I Am Legend has been often in the cinematic eye. Hammer Films brought Richard Matheson to England in 1957 to write an adaptation Night Creatures but this was cancelled due to censorship problems. Richard Matheson later wrote (under a pseudonym) the Italian-made adaptation The Last Man on Earth (1964), which is surprisingly faithful to the book but is a dull film. Next came The Omega Man, the most high profile of the adaptations. Other versions were announced in the mid-1970s, while in the 1990s scriptwriter Tracy Torme’ of Fire in the Sky (1993) and Sliders (1995-2000) toyed with getting an adaptation off the ground and then there was a big-budget $100 million adaptation announced with Ridley Scott at the helm and Arnold Schwarzenegger starring, although neither of these emerged. This was later revived with a script by John Logan, to star Will Smith and with Michael Bay at the helm, before finally emerging as I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith and directed by Francis Lawrence. I Am Omega (2007) was also made as a cheap uncredited ripoff of this film.

Unfortunately, The Omega Man is a ham-fisted adaptation of I Am Legend. For one, the vampires have been eliminated. It is as though the producers were eager to make a film that was divorced of any association with B movie vampires. The Family in black hoods, shades and white albinoid faces certainly cut striking figures but they make no sense. It is difficult, for instance, to see what stops them from simply breaking into Neville’s house – in the book, they were unable to because of the vampire’s inability to enter a place they were not invited into and because the house was shielded with garlic and mirrors. While The Omega Man seeks to assiduously avoid the B-movie vampire label, it on the other hand falls into another cliche – The Family are no more than the mutants out of a B science-fiction movie. The script here comes from husband and wife screenwriting team of John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington who later performed similar outrages on the Planet of the Apes saga with their script for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

Most of the novel is taken up by Neville’s mundane day-to-day existence and his quest for the origins of the plague. Understandably, this does not translate well to the screen, especially in that he is the sole character on screen for almost the entire book. To compensate, the Corringtons have invented an entire second half with Charlton Heston trying to save a small enclave of survivors. (It is never made clear how this group managed to survive so long while everybody else succumbed). When it comes to the image of Charlton Heston sitting in an abandoned cinema watching and reminiscing over Woodstock (1970), The Omega Man eventually reveals its true colours as a Utopian fantasy of the Free Love Generation. While post-holocaust films from Mad Max 2 (1981) onwards co-opted the values of the Western, the post-holocaust films of the 1970s – the likes of Gas-s-s; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), Glen and Randa (1971) and Zardoz (1974) looked to the idea of remaking the world along the lines of Love Generation idealism, celebrating the ideals of communalism and altered states headspace. The vampires are now construed as an evil Manson-like cult, which are pointedly also called The Family. The end of the film descends into clumsy allegory where the allusions between Jesus Christ and Charlton Heston shedding his blood to save humanity are played up – the film even ends with Heston literally sacrificing his life to save the world, lying in a fountain in a crucifixion pose with a spear penetrating his side.

At least in the early parts of the film, director Boris Sagal does an okay job of creating an image of isolation with Charlton Heston prowling the empty streets of L.A., just taking a new car and driving through the showroom window when his old one breaks down or imagining hearing telephones ringing in his head. These scenes are modestly effective, although a film like The Quiet Earth (1985) does a far better job of portraying the psychological isolation and madness that being the last survivor of the human race would entail. Alas, The Omega Man also casts Charlton Heston in square-jawed heroism mode – Heston’s idea of isolation is to make wisecracks while playing chess with a bust of Caesar. After an effective opening, the film quickly lapses into being an action movie – with Charlton Heston wielding machine-guns and stunt driving motorcycles. The film also taps into the burgeoning Blaxploitation genre, in casting Rosalind Cash as the heroine opposite Heston. (The Omega Man was at least ahead of its time in being one of the earliest films to feature interracial love scenes involving a Hollywood male lead).

The Omega Man is the most well known film of Boris Sagal, a prolific tv director. Boris Sagal’s other genre outings include a tv play remake of The Spiral Staircase (1961), The Helicopter Spies (1968), a feature film re-edited from episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hauser’s Memory (1970) and World War III (1982). Sagal died in a helicopter crash in 1981. He is also the father of Katey Sagal, alias Peg Bundy of tv’s Married ... With Children (1987-97) and the voice of Leela on Futurama (1999-2003).

Richard Matheson’s other genre works include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) based on his novel, the scripts for Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World (1961), the occult film Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), the Corman-produced mortician’s comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Last Man on Earth (1964) based on I Am Legend, the Hammer psycho-thriller The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), the classic Hammer occult film The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), the historical biopic De Sade (1969), Steven Spielberg’s first film Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) tv movies, the haunted house film The Legend of Hell House (1973), the tv adaptation of Dracula (1974), the tv movies Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Stranger Within (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Dead of Night (1977) and The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver (1977), the tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), the time travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980) from his own novel, Jaws 3-D (1983), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), and numerous classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Thriller and Star Trek. Works based on his novels and stories are The Omega Man (1971) from his I Am Legend, the afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come (1998), the fine ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), The Box (2009) and Real Steel (2011).