tosses down. And in this sequence where he's doing the

(49:31):
chores around his house, he says, I own the world,
an empty, dead, silent world. So it is not just
the misery of loneliness here. Morgan seems to suffer from
other common symptoms of depression, such as anhedonia, so he
says that he can remember when he took pleasure in food.

(49:55):
Now he takes no pleasure. It is merely fuel to
sustain him for another day. We see him grimly cracking
open a can from this massive stash of shelf stable foods.
So he is he does not enjoy eating. He does
not enjoy anything. It seems there's nothing in life he likes.
He's just going through the motions. Oh and in the

(50:17):
middle of all this, he momentarily gets distracted when he
catches sight of a child's toy. There's a baby doll
kind of piled on the rubbish in his house, and
he looks at the doll for a moment and then
throws his can of beans to the floor in disgust.
So there's there's other pain we haven't learned about yet.
But beyond the household chores and vampire defense necessities like

(50:41):
the garlic and everything, he has to he has to
do another job, which is that. We see him come
to a big map of the city on his wall,
and he has divided the map into a massive grid,
and we can see lots of grid squares have been
systematically xed out. Many others remain. Blood and Morgan says

(51:01):
in voiceover, I've got to find where they hide during
the day, uncover every one of them. So later we're
going to see him at his work, in which Morgan
goes building by building, block by block looking for vampires.
So he goes into buildings and when he finds the
vampires hiding inside, sleeping through the day, he drives a

(51:23):
stake into their hearts. And it's interesting the way this portrayed,
no fuss, no ceremony. He just whax in a wooden
stake into the heart and moves on. And this is
what we learn he's been doing for the better part
of three years. He's only covered less than half of
the city, so it seems like it's just a huge,
miserable task, almost despite the violence of it, almost disgustingly boring.

(51:51):
There's also a line in here where he says that
he can't let anger or frustration overcome him because emotions
rob of reason, and reason is the only advantage he
has over them. Now. Right around this time, there's an
interesting cinematic detail, which is that we see Morgan manufacturing

(52:13):
his wooden stakes on an electric lathe. In a lot
of vampire movies, you just have stakes. People just show
up with a bag of them. Where did they come from?
We don't see them being made, But here we see
the stakes being made in massive quantities. He's got a
huge pile of them that he sharpens it, puts it
in the pile, and keeps going. So this movie has

(52:33):
a real emphasis not just on the action and violence
of vampire hunting, but the chores, the drudgery in the work.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Yeah. Yeah, so many vampire films and shows steaks just yeah,
they just occur. They appear. Anything that any piece of
wood it gets broken off, is instantly a lethal weapon
against the vampire. And vampires that have just people in
general have a way of easily impaling themselves on things
in the environment. That's not the case here. If you

(53:04):
want a stake a vampire, you have to put in
the work.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
Yeah, and again here he gives some explanation and voice
over about why the steak works. He says, you know,
it's not magic that makes the steak kill a vampire.
A steak to the heart works because it wedges the
flesh open and the body can't close itself back up.
So it's something about letting the air in that kills them.
And he comments that he wonders how many steaks he'll

(53:30):
have to make before he's through, But we see him
going about his day. So he loads up bodies into
the hearse and then takes them to the flaming pit
where he dumps them. And then there's part that kind
of made me laugh where he like he throws a
gas can and a torch in and then the pit explodes.
Is that what you want?

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Maybe he was a little more nuanced with it earlier on,
but at this point, yeah, he doesn't carries It's like
throwing a torch, throwing a can of gas that I'm done.
I got things to move on to.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
He also off for supply, so it gets garlic, gets mirrors.
He gets guzzoline from a tanger truck that's abandoned in
the middle of the road, and he finds vampires sleeping
through the day in local buildings and stakes them. And
again I want to emphasize how low key the staking is.
We see Price first approaching a building. He just kind

(54:20):
of casually knocks in the glass on the door, reaches
inside and unlocks it, and wanders in. He finds a
vampire sleeping in a bed in a back room, and
then doesn't say anything. He just steps to her and
hammers the steak into her chest. He makes a kind
of grimace when he does it, but it seems it's
just a grimace of physical exertion, not like he's feeling
much about this.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah, and you know, I think this is an important
texture of the film, But I can also see where
this could be a stumbling block because yeah, it's maybe
not as riveting as you might expect vampire staking sequences
to be. But like, again, that's part of the texture story, Like,
this is his day to day and it is seemingly

(55:03):
it is kind of boring to him. Some of that
boredom might wear off, certainly on a modern viewer expecting
something a little more action packed.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah, I can see how if you're not really following
what the story is getting at, that this might seem
a little dull. But I agree with you, it's an
important theme like that the boredom of it and the
lack of emotional excitability about the violence that he goes
through every day is sort of what the story is

(55:34):
at its core. That this is not thrilling or even
it's not even really triggering a great fear response. Again,
like at one point in the story he says, I'm
not really afraid of them anymore. It's just grinding. He's
just grinding through this task.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
I should also mention, now this is, if it hasn't
become clear already, this isn't really the sort of picture
that I would recommend putting on in the background and
doing other things too. Like it's a film that is
it's rewarding to have a more dedicated viewing of. But
it's not a monster movie in the sense of yah,
or it's not a big colorful at Greland Poe adaptation.

(56:13):
It's one if you're gonna watch it, like sit down
and actually watch it.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Yeah, it's not a fantastic spectacle. It's a thoughtful story. Yeah.
But at some point he goes through the day hammering
the stakes in and he at some point becomes aware
that night is falling and he has to get home quickly.
So once he does, we get our first night siege scene.
We have been told several times in the voiceover that

(56:37):
they attack every night, and now we get to see it.
So this is the part where Morgan comes home and
he puts on this jazz record and he collapses on
the couch and while the record plays, we see outside
his house a disheveled, pale, zombie like man in a filthy, loose,
double breasted suit sort of waves on a crowd of

(56:58):
vampires to approach Morgan's front door. We're later going to
learn that this lead vampire has a name. This is Ben.
What's his last name, Courton, something like that. Yeah, this
is Ben. He's someone who in life knew Morgan very well.
They were family. I think Ben is his brother in
law and they work together in the scientific lab. So

(57:20):
there'll be more on that later. But now he is
a vampire. He leads the other vampires to Morgan's house
and they start bashing at the windows with clubs and
two by fours, and the Ben vampire calls in this lifeless,
hollow voice, Morgan, come out, Come out. So Robie, I
don't know, maybe here we should do a brief description

(57:43):
on the vampires and maybe if there are different categories
of vampires in the movie. So the ones we see
outside the house here are slow moving with dark circles
under their eyes. They're wearing ragged clothes. They seem only
barely to possess the power of thought, like they can

(58:05):
speak but what they say is rudimentary and repetitive, and
their actions are very clumsy and don't seem strategic. To
quote Night of the Living Dead, they are all messed up.
And in fact, I've read that this movie and I
think probably these vampires here were a major influence on

(58:26):
George Romero in creating Night of the Living Dead.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Yeah, it is interesting how watching this film, being more
far more familiar with zombie cinema, these vampires, or at
least this variety of vampire feels very zombie coded. But
I guess maybe it would be more accurate to see
it as one of the various pictures that did some
zombie codifying.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
Though we can kind of already see. Morgan doesn't really
comment much on this, but we can kind of already
see that there seem to be some kind of different
categories of vampires, Like there are these shambling, zombie like
vampires who come to his house in the middle of
the night, and then they are the ones he goes

(59:11):
into the buildings and steaks, some of which, when they
wake up, seem a little more animated than these. Did
you notice that? Yeah, they might flag you think about
that for later.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Yea, And of course, some of them are speaking to
him and calling out to him and telling him to
come out.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
Yeah. Yeah, But so inside the house, Morgan does not
seem very concerned. He smashes a piece of glass against
a window at one of them, and then he just
starts opening a new bottle of liquor, and eventually he
falls asleep on the couch, and while sleeping, he is
haunted by a dream. Out of the dream, a woman's

(59:49):
voice calls Robert, I can't see, I can't see. And
the next day Morgan wakes up. He drives his car
out to a massive cemetery and then he and lets
himself into a locked chapel at the cemetery. Inside there
is a coffin in the middle of the room and
this inside this coffin is his wife, Virginia. He calls

(01:00:11):
her Verge, and speaking to the coffin, he says, Verge,
how I miss you. But while he's in here, thinking
of his wife, he falls asleep with his head on
the coffin lid. Uh oh. By the time he wakes up,
the sun has already gone down and outside vampires are
swarming around his car. So this leads to an action

(01:00:33):
scene where Morgan has to fight them off to make
it inside his car. Then once he gets in he
drives home. He again has to fight a big horde
of vampires outside his house to make it inside in peace.
But he does this with the aid of a small mirror.
So he's holding up a mirror to drive them away,
kind of like holding up across usually in these vampire movies,

(01:00:55):
I feel like he should build a suit of mirrrored armor.
Wouldn't that be useful?

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
That sounds like a very Dungeons and Dragons approach to
this where something something that the players would do.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
Yeah, But so he manages to get inside and barricade
the door, and he has a cigarette while the pounding
from outside continues. And this during this night siege, Morgan

(01:01:29):
is somewhat different that other ones. He's been more dead
kind of through the world, just drinking and listening to music.
Now he is filled with grief, and he fires up
the film projector and watches old home movies of his
wife and daughter, both of whom died in the pandemic. Now,

(01:01:50):
this part has some has a funny thing where if
you stop and think about what you're looking at with
these home movies, the footage does not make any sense
because he's watched scenes that are filmed from multiple camera
angles and they're using editing to alternate between shots. Like
there's a scene where Virginia and their daughter Kathy are

(01:02:11):
at the circus and they're watching you know, chimpanzee smoking
cigars and donkeys kicking clowns and stuff, and it has
reaction shots, so it's cutting you know, reverse shots. But
that aside. Bryce, he in this scene he shows that
he has unhealed wounds, he has lost his family, and
there's no resolution about this. He doesn't he hasn't moved on.

(01:02:33):
He doesn't have the ability to find happiness in anything else.
He is just living on in this empty world that
is that has been created by the circumstances of their destruction,
and he's still in it. You know. It's like the
grief is always fresh, and so he at one point
he catches himself laughing at the circus x the circus

(01:02:57):
acts on the film, like what the clowns are doing,
and then the laughter turns into weeping.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Yeah, yeah, that was a great moment because again, this
is how grief feels sometimes where grief it can be
so overwhelming and then you catch yourself moving on for
it for a second, moving on from it for a second,
and then that can be crushing because you realize for
a moment there it wasn't at the forefront of your mind.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
Yeah, that's right. And then there's another, I think, really interesting,
thoughtful thing about the scene. It is the choice that
you know the vampire siege is going on while he's
watching these whole movies and thinking about his family, and
this will be one of multiple scenes in the movie
where there's some drama or a character moment taking place

(01:03:44):
inside the house, but they don't fade out the background noise.
It stays in, so we continually hear the vampires beating
against the fortifications in the background and moaning outside. So
this deadly threat that it just becomes irritating background noise.

(01:04:05):
I feel like there's something potent in that. Actually like it.
It becomes no longer the point of focus, and it's
not actively terrifying. It's the thing that wants to kill you.
Is just an unceasing annoyance. So from here we move
on to the middle section of the movie, which is
all it's flashback. It's backstory about what happened before I'm

(01:04:27):
not going to do as much full detail on the section,
but we'll talk about some of the main threads here.
One of them is telling the story of Robert Morgan
and his family. So he had a very good, loving
relationship with his wife Virginia and their daughter Kathy, and
he also got along well with his brother in law Ben.
And there's a scene at a birthday party where the

(01:04:50):
children are playing happily, but then Ben arrives and he
pulls Robert aside and privately shows him a newspaper clipping
with the headline plague claims Hunt is Europe's disease carried
on the wind. So we learned that Morgan and Ben
work together as scientists in a medical research lab, so
this is their area of expertise. Robert Morgan has doubts

(01:05:15):
that the disease will cross the ocean and threaten them.
Ben is taking it a lot more seriously. And this
part is kind of interesting for a number of reasons.
One is that the reality that, like in the twentieth century,
a contagious disease will easily jump over borders and across
physical barriers like oceans, you know, because there's going to
be travels.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Yeah, and we'll do so with alarming speed. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
Yeah, so it's not like the ocean is going to
become become actually a barrier there. But also the movie's
mechanism of transmission is unusual and interesting, the idea that
the pathogen is not really transmitted person to person, or
it might be, but that's not what the movie emphasizes.
The movie emphasizes that it is brought on the wind.

(01:06:01):
So it's playing with pre germ theory ideas about the
transmission of disease through air, like bad air and winds.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
Yeah, getting back to like a concept that we see
and we've discussed on stuff to blew your mind the
way that it's echoed in like ancient Mediterranean beliefs about disease,
that a disease are brought from a particular foul wind
that comes from certain mountains and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Yeah, exactly. And this I think is an interesting choice
in the movie because it plays well with the setting
and some like environmental texture they create. There are a
lot of scenes in the movie with empty landscapes with
wind blowing through them, or scenes of characters inside houses
with the wind whipping at the windows from outside. And

(01:06:50):
so we can often just hear the whispering of the
breeze while Morgan looks out the window at something, and
so it fits there. And it also I think the
idea of the pathogen being brought on the wind fits
thematically because in a story about loneliness, the idea is
that the disease is spread not by human contact, but

(01:07:11):
by the physical force that defines an empty, desolate world.
It's the rushing wind. We often use wind almost as
a metaphor for emptiness or a signal of it. So
the adults at the party argue about what's going on here.
Ben thinks that the basillis is carried on the wind
and they are in danger. Morgan doesn't believe it, and

(01:07:33):
then the children are like, hey, it's time to have cake,
so they go to have cake. But then we cut
to later after the party and we see the wind
blowing dead leaves through the yard where the kids were playing.
So in this middle section of the movie we see
the tragic backstory of the Morgan family. First, their daughter

(01:07:53):
falls ill and she goes blind and then she dies suddenly.
At one point Will Robert is out of the house
and this part was very painful to watch, like it's
very emotionally rough. He at one point she dies while
he's gone, and then when he comes home, his daughter's
body has already been taken away by the military patrols

(01:08:14):
that are roaming the street. So their job is to
immediately remove bodies and take them to the burning pit
to contain the infection. And when Robert finds out this,
he is furious. He goes to the pit to try
to find his daughter's body before they throw it in,
but he can't. And then shortly after this, Virginia becomes
sick and dies as well. I think actually she was

(01:08:36):
sick before, but she's been hiding it from him. And
then when Virginia dies, Morgan secretly takes her body and
buries it in the earth. Now you might notice something,
It's like, wait a minute, didn't we go didn't we
see her body at a chapel earlier? How does that
square with him burying her in the earth. But that
will make sense. Also in the middle section of the movie,

(01:08:59):
there are are some scenes of Robert and Ben working
desperately together in the lab to understand the bacterium that
causes the disease and come up with a vaccine. But
the cure keeps eluding them, and Ben has been hearing rumors.
He repeats them it is the disease is not only
causing blindness and killing people. He says that after the

(01:09:21):
people die, some of the dead appear to come back
once again. Robert does not believe this. He chalks the
stories up to panic and superstition. But Ben says, quote,
why are the infected people always so tired in the daytime?
Why can't they stand the sunlight? Why are they only
seen at night?

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Now?

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
The delivery there, I think is kind of a good
little moment, though I will say in general, I think
the science lab stuff is one of the weaker parts
of the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Yeah, And I think in general all the adaptations of
I Am Legend kind of falls short in the science
lab area. Like there's always a fair amount of criticism because,
and I think part of it is via the source material,
there's this impulse to try and couch things rather snugly
with science, and it ends up just getting things wrong

(01:10:12):
and things just feel rather off. But you know, I
don't know again, Ben, a while since I read the
original book in full, but my memory was that it
made a pretty convincing case at least in the context
of the book.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
Yeah, So later Ben stops coming to work and there's
a scene where Morgan goes to his house and finds
a wreath of garlic on Ben's front door, like the
ones we will later see at Morgan's own house. Ben
answers the door in a bathrobe and he's angry and paranoid,
and he yells at Morgan for not believing him and

(01:10:45):
orders him to get away from his house. And then, finally,
the end of the flashback segment is that after Morgan
buries Virginia, he goes home alone. He's alone in the
house now. He pours himself a drink and then he
hears a voice through the wall. It is a woman's
voice in a soft whisper, saying, let me in, Let
me in. And he goes to the door and oh no,

(01:11:08):
it is Verge. She's back from the dead. She's covered
in soil, with her mouth hanging open, glassy eyes, and
she's clutching for his neck. So she is now no
longer who she was. She is this other type of
being and she wants blood. I thought this part was
very disturbing. Yeah, yeah, but I think that now explains

(01:11:28):
why she's in a coffin on the surface instead of
buried in the earth. I'm wondering. I don't think the
movie ever says this explicitly, but my understanding is maybe
if they get buried in the earth, that closes up
the wound, so like the bacterium can grow again, and
then you know, I don't know, maybe that allows them
to reanimate. So they've got to be either burned or

(01:11:49):
kept on the surface with a steak in them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
Yeah, And again, just the continuing motif that is present
in the original present in the original book as well,
is that there's this this urge and this temptation, and
it is voiced by the vampires that he just needs
to give in, He just needs to let them in,
just open the door. So it's it fits so nicely

(01:12:16):
with these themes of depression and hopelessness, like the temptation
is so strong in him to just do exactly what
they say, to just open the door and let whatever
happens happen, and to just give up the fight, like
it's taking so much effort to keep going. What if
he could just let go, What if there was another way?

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
And it's clearly shown that he feels like he has
nothing to live for. There's nothing he enjoys, there's nothing.
I think there's maybe just a hope that there is
something else that he'll discover. Maybe one day he'll hear
back from other people on the radio and that will
change things. But as he is now, there's almost no

(01:12:58):
reason not to give in.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Yeah, and there's a I don't think it's really explored
in this adaptation, but in the original book too, there
was also a dimension of the physical loneliness, and like
the female vampires that are calling to him, there's like
there's a sense that like his physical loneliness could be
momentarily relieved if he let them in as well, like

(01:13:20):
like that's just how all encompassing his loneliness and desperation is.

Speaker 3 (01:13:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think there's from what I understand, the
element of romantic desire is somewhat there in the book.
And then we'll come up later when he meets another character,
but that's not really a part of the movie. Yeah.
So there's another scene here where during this night' seage,
the vampires led by Ben, destroy Morgan's car, and this

(01:13:46):
part was actually kind of funny when it cuts to them,
like pulling the seats out.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
But so the next day Morgan goes shopping for a
new car. We see him pass over a cool convertible
because he says he says he needs a hearse. There's
also another middle sequence of the movie here where Morgan
comes across a dog and he's shocked to find that
the dog is alive. So apparently this disease affects dogs

(01:14:13):
as well as not just humans. But he sees a
dog alive and he's so excited. You can see him
desperate to make friends with this dog, you know, for companionship.
So he chases after the dog, but while doing so,
he comes across something astounding. He finds dead vampire bodies
that have been staked, but not by him, So they're

(01:14:37):
staked not with his characteristic wooden cones, but with iron spears.
And he's wondering, who did this? Who are they? Where
did they come from? Why haven't I seen them? So
that's a mystery that arises. Later, the dog appears at
Morgan's home and he's very excited to take care of

(01:14:57):
this dog. He brings the dog in, gives it a
bad tends to its wounds, but there seems to be
something wrong. Morgan takes a sample from the dog and
goes and looks at it under his microscope, and we
see the same telltale signs of infection that were shown
in the earlier laboratory scenes. So the dog is infected,
and Morgan begins to laugh at the terrible irony of it.

(01:15:21):
So then we cut to later when Morgan is out
on a hillside overlooking the city and he's burying the
dog in a plot in the earth, and while he
is looking out over the landscape, he happens to catch
sight of a woman walking alone, apparently not a vampire
but a living woman because she's out here walking during
the day. He gets her attention, and at first she

(01:15:45):
runs away from him, but he chases after her and
manages to convince her that it's safe to come with him,
so soon they are together back at Morgan's house. The
woman who we will come to learn is named Ruth.
She changes clothes from her ragged and mud splattered outfit
into a clean black sweater, presumably one that belonged to

(01:16:06):
Morgan's wife, Virginia. Tentatively, Ruth joins Morgan in the living
room for coffee, and they have a brief conversation, Morgan
seems a little jittery and Ruth in this scene, did
you notice she speaks with a weird soft confidence. She
tells him that she was married and she lost her husband,

(01:16:29):
and she asks him about the family he lost, And suddenly,
in the middle of this conversation, Morgan gets very disturbed,
and he runs to the kitchen and grabs this wreath
of garlic, and when he brings it back into the
living room, Ruth winces she's kind of hiding from it,
so it seems like he's onto something. He shoves the
garlic in her face and she recoils, begging him to

(01:16:51):
take it away. So I was wondering, Rob, what do
you think it was in their conversation that made him afraid?
What tipped him off? If it was anything in particular.

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):
I don't know. One thing I kept thinking of here
is that maybe part of it is just like it
seemed like things were going too well, Like this is
a guy who's become accustomed to crushing defeat, and like
he just went through this experience with the dog. You know,
he opened up his heart just a little bit with
the dog, and then he's having to bury the dog
and basically the next day because of its infection. So

(01:17:25):
like maybe he kind of caught himself just in general,
or indeed there's something in what she said that that
tipped him off. But yeah, I think one read is
just like he kind of snapped out of it. He's like, no,
nothing good can be happening here.

Speaker 3 (01:17:40):
Yeah, I can absolutely see the angle of you know,
at this point, he's he's had so much disappointment and
misery that he could have a kind of self destructive impulse,
Like he can't believe that it could be that it
could be alleviated, so he sabotages it. But maybe I
don't know, maybe there's something else. So obviously she's reacting
negatively to this garlic, but she tries to argue, no,

(01:18:03):
it's not because she's not a vampire, she's not infected.
He and she starts giving explanations about how she's had
a sensitive stomach all her life. At one point, he says,
you can't change the facts by talking true enough, But
she does start to get through to him. She kind
of appeals to him emotionally. She says that she saw

(01:18:24):
her husband torn to pieces right outside her house. She's
been wandering for years, eating scraps, hiding at night, sick
with morning, sick with fear, unable to sleep. Then you
shout at me, chase me across this field, hit me,
drag me to this house. And to top it all,
when I get sick because you shove a piece of
wreaking garlic in my face, you tell me I'm infected.

(01:18:46):
And here's the first moment, I think where you really
get a sense of inversion. Like the audience had previously
been invited to see this situation from Morgan's point of view,
where we know he's safe and she is potentially a
hidden danger, there's maybe something wrong with her. But then
she shares her point of view where she is a

(01:19:07):
bewildered victim and he is the ambiguous and threatening aggressor.

Speaker 2 (01:19:12):
And he kind of thinks about this, you know, it's like,
maybe this is too much garlic to be shotting in
people's faces.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Yeah, she kind of gets through to him, so eventually
she she kind of pulls away and gets some space
and goes to another room. He offers to fix her dinner,
so apparently his suspicion is somewhat put on hold, and
later at the dinner, table, we hear again the hammering
and pounding of the vampires outside, and this is the

(01:19:39):
part where you Know Ruth says you seem used to them,
and Morgan admits that he is not afraid of them anymore.
He's fought them so long they are no longer terrifying.
They're more of an irritation. But he goes on to
tell her the story of Ben Cortman, and you know,
tells her about how they used to be friends, they
were family. But he says, when I've find him, I'll

(01:20:00):
drive a stake through him, just like all the others.
And Ruth seems a little disturbed by Morgan's coldness here
toward a man who was once his friend. But Morgan's
attitude is that it's no longer really been. He's just
another lumbering menace to be destroyed. So next comes the

(01:20:26):
question why did Morgan live through this plague when everybody
else was infected. It's curious that she postes this question
at first, as if it doesn't apply to herself, but
Morgan he first makes the ironic comment that perhaps he
was chosen, and then he gives a real explanation. I
wonder I don't know if this is if there's anything

(01:20:48):
like this in the book. But he says, perhaps, quote
perhaps it was a long time ago when I worked
in Panama. I was bitten by a bat in my sleep.
My theory is that the bat had previously acquired the
vampire germ. By the time it entered my blood, it
had been strained and weakened by the bat system. As
a result, I have immunity. But it's only a guess.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
Yeah. I don't remember if this was in the book
or not, but it feels very on brand with the book.

Speaker 3 (01:21:14):
Like it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:14):
It feels like something he could very well said in it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:16):
Yeah, So the question is is Ruth immune as well?
Since she's still here and hasn't turned. Morgan explains that
it is a simple matter to find out. All he
needs is a blood sample and he can find out
if she's infected. But there's tension here because there still
is no cure, and if he were to discover that
she were infected, what would he do? The implication just

(01:21:39):
hangs in the air. So she retreats to a bedroom
by herself, where we see her recoil in fear from
a mirror. Uh oh, that's not a good sign, and
She then produces from a hidden pocket a hypodermic needle.
She's got a syringe here, so it's a vile of something.
She plans to inject herself with, but Morgan interrupts before

(01:22:02):
she can take the shot, and this leads to a revelation.
She explains that she was one of those things. She
had been a vampire, and without the injection she soon
would be again. So Morgan is dumbstruck here. He's always like, wait,
you have a treatment and the answer is yes. She

(01:22:22):
explains it's some kind of cocktail with blood sea rum
plus a vaccine dose. It doesn't offer a permanent cure,
but it staves off the infection for some period of time.
It has to be taken again and again or the
vampire disease will progress. And she says, we've had it
for some time now, and he is shocked. We So

(01:22:44):
it turns out she's part of a community. There are
others out there, and Morgan is floored by this. And
I thought this was an interesting choice in prices portrayal.
It's not just surprised at the information. There is also
a sense of effacement or embarrassment on display. Interesting reaction.

(01:23:09):
So despite spending every day looking for others, calling out
to others on the radio, looking for signs of survivors
everywhere he goes. He's feeling desperately lonely all the time.
When he discovers there is a whole community of other
living humans out there, his immediate reaction is not really

(01:23:29):
relief or joy. He instead seems taken aback, embarrassed, and
sort of insulted.

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
Yeah, yeah, what.

Speaker 3 (01:23:37):
Does that mean? Where does that come from?

Speaker 2 (01:23:40):
Yeah? I mean he he has thought so long of
himself as the last you know, and in a way
taken like a strange solace or pride in that, you know,
you know, at the same time obviously dealing with crushing
depression over his situation and loneliness. But it's like it
at least he had this one thing to fall back on.

(01:24:02):
And Yeah, and in a way that almost lends itself
to humor. There's like this sense that, oh, there's been
a party going on the whole time, and you didn't
invite me, Like, like a lot of what I've been
feeling and going through could have been alleviated if you
had just reached out to me.

Speaker 3 (01:24:19):
Yeah, it makes his lonely struggle not like hopeless and inevitable,
but kind of farcical. Yeah yeah. So in this scene
we learned that Ruth actually did not come across Morgan
by accident. She was sent by her people to spy
on him to find out if he knew any more

(01:24:39):
about the disease than they did, and it turns out
he knows less than them, not more, so again kind
of embarrassing to him. So she resists Morgan's way of thinking,
thinking that the infected are already dead or are indistinguishable
from the undead. She says, we're alive infected, yes, but

(01:25:03):
alive again, making this distinction that he doesn't really make.
That there are like different kinds of vampires out there.
There are the infected who are progressing but can now
their progression can be staved off, versus the ones who
are already dead and have turned, and those are the
ones that are kind of unsavable at this point. And

(01:25:25):
it seems that the ones that have already fully turned,
that have died and come back, those are the common
enemy of her people and of Morgan. So she says
that her people are trying to reorganize society, start over
anew and quote do away with those wretched creatures who
are neither alive nor dead. So she's of the people

(01:25:46):
who have been infected but have not yet died. Yeah,
And so, with some hesitation, Morgan asks, well, do you
want me to join your people? So there's kind of
a moment of hope here, it is dashed. Ruth says,
you can't join. You are a monster to them. Why

(01:26:06):
do you think I ran when I saw you? She
explains that even though she was sent to spy on him,
when she saw him, she had heard so many terrifying
stories about this monster, this killer, that she was overwhelmed
with fear and she ran away. She says, you're a
legend in the city, moving by day instead of night,

(01:26:28):
leaving as evidence of your existence bloodless corpses. Many of
the people you destroyed were still alive. Many of them
were loved ones of the people in my group.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Wow. Yeah, this is where it really begins to hit Yeah.
Like he is essentially the Dracula figure to these new people,
Like he is the thing that comes while you're asleep
and kills silently and leaves drained corpses in his wake.
Like he is the monster.

Speaker 3 (01:26:56):
He is the monster of this movie, and it gets worse.
Ruth her people want justice. They are coming for him tonight,
and he has to find a way to get out
of here before they arrive. She pulls a gun on him.
There seems to be some ambivalence of like, is she
still carrying out her mission to incapacitate him so that

(01:27:17):
her people can get him, or is she kind of
on his side now? She explains that it was part
of her mission to get in his house and prevent
him from resisting. When her friends arrive, Morgan says, your
new society sounds charming, and Ruth says the beginning of
any new society is never charming or gentle, and Morgan
dares her to go ahead and shoot him, but she won't.

(01:27:40):
She throws the gun away and then collapses unconscious. So
I think a legitimate question here is why is Ruth
helping him or at least ambivalent in her moves against him.
I thought this part of the movie felt a little
bit weak. I've read that this is much stronger in
the naw when they have more time to get to

(01:28:02):
know each other and develop genuine affection for one another,
Like I think they sort of fall in love in
the book don't they or.

Speaker 2 (01:28:10):
I believe so yeah, yeah, a little bit. Yeah, and
that's of course reflected more strongly. And I believe in
The Omega Man. I'm a little foggy on the exact
relationship between Chuck Heston's Neville and the romantic interest. If
she is in fact one of the new people in
that I assume she is. But again, long times since

(01:28:31):
I've seen The Omega Man as well. But obviously there's
a romantic entanglement in that film, and we don't really
get that here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
Yeah, so here think I think this is one of
the weaker parts of the movie. It's not. I think
it would have been stronger if you had let this
relationship develop some more.

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):
Yeah, maybe had a little less backstory, but I don't know.
I mean, the backstory is important too, but yeah, it
just needs a little more time with this relationship.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
So now that Ruth is unconscious, Morgan wanders around wondering
what to do next. We see him raise a steak
and examine it, but he doesn't stake her. He lets
her live, and instead, while she is asleep, he gets
out his medical bag and he gives her a massive
blood transfusion. So by putting his blood into Ruth's body.

(01:29:20):
Ruth seems to be cured, and they test this. She
wakes up and she can now look at her reflection
in a mirror without recoiling. She can snuggle a wreath
of garlic. She rubs it all over her face and
there's no sickness. And he says it worked. He says,
the antibodies in my blood have saved you. So after
so long going through the brutal drudgery of this life,

(01:29:42):
Morgan seems to finally feel happy. He now knows that
it works. He can save others. In fact, his physical
person can save others. It's like by giving transfusions of
his own blood, he can save her friends too.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
Yeah, not a monster, but perhaps a savior.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
But it's too late. So he's excited about this, and
he's like distracted examining her blood under the Microsoft microscope
to prove that it's cured, and everything starts going down.
The ben vampire who comes every night and hammers on
the outside of the house. He's outside now and he

(01:30:24):
manages to finally break through the door and he attacks Ruth.
Morgan runs outside to defend her, but while they're outside,
incomes the cavalry income Ruth's people, and so these are
jeeps full of soldiers dressed all in black, armed with
guns and iron steaks, and the jeeps come to a
halt in front of Morgan's house. Morgan watches kind of

(01:30:46):
in awe as the men jump out and efficiently stake
all of the vampires wandering in his yard. So this
is an elite anti vampire force of people who are
half vampires themselves, and we watch them destroy the bin
vampire who's up on the roof now, and then they
turn to Morgan. They're trying to catch him. He runs away,

(01:31:10):
with Ruth screaming after her people to say stop. They
don't understand. I think she's trying to convince them that
he could save them all now, but they're not listening
at this point. They want revenge and the hunt is on.
There's a whole chase sequence where Morgan he flees through
the neighborhood. He hides in bushes and sneaks past the scouts,

(01:31:31):
but eventually they pursue him into a big building which
has an armory. This is where Morgan gathers guns and
ammunition and smoke grenades. And this was the funny part
where he kind of like throws the smoke grenades in
a very not very convincing manner. It just throws them
at his own feet basically, and then runs away. But

(01:31:52):
finally the chase leads to a massive cathedral. Morgan is
shot by the New people as he goes inside, but
he keeps going, and now it's not just soldiers, it
seems the whole new society is coming along. There are men, women,
and children all gathering inside the church where Morgan is
hiding and clutching his wounded stomach. He staggers up to

(01:32:14):
the altar as the men armed with steaks gather around him,
and he cries out to them in anger. He says,
you're freaks, all of you, all of you freaks and mutations,
and then he is impaled by an iron spear. They
stake him as if he were a vampire, even though
he's not, and as he collapses, he says, I'm the

(01:32:34):
last man. I'm a man, the last man. And finally
Ruth arrives at the church and she runs to the
dying Morgan as he's clutching this iron steak in his stomach,
and he says his last lines. He says they were
afraid of me. They were afraid of me. And he
goes limp, and then Ruth stumbles back down the aisle

(01:32:55):
and further back in the church there is a woman
in black holding a crying babe. Ruth goes to the
baby and takes the baby's hand and says, don't cry.
There's nothing to cry about now. We're all safe. Now
all safe. So in the end, even though she knows better,
she knows what he could have done for them, she
has to affirm the legend, right, she kind of she

(01:33:18):
has to affirm the legend that the dragon has been slain.

Speaker 2 (01:33:22):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's I have to say it's a
pretty strong close here for the picture. You know, it's
this a bleak ending in many in many ways, and
maybe it doesn't feel as bleak as the book, but
it's I think it's still pretty solid. The music I
think could have been stronger here. I feel like this
is a very emotional scene and the music is maybe

(01:33:45):
not doing its part to keep up with what we're
actually seeing and feeling on the screen. Yeah, apparently there's
an alternate ending. I think it's like a TV ending,
and I don't know how much of it is just
merely cut for time. But it's a pcluted on the
on the keynot disc that I mentioned earlier apparently cuts
out this bit with the crying infant at the end

(01:34:06):
and essentially just closes after Morgan's death.

Speaker 3 (01:34:10):
It seems not as good.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Yeah, because I'm one. It's a careful balancing act, because
it's like it should feel dark from the human perspective,
because this is the end of humanity as Morgan knew it.
But there is this new thing dawning. But it's a
new thing. It's a new world in which he has
no place. It's completely beyond him. And again, this kind

(01:34:32):
of resonates well beyond any kind of you know, fantasy
horror scenario, because this is this is a matter of
fact for our own mortality. You know, for all of us,
there comes a point where we are the thing that
is leaving, and there the rest is carrying on, and
in fact, new things are beginning and we are not
a part of that, except to whatever degree our legend

(01:34:57):
carries on. And you know, generally, I think for most
of us we're dealing with legend with a very lower
case L. And hopefully we're not living on as a
monster in the minds of the people that come after,
as is the case with our protagonist here.

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
But yes, I think another interesting thing about this ending, though,
is that you really can easily, at least in my opinion,
I don't know if you disagree, you can quite easily
switch the lenses for which way you see the ending,
Like you can see it from the original human point
of view, where the ending is tragic and Morgan, the

(01:35:37):
last man on earth, has died and you know, he's
had this tragic, miserable existence and finally it has been
extinguished and all of the people that came before, every
bit of that is now gone. Or you can put
on the new lens that we get from the twist,
that the monster has been destroyed and finally the new
people can live in peace. And though I think that

(01:35:59):
part's a little bit harder, because we get this, we
get the detailed that at least Morgan was willing to change,
like he wasn't insisting that he was going to go
on killing them now that he had had the revelation
that he you know, now that he understood he could
cure them with his blood. And so I think, I
don't know, I guess it is a little bit harder

(01:36:21):
to see it as a victorious ending. But I wonder
if the story would have been different if he had
been a little bit more recalcitrant, you know, if he
had been a little bit harsher against them and less
less willing to see things their way. Yeah, yeah, how
is it in the book? By the way, do you remember.

Speaker 2 (01:36:43):
I was rereading part of the ending, and yeah, I
didn't reread enough to really get in on the nuance
of all of it. I believe he dies by poison
pill while in the custody of them, of the new
people at the end, and you know, realizing that I
get the last lines in the book or I am
legend like that is when he realizes that is what

(01:37:03):
he has become, that is what he will live on.

Speaker 3 (01:37:05):
As I guess, is he remorseful?

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
I don't know that. I don't remember there being a
strong sense of remorse. Yeah, but I bet I could
be wrong. Again, It's been a number of years. But
I like the focus focusing and focusing again on the
film here. I do like the sort of ambiguity we
end up occupying here where we can take either side
and we have these you know, we can look at

(01:37:33):
it as kind of a positive ending from the standpoint
of the new people, but it also doesn't land like
a happy ending in that respect either, and maybe not
a crowd pleaser either, more of a thought provoking ending.

Speaker 3 (01:37:46):
It's more like revenge. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
I think if memory serves, other adaptations of I Am
Legend have really latched onto this idea that his blood
is the cure and turns him into more of a
savior figure. But that's not what we get in this adaptation,
and I like the way it lands.

Speaker 3 (01:38:04):
Yeah, I guess to back off on something I said
a second ago. We kind of do see them, do
see Morgan being a bit resistant to you know, the
friendly reconciliation at least after they shoot him, yea, because
he's calling them freaks. Yeah. Yeah, So he's speaking at them,
you know, he's not trying to say, no weight, I

(01:38:24):
can save you. He's instead just spitting venom at them.
He's going back to his old ways of viewing them
as monsters and nothing more.

Speaker 2 (01:38:32):
Yeah, and his last words are you were afraid of me?
And on one level, like that was kind of all
he had left is that they feared him, and that
which is it's you know, it is tragic as well,
because like he becomes the monster in more than one way,
not just in memory, but like maybe that's all he
really was towards the end, you know, he was just

(01:38:52):
this this man had been torn apart by grief, and
his only purpose in life was to be the nemesis
of an enemy that he comes to realize he'd never
fully understood.

Speaker 3 (01:39:05):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, the tendency to take pride in being feared,
I think comes when you have given up hope on
taking pride and being loved. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:39:16):
So, yeah, I think a thought provoking adaptation, and I
think that is one of the reasons people keep coming
back to it, because it does we can all disagree
on to what extent. It does a decent job adapting
various aspects of the source material, but it's trying things
and perhaps trying things again with a little more nuanced

(01:39:36):
than some of the subsequent adaptations did.

Speaker 3 (01:39:38):
Yeah. So, are we going to come back and do
the Omega Man almost sid the Omega Code, Maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:39:46):
Not the Omega Code, but possibly the Omega Man. Yeah. So,
when you're listening to this, you may note that the
next scheduled episode of Weird House Cinema will be good Friday.
So we're looking at a few different possibilities, some of
them more over Jesus y in nature, but the Omega
Man really leans into the savior aspect of the blood

(01:40:08):
and the idea that Neville is a kind of Jesus figure.
So it would be a fitting pick if we are
indeed up for two straight weeks of I Am.

Speaker 3 (01:40:16):
Legend, Well, we'll think about it.

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
Maybe maybe not, maybe maybe not. It won't be three.
I'll tell you that I'm gonna the time is not
right to revisit the two thousand and seven adaptation, but
I would love to hear from everyone out there. You know,
if if you're a fan of the original book, maybe
you've reread it or read it more recently than I have,
maybe you have some notes to give us. You also

(01:40:41):
might have different thoughts about the different adaptations. Do you
love the Omega Man? It's hard not to if you
were listening to Rob Zombie albums at just the right time,
because that movie is heavily sampled in OK. I guess
it was. I guess it was a White the White
Zombie album. One of the one of the tracks that's
a lot of a lot of bits of like Creature

(01:41:01):
of the Wheel and so forth. Okay, and you know,
it's a pretty groovy film many respects. And then I
don't know, it's like the two thousand and seven film.
I wasn't crazy about it when it came out, But
we've had lots of people, lots of people have had
the chance to discover and rediscover that film, so maybe
maybe there's a different reception to it now. Love to

(01:41:22):
hear from anyone who has thoughts on that.

Speaker 3 (01:41:24):
Yeah, like I said, never seen it, so I'm curious
about it now.

Speaker 2 (01:41:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I said, I remember Will
Smith being good in it. All right, Well we're gonna
gohead and close it out here, but just a reminder
that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
If you like Weird House Cinema and you want to
follow us online, you can follow Stuff to Blow your

(01:41:48):
Mind wherever you do your social media stuff. You can
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also make sure that you were asking for more on Netflix.
If that's where you're getting this. Click They'll remind me,
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or two thumbs. Go ahead and give us both of them.

(01:42:10):
And then, finally, if you're on a letterbox dot com,
you can follow us there. We are a weird house.
We have a nice list of all the movies we've
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what comes up next.

Speaker 3 (01:42:20):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:42:40):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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