I can’t say this obscure 1964 Vincent Price is a truly great movie but it will always have a very special place in my heart. Unlike some of my most esteemed favorites, I wouldn’t say it’s can’t-miss, but at one point Price himself said this was his favorite of all his movies, and George Romero openly cited it as the direct inspiration for founding father of the zombie genre “Night Of The Living Dead” (bet you didn’t know there was a “founding grandfather” movie of that genre. “The Last Man On Earth” made it alllllll possible.)
This was based loosely on the 1954 novel “I Am Legend” by Richard Matheson. That’s the same “I Am Legend” that “The Omega Man” (with Charlton Heston) and Will Smith’s much later action movie were based on.
(This is worth a side note here: Richard Matheson’s is a name anyone with more than a passing similarity to my taste in movies & TV should be very well acquainted with, and if not, he certainly either wrote or directly inspired many things you’re familiar with: he wrote “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within”, Steven Speilberg’s first feature “Duel”, the pilot of “Kolchak The Night Stalker”, a slew of ’60s Hammer and Roger Corman horror films, novels that were later adapted into “What Dreams May Come” and “Stir of Echoes”… the list is long, and besides being a chief inspiration for George Romero, he’s also credited as such by Stephen King, and believed by Roger Ebert to be the spiritual father of later realist horror like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist”. Matheson was extremely influential. End of digression.)
Price plays a scientist holed up in a house trying to survive while the rest of the world has been transformed by a viral plague into a bumbling, bloodthirsty vampiric creatures, sort of a combination of vampires and zombies. Yes, nowadays that setup is hackneyed, but remember: this came out in 1964. Now you know where every other one of those movies got the idea from.
Part of the charm here, besides seeing these very familiar tropes when they were new, is that Price turns in about the best performance of his career here. He certainly hammed it up from time to time over the years, but he could act, and in this one, he plays it straight.
It’s kind of dark for 1964, too. There’s a lot of corpses around, and price’s character deals matter-of-factly with clearing his property of them… the kind unflinching in-your-face mortality we saw a lot of in horror movies just a few years later, but not ordinarily this early, and not from from Vincent Price. Please there’s some heavy deaths of children and loved ones… always off-camera, but more effective for it. Again, light fare for today’s viewers, but you can appreciate that for 1964, it was pretty grim stuff.
If you’re a film buff, especially of horror or sci fi, you need to at least know this one. Occasionally it turns up as a winking reference… at some point in the last few days I saw a zombie movie that opens looking like it’s this one, but turns out to be a guy sleeping in front of his TV with this movie on.
Note, 2025: I noticed on Tubi there’s a colorized version of this black-and-white film floating around. Not to be a purist, but I found the colorizing job detracted from some of the stark cinematography of the original. By 1964 they knew how to shoot in black and white. I strongly recommend avoiding the colorized version. This film is more effective with the original occasionally shadowy cinematography.