Quips and Quotations (Something Welcome This Way Comes Edition)

 

The monsters weren't intended to be gay, except possibly when director James Whale was behind the lens, but they read as gay to me. For me and my fellow queer youth growing up in the gay-intolerant era of the mid-twentieth century, these monsters spoke to our lives. That they flourished in marvelous gothic fantasy films, some brillant, most ridiculous, all imagination-stirring, only made them more special.

Hollywood's message may have seemed clear: You're gay; you're a monster. The villagers must hunt you down and destroy you. However, there was a more subversive underside to them. Almost without exception the monsters are presented sympathetically: Frankenstein's Monster was a lonely innocent, persecuted for existing, and good with children (some of the time). And there was his enormous schvancestucker. The Wolfman was a heroic fellow who acquired a cursed life when he came to the aid of a damsel in distress. Even soulless Dracula is often presented as a lonely, isolated figure seeking love, burdened by a curse acquired in defense of his country. The villagers are usually frightened, ignorant yahoos, with a hair-trigger lynch-mob response to almost any stimulus.

These movies said to me, It is intolerant society that is wrong. Hang in there. Fight the good fight. If you get enough sequels, eventually everyone will love you. Once Abbott and Costello show up, you're home free.

There is hope.

--Douglas McEwan, The Q Guide to Classic Monster Movies

..............................................................................................................................................

1944-2024

The "enourmous schvancestucker," that Mr. McEwan refers to is not a direct or even an indirect quote from any classic monster movie made in the 1930s or '40s, but rather uttered by the winsome young woman pictured above in a classic monster comedy from the 1970s. Her name is Teri Garr, and as a trick instead of a treat I'll leave it up to you to come up with the name of that movie.

Quips and Quotations (Declaration of Independents Edition)

 

Roger made us work hard and long, I remember that! He was always fascinating to me, a fascinating man – and a good businessman! He had such incredible energy, it was tremendous – he was a dynamo to be around. I always knew he was going to be a huge success because there was no stopping him. He just made up his mind that he was going to be a success and that was it.

--Beverly Garland

Roger seemed a driven man. Roger wanted to accomplish a lot, he had to have a lot of drive to do it, and he pushed through. He not only pushed through, he punched through! With a lot of energy, and a lot of disregard at times...What we did for Roger Corman – I mean, things that you could never do in a real studio, but you did for this guy! Everything seemed unreal with him.

--Susan Cabot

I wrote a screenplay titled Gluttony, about a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn't do that though because of the [production] code at the time. So I said, 'How about a man-eating plant?', and Roger said, 'Okay.' By that time, we were both drunk.

--screenwriter Charles B. Griffith 

 

It's not precisely the Edgar Allan Poe short story known to high school English that emerges in House of Usher, but it's a reasonably diverting and handsomely mounted variation ... The film has been mounted with care, skill and flair by producer-director Roger Corman and his staff.

--Variety

[Frank Sinatra] was very worried that his daughter was in a film with the Hell's Angels. And for some reason he didn’t want to bring it up to me, so he arranged to meet with my second assistant director, Paul Rapp, and said, “Is Nancy going to be all right?” And Paul, we had never even thought about it, but Paul made up a whole lot of nonsense, just, “Well, we’ve got people there, we’re going to be protecting her all the time.” It was all just talk, but Frank accepted it, and Nancy was great.

--Roger Corman

1926-2024

(Things happen, so I'll just save the Mother's Day post until next year. You know how it is--Kirk)

 

 

Haunts of the Very Strapped

 

Following a recent showing of Barbie, a fellow moviegoer ventured the opinion that what we had just watched was an "art film." I felt it necessary to point out that a major Hollywood studio, in this case Warner Bros., isn't likely to shell out a reported $145 million dollars on anything that's not an arguably guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and an art film is rarely that. Nevertheless, Barbie's plot, a good deal of which takes place in a land where dolls come to life, necessitated loads of abstract imagery which may have made the whole thing accidentally avant-garde. And I wonder if that could work in reverse. An ambitious--in terms of story--science-fiction saga with a lower-than-Death Valley budget, could in the end resemble an art film, albeit unintentionally. Which brings us to 1957's Plan 9 from Outer Space. Yes, there are those who say it's the worse movie ever made, but the film's slapdash, flea market dreamlike imagery has always held my attention, an 80-minute workout that prevents the eyeball muscles from atrophying. The above photo, culled from a movie memorabilia auction site, is a behind-the-scenes portrait of some of the characters, and we can all agree that they were characters, involved in the making of Plan 9. The good-looking, dapper young prole crouched in the foreground is not Johnny Depp, but the film's producer, director, and writer Edward D. Wood Jr. Moving clockwise from Wood we have Swedish professional wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson, who plays a zombie under the control of disdainful space aliens; local LA horror movie TV hostess and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark precursor Vampira (Maila Nurmi) as another zombie; the movie's narrator, the Amazing Criswell, a local LA television psychic; and just above Wood, cinematographer William C. Thompson, who had begun his career in 1914 and lived long enough to witness the advent of the drive-in movie. Conspicuously missing, mainly because for some reason he seems to have been cut out of the picture, is Bele Lugosi, who according to the photograph's ballpoint penned copy should be standing to the left of Wood. Plan 9 from Outer Space was Lugosi's last movie (in fact, he died in the middle of filming and was replaced by a younger, taller man holding a cape over his face!)  Also missing, conspicuously so only because it seems rather odd that someone would have had it deliberately removed, is some nondescript prop, maybe a pile of nondescript props, situated between Vampira and Criswell. The imagination reels! I suppose there's some enterprising digital wizard out there who could make this photo once again complete, but I'd advise against it. Incompleteness was crucial to Ed Wood's art. It's what made him, however unintentional, avant-garde.  

Nice try, Eddie, but it's not nearly as scary as the 118th Congress. 

Reflections of the Way Life (or the Undead) Used to Be

 

 

Basil Rathbone examines Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in this publicity still from 1939's The Son of Frankenstein. If that wasn't spooky enough, that very same year Rathbone had to contend with a Baskervilles hound!

Under the Radar: Dick Miller

 

Quite possibly the most famous non-famous actor in the history of cinema (especially if that cinema was in the form of a grindhouse or drive-in theater), Mr. Miller was NOT born on this day in 1928, as I reported when this post first appeared (I offer an explanation to Shady in the comment section) but on Christmas Day of that year. The post stays up anyway, in the off-chance he was also born in a manger under an unusually large star. Now to the matter at hand. Appearing in what in the latest tally is an astonishing 180 movies, more often than not in bit parts, by the end of the 20th century Miller had become a favorite of directors who felt his five-to-ten-minutes cameos gave their films a certain back alley hipness. In the following clip, the Great Man himself talks about his surreptitious rise to cult stardom:

He played both a Cowboy and an Indian, and got to shoot himself? Now who would have him do that?

Why, this enterprising young filmmaker, that's who! Unfortunately, I can't show you that Miller-shooting-Miller scene (unless I show you the whole hour-and-a-half movie), but since Robert Corman above is known more for his science-fiction and horror films than his westerns, I'll instead give you this clip from 1957's Not of this Earth:

Such is the fate of the B-movie bit player, always getting offed by this monster or that alien, but sometimes even bit player gets to star in a classic all his own:

  

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz 

OK, Mr. Ginsberg wasn't talking about a movie when he composed the above lines, but still, it's as good as any a description of this particular one:

Written by Corman's main screenwriter of that period, Charles B. Griffith (the exploitation film's answer to Ben Hecht), 1959's A Bucket of Blood is both a humorous look at the Beat Movement and a genuine horror movie that seeks to cash in on 1953's House of Wax, with corpses-as-statues instead of corpses-as-mannequins. But the biggest difference between the two films is whereas the villain of Wax is an appropriately sinister Vincent Price, the villain of Blood doesn't seem much like a villain at all! Miller's Walter Paisley is just some poor schnook who stumbles his way into committing acts of real evil. You've heard of the bad guy you love to hate? This is the bad guy you feel sorry for, the psychopathic murderer that just couldn't get a decent break. There but for the grace of Satan goes I. A Bucket of Blood came and went (while still making a profit, thanks to its shoestring budget.) As with The Little Shop of Horrors, another Corman-Griffith collaboration, Blood's real effect was on a later generation of filmmakers, who likely caught both films in that cultural safety net of last resort, television. As a kind of tribute to this movie, Dick Miller would be asked to play a character named Walter Paisley five more times throughout his career. Though it technically wasn't the same Walter Paisley each time out, that's still more often than Daniel Craig played a character named James Bond.

A Bucket of Blood having failed (at least in the short run) to make him a star, Dick Miller went back to supporting roles, and not just on the big screen but...

...the small one as well.

 

The names have been changed to protect the innocent...from embarrassment.

Joe Dante got his start editing trailers for Roger Corman, which of course meant he spent much time watching Dick Miller. In 1976, Dante and Allan Arkush codirected Hollywood Boulevard, a satire of Corman's budget-conscious New World Pictures (for Corman's budget-conscious New World Pictures.) For the second time in his career, Miller plays a character named Walter Paisley, only now he's not a murderer, just a... 

...Hollywood agent, which has its own body count.

Remember this place? They say the Kindle drove it out of business, but I don't buy it. I think it would still be around if only an employee named...

...Walter Paisley had been recommending the reading material. From 1981's The Howling, directed by the aforementioned Joe Dante.

Speaking of aforementioned, I'd like to retreat back in time for just a second to remind you of this film, 1960's The Little Shop of Horrors. In it, Miller plays Burson Fouch, a man who likes to eat flowers (as compared to the film's main attraction, a flower that likes to eat men.) I would have loved to have shown you a clip from it, but the only one I could find was dominated by the man in the cap, actor Jonathan Haze (for just cause, as he played the movie's main character, Seymore Krelborn.) The man with the beard is Mel Welles, and the lithe young woman on the left is Jackie Joseph. In 1984... 

...Miller and Joseph were reunited during the filming of...

...Gremlins. Once again directed by Joe Dante, he gave Miller a break from the Walter Paisley moniker, and now plays a character named Murray Futterman, and Joseph is his wife Shelia.

You have to squint a bit, but as this chart illustrates, Joe Dante gave Miller a lot of work over the years.

Not that other filmmaker didn't take notice of Dick Miller's talents. The same year Gremlins came out, James Cameron had Miller perform this memorable cameo in The Terminator:

Perhaps instead of memorable, I should have said In Memoriam.

 Remember Fame? First it was a movie, then a TV series that ran for a number of years in the 1980s (which reminds me: RIP Morgan Stevens.) Seasons four through six, Dick Miller played Lou Mackie, the proprietor of a local diner where the students of the fictional New York City High School of the Performing Arts liked to hang out. In this clip Miller gets to do something that he was never asked of by American International or New World Pictures--perform a little song and dance:

That scene might have worked better had the Three Stooges sang backup for Miller.

It's Roger Corman again, this time with wife Julie, who is a producer in her own right. In 1986, she asked that audiences pay a visit to the... 

...Chopping Mall. Yes, Dick Miller is once again snuffed out, but that's just in keeping with family tradition.

Sixty years of bit parts add up, and as a result, Dick Miller received much recognition late in life. Still, you may want to ask:

Well, Dick Miller may have never received an Oscar, but in 2014 he was awarded...

...the HorrorHound Weekend Lifetime Achievement Award. Frequent employer Joe Dante was on hand to bestow the honor.

Corman and Miller also stayed in touch over the years.

Finally, on this day in 2019:

Vital Viewing (Gothic Romance Edition)

 Actress Elsa Lanchester was born on this day in 1902 (she died in 1986.) With her good looks you might assume she played lots of leading ladies roles, or at least was the hero's romantic interest, in many a film. However, she was mostly a character actress throughout her long career, often playing eccentrics, which, while lacking glamour, no doubt kept her steadily employed when those good looks inevitably began to fade.  In twelve of her films made both in England (where she was originally from) and Hollywood, she appeared with husband Charles Laughton, one of the greatest actors of his generation. On her own Elsa had roles in--

You know what? Before I go any further, how about, for anyone who's interested, a lesson on the most efficient way to put on pantyhose? Pay close attention: 

That woman makes it look easy, huh? But remember, she's just a drawing. On actual flesh and bones it may be a bit more difficult, as Elsa explains to Dick Cavett in this 1972 interview:

Now you know why she played eccentrics. As for that poem she mentioned, we'll have to save that for some other day. Halloween is almost upon us, and I have a scary treat for all of you (no, it's not a chocolate-covered eggplant.) I said before Elsa rarely played the romantic interest, but one of the few times she did...

...she got to play the title character. Actually, she wasn't in the movie all that much, just a little at the beginning and a little at the end. Let's begin with the beginning, where she doesn't even play the title character, but rather, an aspiring novelist: 

At that point, Mary conjures up a Universal Pictures sequel for Percy Shelley's and Lord Byron's viewing-or-however-they're-taking-in-this-story-in-1818 pleasure. Along the way there's an old blind man in the woods and some little people in jars, both of which I'm going to skip so I can go right to the end. The very end. Like, the words "The End" on the screen end. You know what that means boys and girls, don't you? Something even more frightening than a creature stitched together from dead body parts. I'm talking about the dreaded SPOILER ALERT! So if you haven't seen the movie and want to, you better leave right now.

On second thought, why doncha stick around? Because what I'm about to show you is so giddily gruesome and so gleefully ghastly, with just a touch of piquant poignancy for all you romantic misfits out there who have no problem commiserating with a brokenhearted monster, that you don't really need an explanation as to how all these characters arrived at this particular moment. Just hold on to your pillows and feast your eyes on one of the greatest horror movie finales of all time:  

 Some people are just not made for each other.

Quips and Quotations (What--Me Scary Edition)

See the awful monster.
See the bolts in his head.
See how he kills people.
Kill, kill, kill.
The monster likes to kill.
Poor, poor monster.
The monster is sick.
Sick, sick, sick.
He wants to be cured.
The doctor cannot cure the monster.
The monster does not belong to Blue Cross.

--Larry Siegel, Mad magazine

1925-2019

Vital Viewing (Globe/Grindhouse Edition)

1960s screen teen ingenue Olivia Hussey was born on this day in 1951. In the following video, she reflects on her unusual adolescence:

Now let's take a little trip to Verona, courtesy of filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli:

The above is still Hussey's best known role, one that made her a star back in '68, whether that was her goal or not. But perhaps Billy Shakespeare is too highfalutin for you. Maybe you'd like a holiday film instead. We'll jump ahead six years:

Not much call there for iambic pentameter, huh?

Max Fear Factor

 

Yes, the above picture is that of a fly reading what appears to be Forbes while being groomed by a middle-aged man in glasses. Look carefully, or even haphazardly, and you'll see what appears to be a human hand holding up the back of the magazine, which has an ad for what I'm guessing is the Sheraton hotel chain. So it's not really a fly at all, but an actual human, an actor by the name of David Hedison. In the 1958 film The Fly, Hedison played a scientist named Andre Delambre who invents a machine that can transfer matter across space, sort of like the transporter on Star Trek, though it would be another eight years before that show's debut. Unlike Captain Kirk, Dr. Delambre doesn't want to beam himself from the Starship Enterprise to a planet down below. He's perfectly content, and reasonably believes it would be a big enough scientific achievement, to go from one side of his basement to the other. Unfortunately, when he steps into the chamber, he doesn't notice the housefly inside. The machine switches on, atoms scramble, and man and fly end up with each other's head and arm/leg. On the plus side, they do make it to the other side of the basement.

 

Here's another picture:

 

The bare-chested flat-headed fellow in the middle is actor Boris Karloff. Obviously, he was never in the running to play Tarzan. No, he portrayed the title character in the 1931 film Frankenstein. Wait, that's not right. An actor by the name of Colin Clive played that particular role. The confusion is understandable. Even Universal Pictures sometimes got it wrong, such as when they came out with Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein in 1948. Bud and Lou met no such person. They did meet, or at least ran in the opposite direction of, a monster played by Glenn Strange. But Karloff portrayed that monster first, and best. In the 1931 film, Clive/Frankenstein is intent on creating life in the laboratory, as if the planet wasn't overpopulated enough all ready. Maybe the idea was to help childless couples.  Anyway, the result is Karloff. As you can see, he has a face only a mad scientist could love.

No, this fellow's not the Batman villain Two-Face. It's actor Lon Chaney, who played the title character in the 1925 film Phantom of the Opera. What exactly is a phantom doing at the opera, you may ask? Turns out he's a frustrated producer. When his favorite actress doesn't get the lead, he goes into a snit and drops a chandelier on the audience. I do hope the survivors got their tickets refunded.

 

 

The fellow getting groomed this time is the Phantom's son, Lon Chaney Jr. He actually came into the world as Creighton Chaney, but changed his first name once he realised identification with his father could get him acting jobs. One of those jobs was the title character in 1941's The Wolf Man. He starts out the film as a very human Larry Talbot, and turns into a monster only after being bitten by a wolf. He should be grateful he didn't get rabies.

 

 

If you're not quite sure whom that gruesome fellow in middle is, first imagine him wearing a fedora. You can't see his hands, but if you could you would, or should, see switchblades in lieu of fingers. Yep, it's none other than Freddy Kreuger, aka actor Robert Englund, of The Nightmare on Elm Street movies. In the first film of this long-running series, Freddy terrorizes teenagers in their dreams until he finally kills them, and they wake up dead. Or rather they don't wake up. He does this seven times from 1984 to 2003. Why? Originally to seek revenge. He was burned to death by a bunch of vigilante suburbanites, and now he's going after their kids. Why was he burned alive? He murdered a bunch of kids. And why did he do that? As Peter Boyle told another serial killer in an episode of The X-Files, because he's a homicidal maniac. So basically Freddy goes from being a homicidal maniac in life to a vengeful homicidal maniac in death. As the series progresses, he puts revenge behind him and goes back to being a homicidal maniac without any personal bias attached. He eventually goes after the real-life actors who played the characters in the first movie, but only kills the fictional people they encounter, proving that, in this series at least, being make-believe can be hazardous to your health. Finally, he has a turf war with Jason Voorhees, of Friday the 13th fame. I, for one, don't blame Jason for moving to the suburbs. There's a lot more kids there to kill then you're gonna find at some abandoned summer camp.

 

What the above pictures all have in common is that none of them are from the actual movies I describe. Rather, they're behind-the-scenes photos of the actors in the process of being turned into hideous beings so they can appear in those movies. None of these thespians were hideous in real life. Mostly, they were average-looking, except Hedison, who had screen idol looks (though the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea co-star had to contend with a much smaller screen as time went on.)

 

The man responsible for Karloff's and Chaney Jr's hideousness was long-time Universal make up department head Jack Pierce. That's him to the left of Karloff in the Frankenstein photo (sorry, don't know who the other fellow is) and he's holding up the scissors in the Wolf Man picture (when I see that I'm reminded of the Bill Cosby routine about a werewolf getting a haircut "Just a little off the knee.") Ben Nye is the guy hiding all human traces of David Hedison, except the one hand. Nye later founded his own make up line. David B. Miller did Englund's makeup in the first Nightmare, but that's Bill Terezakis and an assistant applying the scars for a later film.  As for Lon Chaney Sr, he did his own transformations, and is proudly displaying his makeup case in that photo.

 

Suppose you saw one of those monsters in real life? What would you do? Run? I wouldn't blame you, but how far would you run until it occurred to you that maybe that really wasn't a monster you saw? After all, everytime you see a film where the monster's a  monster solely through the art of make up, it's evidence that someone who's NOT a monster can LOOK like a monster. Thus, once you're safely in your house, your basement, with the doors to both locked and bolted, and you're hidden under the pool table, then would probably be a good time to say to yourself, "Hey, I bet that was an actor. I should have got his autograph!"

 

Of course, all actors dressed up like monsters aren't necessary worthy of an autograph. Halloween's almost upon us, and all those "haunted houses" run by the Jaycees and whoever are open for the season. We don't think of the people who work in such places--often high school or college kids--as being actors, but that's what they are, even if they don't belong to Equity. Just like Karloff and Englund, they, too, have transformed themselves into creatures of the night via make up. Or rubber masks if they're lazy. I try not to judge. It can't be easy squeezing horror in between homework.

 

 

 Certainly people do get scared when they go to those places. But I wonder, are the scariest haunted houses the ones where actors have the most convincing makeup, or masks? I once went to one where someone dressed like a--well, I'm not sure what exactly, but it was scary enough. Except I knew it wasn't real. I was in one end of the room, and the goblin or ghoul or whatever was in the other. He (or she; couldn't tell) came up to me and went AAARRRRGGGHHH!!!! and then followed me out of the room, down a hallway, and right out of the haunted house, AAARRRRGGGHHHING all the way! I'm like, dude, I get your point already. But the make up was convincing.

 

 

Unlike real haunted houses, assuming there are such things, fake haunted houses operate under a tremendous disadvantage. People who willingly go to one know, as I did, that it's fake. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't go. I mean, if it's a real haunted house, the monster kills you, right? What's the fun in that? Yet the paying customers do want to be scared, but just safe and secure in the knowledge that no physical harm will befall them. Frankly, it's a rather contradictory thing to want, but I suppose some psychological theory about getting your catharsis off can explain it. Except make up (or a mask) no matter how good, isn't going to do the trick by itself. Instead of fear, it may just inspire a certain admiration for a job well done.

The key, I think, is the element of surprise. Not that surprise is all that easy is a situation where people are walking around snapping there fingers going, "C'mon, c'mon, it's a haunted house, I want to be surprised. Coulda gone and seen Fast and Furious 17, instead I came here." But it can be done. Just make sure their mind is somewhere else. Ever do that? I don't even mean on purpose. I mean, you know, someone's wrapped up in their own thoughts, you innocuously say "hi" or whatever, and they jump back and scream, "Oh! You frightened me!" At which point, you rush to the bathroom and check your face for acne. Fright begets fright.

If I had a haunted house, here's what I would do. I'd give everybody who walked in a Rubik's cube. Let them walk through the place trying to figure out how to solve it. When they're deep into it, then you scare them. The house wouldn't even have to look haunted. It could be brightly lit, with pictures of baby chicks on the wall. My actors would look equally unsuspecting. Instead of monsters, they'd be dressed like Jehovah Witnesses. I envision them sneaking up on unsuspecting Rubik's holders and saying things like "Have you read the latest issue of The Watchtower?" Trust me, people would jump right out of their flip-flops. And the cubes would remain unsolved.

Getting back to movie monsters, there is an exception to the anything-scary-in-a-movie-could-be-fake-in-real-life rule. Stop-motion or digital animation creatures. That can only be faked on the screen. So, if you happen to see a fifty-foot ape in a real-world setting, you have my permission to wet your undies.

All this talk about stop-motion or computer animation makes me wonder. Suppose you saw a run-of-the-mill animated figure in real life. I don't mean someone dressed up as a cartoon character, like you see at Disneyland. I mean, a hand drawn cartoon. Wouldn't have to be a monster. Could be the most benign, friendliest cartoon character in the world, yet if you saw it walking right up to you on the street,  I bet you'd be scared. I bet you'd run. Or, if you were cornered, I bet you'd reach for your crucifix.

Or your Scooby snacks.

There's one last picture I want to show you:

That's James Cagney, not an actor one normally associates with horror. In fact, he's not, strictly speaking, being made up to look like a monster. He's getting ready to play the aforementioned Lon Chaney Sr. in the 1957 biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, which raises an intriguing prospect.

 

The next time you see a monster in real life, not only could it be an actor pretending to be a monster, but also an actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be a monster!

 

Nevertheless, I suggest you approach with extreme caution.

 

If you don't, you could end up with the wrong autograph. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

In Memoriam: Richard Matheson 1926-2013

Writer, known for science-fiction and fantasy. I Am Legend. The Shrinking Man (which Hollywood turned into The Incredible Shrinking Man, screenplay by Matheson himself) Hell House. What Dreams May Come. Bid Time. Stir of Echoes. Adapted his short story "Duel" into a TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg Wrote many episodes of The Twilight Zone, including one of its most famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". Wrote the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within". For director Roger Corman, he adapted four Edgar Allen Poe stories (the titles, anyway) to the screen. Adapted what was at the time an unpublished novel (by Jeff Rice) into a TV movie starring Darren McGavin called The Night Stalker, which later became a series that, though short-lived, still pops up on cable from time to time, and was the main inspiration for the long-lived series The X-Files.

Richard Matheson was a close friend and the best screenwriter I ever worked with. I always shot his first draft. I will miss him.

--Roger Corman

...one of the most important writers of the 20th century

--Ray Bradbury

 For me, he is in the same category as Bradbury and Asimov.

--Steven Spielberg

He fired my imagination by placing his horrors not in European castles and Lovecraftian universes, but in American scenes I knew and could relate to. ‘I want to do that,’ I thought. ‘I must do that.’ Matheson showed the way.

--Stephen King

Wonder why Spielberg and King spell their first names differently. That could be a Matheson story right there: "The Mystery of the Monikers"--but I digress.

        
“But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie--is the vampire so bad?” 

"...suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a
majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just
one man.

"Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces --
awe, fear, shrinking horror -- and he knew that they were afraid of
him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a
scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was
an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the
bloodless bodies of their loved ones. And he understood what they felt
and did not hate them. His right hand tightened on the tiny envelope
of pills. So long as the end did not come with violence, so long as it
did not have to be a butchery before their eyes...

"Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he
did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was
anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept
came, amusing to him even in his pain.

"A coughing chuckle filled his throat. He turned and leaned against the
wall while he swallowed the pills. Full circle, he thought while the
final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in
death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of
forever.

Sometime in the early 1950s, Matheson was watching the 1931 movie version of Dracula and “My mind drifted off, and I thought, ‘If one vampire is scary, what if the whole world is full of vampires?'" The result was I Am Legend, part horror story, part meditation of what it means to be human, to be normal.

Officially, Legend has been brought to the screen three times, with the emphasis on horror. Well, whadya expect? Film is a visual medium; you can't just show someone meditating, can you? Actually, the first version kind of tries. The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price,  emphases the titles character's loneliness, a loneliness only interrupted by battles with dead folk that aren't quite the vampires of Matheson's novel. What they are exactly I'll get to a couple of paragraphs down. Matheson wrote the screenplay himself under the pseudonym "Logan Swanson". Though he acknowledged the finished product followed his book pretty closely, Matheson was disappointed with the results, mainly because of the low budget. He also felt Price, appearing in a monster movie where he wasn't one of the monsters for a change, was miscast. I think the movie works despite the low budget (I've read that it was an U.S. produced movie shot in Italy to save money. So what, did the cast and crew get discount airline tickets or something?) I thought Price was good, too, though, truthfully, even if I were a bloodsucking monster, I'd be a little leery about taking him on.

The second version of I Am Legend came out in 1971. This time called The Omega Man, it starred Charlton Heston as a man not only upset that he's seemingly the last member of the human race, but that the monsters who come out at night are so gauche. Why can't they appreciate fine art, fine wine, and classical music the way he does it in his fortified penthouse? The monsters themselves have Gold Medal-flour white skin and--leapin' lizards!--no eyeballs. The film is notable for an interracial kiss and a suggestion of sex between Heston and Rosalind Cash, at a time when that was still rare on the big screen. Unfortunately, there's little chemistry or--despite one playing a right-wing militarist and the other a Black Nationalist--sexual tension between them, though if two such people ever got together back in 1971 it probably would have been the end of the world. Really, this movie is pretty ambitious in the way it tries to combine horror with late '60s-early '70s social relevance. However, it just doesn't take. The best thing about this film is the always-scary Anthony Zerbe as a TV anchorman-turned-ghoul. Not surprisingly, he's more convincing playing the latter.

The latest version, this time actually called I Am Legend, came out in 2007. I haven't seen it, but it got good reviews, and who better than Will Smith to survive a world holocaust?

Those are all the official versions of Matheson's novel. There was also an unauthorized version, in 1967. At the time, George Romero was a young director of commercials and industrial films who wanted to escape that rut by making his own horror film. A fan of I Am Legend, he saw this new film as a prequel of sorts, showing the vampire plague at the very beginning. Except these weren't vampires, either, but zombies, though the term in never used in what shaping up to be the most influential horror film of all time, The Night of the Living Dead. Romeo has never cited the first screen version, The Last Man on Earth as an influence, but the two films look very similar. The final  scene in the earlier film where the hero fights off an army of the undead would have fit right into Romero's version, except that he couldn't afford Vincent Price. Instead, a local Pittsburgh actor by the name of Duane Jones played the zombie-battler. Noone ever mentions it in the film, and Romero himself has said it played no role in his casting decision, but Jones was black. That he--SPOILER ALERT--gets killed not by the monsters themselves but a trigger-happy redneck gave the film much more social significance than could ever be found in the more self-consciously provocative The Omega Man made a few years later. Who knows? Maybe the 1971 version was so self-conscious BECAUSE of Romero's film. Social significance aside, we're currently living in an age of zombies. There's the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, a book, The Zombie Survival Guide, and a movie out in theaters, World War Z. All can be traced to the novel I Am Legend. So you have Richard Matheson to thank for it all (or to blame if you're one who yearns for a return to werewolves)

    

 

OK, enough with the animated corpses already. Matheson wrote other things as well.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) screenplay by Richard Matheson. If you found The Last Man on Earth too upsetting, let me reassure you that Vincent Price is back to playing a creep in this one.

 

The Twilight Zone: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" OK, I admit the "gremlin" is obviously just some guy in a costume, but even THAT would be a rather odd thing to see 20,000 feet up, don't you think?

Matheson could be funny when he wanted to, never more so than when he wrote the screenplay for The Comedy of Terrors (1963)

There's a thin line between horror and humor.