I am Legend is a timeless apocalyptic classic that tells the story of Robert Neville, the last uninfected man surviving in a world populated by vampires more akin to zombies than Dracula. They are infected with what Neville surmises is a bacterial agent, one with symptoms that explain vampiric lore, such as exposure to sunlight and stakes through the heart.

This backdrop of vampires is never as prominent as the book's central themes as Matheson digs into loss, loneliness, regret, and the human condition. The writing is crisp and easily consumable over the short span of only 162 pages (just longer than a novella), which is why so many of the movies spawned from this story had room to take a few liberties.

My favorite of those three films remains the Omega Man with Charlton Heston. Despite expanding the third act to be a fight for the survival of humankind, Heston portrays Neville as an appropriately reluctant average-man hero, which is how Matheson pens the character. This is important, I think, because Matheson's work is very much about the tenacity of an average American man in the 1950s.

What doesn't really make any of the movies but is especially important about Matheson's work, however, is his underlying statement that humans are predisposed to recreate the same societal structures that always lead to their next near extinction. We simply cannot escape it.