The Last Man on Earth (1964)

“Another day to live through. Better get started.” – Robert Morgan

This is another of those classic films that I’ve been meaning to add to Shocktober for a few years. It’s the first movie based on Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic novel I am Legend, the others being The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston and, well, I am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith when he still had a career.

My opinion – this is easily the best of them. It’s simple, it’s blunt and it’s direct. It doesn’t really pull any punches and it’s one of Vincent Price’s greatest performances. Price is known for chewing scenery, but here where he carries practically the entire film, he’s restrained for the most part and this adds to the air of utter hopelessness of his character, where he is, what he has endured and what lies ahead. He doesn’t even share any scenes or have any dialogue with anybody until 27 minutes in. All we hear up to that point is his despairing inner monologue over scenes of him going about his grim business of survival.

For a black and white fifty-nine-year-old movie, world events have made The Last Man on Earth startlingly relevant with scenes that eerily echo what we all experienced only a small handful of years ago. If anything, my recent screening of the film for this write-up packed more of a punch than any other time I’ve watched it, because it brought back all those memories of lockdowns, the stillness and the quiet.

Robert Morgan appears to be the last living person on Earth. Well, as far as he knows anyway. He lives in his house, which is a makeshift nerve centre, uses a radio to hopelessly try and contact anybody else who may be alive. There are bolts on the doors, the windows are boarded up, he’s living in fear for his life. The outside of his house is protected by garlands of mirrors and garlic. There has been a world-wide pandemic which has wiped out the world’s population – BUT, after death, the corpses reanimate pretty much as vampires. They’re very sensitive to sunlight, only venturing out at night, they’re feral but still intelligent, they can’t stand mirrors because they don’t want to see what they’ve become – and a wooden stake kills them, only as long as the stake remains in place to prevent the flesh from healing.

Every day, Morgan gets up, tops up his generator’s fuel, surveys and repairs any damage to the outside of his house because every night’s a siege as the vampires try to get to him. The rest of the day is spent systematically checking the city building by building, block by block, killing the vampires he discovers as they sleep in a futile attempt to eradicate them.

Any bodies he finds, he takes to the outskirts of the city and dumps them in a large fire pit, which the authorities used before the plague became overwhelming. It’s a grim reality, which is well executed on screen. The film is set in an un-named American city, but was actually shot in Rome which works really well because the location filming gives the movie an off-kilter feel of something being not quite right that just adds to the overall atmosphere of weirdness, aided and abetted by the black and white filming. Given that the supporting cast are also Italian and dubbed equally feeds in to this strange dreamlike quality of everything’s there, but it’s wrong.

Price’s first dialogue comes in a flashback sequence to his daughter’s birthday when the papers are carrying stories of a plague wiping out Europe, being carried on the wind. People become scared; the streets are deserted (sound familiar?) The government is covering up stories of the recently dead coming back to life. Morgan’s own daughter becomes ill and dies, soldiers arrive to take her body to the fire pit and he can’t prevent it.

When his wife succumbs to the illness, she too dies, but rather than have her thrown in the back of a truck and taken to the pit, Morgan buries her himself – but she comes back home that night and attacks him. Morgan is unaffected because years earlier, he was bitten by a bat which seems to have immunised him.

Some relief comes to Morgan in the present day, as he discovers and befriends a stray dog – which soon falls to the disease and has to be staked. But when burying the poor mutt, Morgan spots a woman in the distance in daylight and gives chase. She is persuaded to go home with him, but Morgan is understandably suspicious, especially when having some garlic waved around her face makes her ill.

It turns out that the woman named Ruth (Franca Bettoia) is one of a group of people who’ve developed a medicine that allows the vampires to operate normally, as long as the drug remains in their bloodstream but frequent injections are needed or the disease takes over again. Worse, these vampires are planning to rebuild society and to do so, they need to wipe out the remaining humans. Here’s a stunning piece of dialogue from Ruth that brings their point of view into stark focus;

“You can't join us. You're a monster to them. Why do you think I ran when I saw you, even though I was assigned to spy on you? Because I was so terrified, what I'd heard about you. You're a legend in the city. Moving by day, instead of night, leaving as evidence of your existence bloodless corpses. Many of the people you destroyed were still alive! Many of them were loved ones of the people in my group.”

The last normal, unaffected human being is the monster, the aberration, the outsider to be killed for the safety of the “new normal” – surely this is the ultimate horror.

Morgan meets his end in a church, chased down by the group as Ruth reassures a crying child that they’re safe now.

Here’s a heartfelt, but nonetheless controversial statement. The Last Man on Earth was released four years before George Romero’s seminal zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, yet remains largely forgotten – but in my view, it’s the far superior film, due largely to a stronger script, a stunning performance by Price and the twist on exactly who the bad guy is, turning convention on its head.

A true classic.