His novel I Am Legend, adapted for film three times and not once with enough dexterity to emulate Matheson’s deeper paranoia, ends with the hero introspectively commenting on the utter irony of his own demise: he was determined to cure a vampiric disease and eradicate the threat to his own existence but he ends up becoming the outlier, the Other, and the Diseased collate into something resembling a ghoulish community and execute him. He uses ambiguity as a weapon and offers faux-closure, giving his audience a discernible ending but leaving them alone in a swirling benthos of opacity. Matheson’s writing is, at its best, lean enough to be accessible but dense enough with metaphysical monsters and borderline-existentialist musings to spur cogitation.
Why is a 25-foot shark attacking little boys in 3-feet of water? Why is a nameless, faceless apparition in a tanker chasing a poor demotic guy across a desert? You can ask, but Matheson and Spielberg eschew whys and deal strictly in grueling suspense. We never see the insidious vehicle’s driver just clastic cuts to his hands and his boots.Īs with the big fish prowling the shallow shores of Amity Beach in Spielberg’s later film, Jaws, the terror of the rusty rig lies not within its oddly deft ability to find and chase unwitting prey, but in the enigmatic nature of the attacks. The film’s irregular path to theaters is more complex than the actual film: our Everyman (Dennis Weaver) is chased on a two-lane California road by a 1960 Peterbilt 281 tanker. It was a surprise hit and nabbed a nomination for Best TV Movie at the ’72 Golden Globes, so producers, hoping television popularity would translate into big-screen bucks, asked their first-time director, a young Jewish boy from Los Angeles named Steven Spielberg, to add sixteen minutes of new footage, and a few naughty words to act as a vulgar veneer, so that Duel could be released in theaters. Matheson and ABC producer Lillian Gallo took the former’s story “Duel”, which appeared in Playboy in 1971, and turned it into 74 minutes of small-screen tension. Even if you’d never heard of Matheson before he died last month you’ve probably seen something stemming from his inscrutable mind. Matheson often penned his own adaptations, as well as original scripts, notably turning eight of his stories into Twilight Zone episodes, but only one of Matheson’s adaptations really captures the inherent sense of isolation and loneliness, of questions spurring more questions and answers as opaque as oil, so replete in his writing.
Richard Matheson‘s novels and short stories have been adapted into television programs, films, television programs that have subsequently been adapted into more films, comics, literature, et cetera. Terror Story: the only Richard Matheson adaptation that worked Terror Story: the only Richard Matheson adaptation that worked » MobyLives
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