Richard Matheson RIP
A great novelist and
even better screenwriter has left this dimension to explore a new
one, and we are all the lesser for it.
Matheson used
sci-fi/horror tropes to examine the existential condition of America in the
post-WWII age.
The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend were novels that explored powerlessness and alienation
better than the multitude of “important” (and now mostly forgotten) books
published at the same time, and his scripts have become part of the cultural
landscape—even if they don’t know where it originates, everybody knows what you’re
talking about when you say, “There’s a gremlin on the wing of the plane!”
Rod Serling created
and hosted The Twilight Zone, but
hardly anyone remember his overly-moralizing scripts for the show. Matheson, on
the other hand, gave the show juice and spice, with lively characters and sharp dialog—even in the episode he wrote with no dialog, “The Invaders.”
This was a talent
Matheson extended to the multitude of TV movies he wrote during the 1970s, “The
Golden Age of TV Movies,” creating the Zuni Fetish
Doll (Trilogy of Terror); Carl Kolchak, inadvertent and irreverent supernatural
reporter (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler); alien impregnation
(The Stranger Within), reinterpreting Dracula for director Dan Curtis and
actor Jack Palance; and the flick that foisted Steven Spielberg on the world, Duel (1971).
Some of my favorite
Matheson scripts were The Incredible
Shrinking Man, The Legend of Hell House, The Night Stalker
(the first Kolchak TV-movie), Corman’s The Raven, Burn Witch Burn!, Jacques Tourneur’s The Comedy of Terrors, and of course, “Nightmare
at 20,000 Feet.”
1968’s Night of the Living Dead was an
unofficial adaptation of I Am Legend (the book where everyone
in the world, except one man, is turned into vampires—and a book I reread every
few years, because it’s that good),
and in Matheson’s opinion, the only cinematic adaptation of the book to get the
mood right. (Although I do enjoy the two first adaptations of the novel: The Last Man on Earth (1964) with
Vincent Price, and The Omega Man
(1971) with Chuck Heston.)
Matheson’s influence
is so great, Chris Carter named a major X-Files
character after him!
Unlike many other
Grand Masters, Matheson was never forgotten or put (too much) out to pasture,
with mega-bucks adaptations of his works being created all the way to the end,
with Real Steel, Will Smith’s I Am Legend, The Box hitting contemporary theaters, and others still in the pipeline.
It has been mentioned
before, and I’ll repeat it: Matheson brought horror into the modern world, but
he did it in a Popular Mechanics way:
how to survive if you’re shrinking, or surrounded in a world of vampires, was
dealt with in a nuts-&-bolts way. No special gizmos or metaphysical powers:
just brains (and his protagonists were never super-powered, either; usually
they were just regular shlubs with the same amount of technical know-how that
any vet of WWII—like Matheson—would have).
And let’s not forget,
Matheson was from Brooklyn!
If dying means
getting to go to a place where there are even more Richard Matheson works to enjoy, then it’s not a scary prospect. But until then, there’s
plenty to reread and rescreen…
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