(He also sometimes used this pen name in his writing, including for the 1982 novel Earthbound.) Matheson called The Omega Man “ludicrous” and noted that it “was so removed from my book that it didn’t even bother me!” Matheson co-wrote the screenplay for the first adaptation, but thought Vincent Price was miscast and that “the direction was kind of poor” he used the pseudonym Logan Swanson in the credits to avoid being associated with it. Matheson felt that The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007) all failed to capture his novel. Matheson was disappointed with the movies based on I Am Legend. The latter he thought was “marvelous” the former he would not comment upon “except to say that a major producer in Hollywood said to me, ‘They should have shot your book.’ Amen.” 5. Adaptations made without his involvement include What Dreams May Come (1998) and Stir of Echoes (1999).

Matheson wrote screenplays for many movies based on his works, including The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Duel (1971), and The Legend of Hell House (1973), an adaptation of his 1971 novel Hell House. Many of his works were adapted into films. Matheson told Mystery Scene magazine that the story was “odd enough and different enough to call attention to me and I got an agent through it.” 4. “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) is told from the perspective of a monstrous child chained to the basement wall by its equally monstrous parents, who routinely beat the child when it tries to escape. Matheson’s writing career began with short stories.Ī year after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, Matheson’s first short story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “During basic training,” he later recalled, “I would go down to the latrine at night while other soldiers were sleeping, and I would sit there reading Dracula … never knowing I was gonna write a book about vampires.” His experience of fighting in Europe during WWII served as the basis for his war novel The Beardless Warriors (1960). Matheson joined the army after graduating high school in 1943. Matheson was a published writer before even having this career defining idea, though he was only 8 when he had a poem printed in the Brooklyn Eagle. In a 2012 speech accepting the Vampire Novel of the Century Award, he remembered that “the thought occurred to me: if one vampire is scary, what if the whole world were full of vampires?” But, he said, “at least 10 years” passed before he took that seed of inspiration and began work on I Am Legend. Matheson, who was born in 1926, saw Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s infamous blood-sucker when he was a teenager.

Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler in 'Dracula.' / United Archives/GettyImages

Richard matheson's novel i am legend