Streaming Availability: Public Domain! You can find it legally anywhere, they even have the full movie uploaded on its Wikipedia page
Ever notice that vampires and zombies are basically the same thing? They’re both undead humans risen from the grave that feast on the living. You do not want to get bitten by either of them. The difference really comes down to basically RPG rules of your chosen ghoulish Job Class. Vampires are much more intelligent, sexually enticing, and capable of dark magic, but have dozens of weaknesses. Zombies meanwhile are usually little more than shambling corpses, but are practically indestructible, so actually are far more successful at actually wiping out humanity in fiction.
Vampire fiction goes back centuries. But the modern zombie,
as we understand them, is less than sixty years old, going back to George A.
Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead. “Zombie” as a word is inspired by
Haitian Voodoo folklore, but those creatures are mindless slaves created by dark
necromancers. There were plenty of (frankly racist) films made in the early 20th century about that legend. The moaning creatures shuffling through malls that make for ironic statements on modern capitalism are a different breed.
All flavors of the undead are just shades of the
same universal human fear of death and the uncleanliness of corpses,
spiritually and otherwise. The Romero Zombie traces its origins as much
from Haiti as it does vampire fiction. In fact, everything in the zombie movie genre was anticipated in our movie tonight, which came out a few years before Night of
the Living Dead. It's a movie about isolation, a chilling world without us, and a battle for the very definition of "human". This is the classic post-apocalyptic film, The Last Man on Earth.
So far, every vampire movie we've seen has
depicted a loser. Prof./Dr. Van Helsing or some
stand-in always saves the world before the vampire problem gets worse than a
handful of monsters. But what if they failed completely? What if vampires took
over the Earth?
The Last Man on Earth is an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. (You probably know it better by the title, since Will Smith starred in a 2007 remake that following the trends of the time, switched out vampires for zombies.) This is our first true B-movie, an independent production, cheaply made, and still shot in black and white even into the Sixties. This was filmed around Rome, since Italy was a cheap place to shoot at the time. This does give the movie a lot of production value. They were able to find some grandiose modernist spaces leftover from Benito Mussolini’s regime, and as backdrops, they look great. If you’re going to make a B-movie in the Sixties, you’ll need the King of the B-Movie, Vincent Price. A good two-thirds of this movie is Price alone on set, accompanied only by his voice-over narration.
If you can only get one actor for most scenes, might as well be an absolute legend of
a performer with an unforgettable and distinct voice.
The film is set in 1968, four years into the future, after a
mass plague has wiped out humanity. Dr. Robert Morgan (Price) believes himself
to be the titular Last Man. In flashbacks, we learn that Morgan was one of
the scientists trying to stop the epidemic, but one who refused to believe
stories of the dead coming back to life. We see trucks full of bodies being
dumped off to be burned. Then the disease comes to Morgan’s own home, first
daughter goes blind and succumbs, then his wife, Virginia (Emma Danieli) falls
next. Morgan tried to save his daughter from the pits, only to be gravely pushed off by soldiers burning their own children. Not wanting to see another loved one tossed into the flames, Morgan secretly buries his wife. But then that night there’s a knocking on his door... with an incredible scare on the other side.
Most of the film is about Morgan
struggling to maintain his sanity in a hopeless world. His house is a mess
of boarded-up windows, scribbled notes on the walls, and a million kinds of junk. Interestingly though, the outside world is immaculate. Morgan can walk through the supermarkets without being overwhelmed
with rotting food, or he can pick up a Ford Sedan off the lot which is still
perfect and without a spec of dust. The most they do is decorate the roads a
bit with some old Fiats parked messily with open doors. Even so, the sheer
emptiness of the otherwise spotless city is creepy in its own right. And the
difference between Morgan’s ruined life and the peace outside is fitting with
the overall theme of the film.
Though The Last Man on Earth is a prototype for the future zombie genre. The undead gather in
masses around Morgan house every night. Their bodies are limp and weak, so
Vincent Price easily pushes them down. Their minds are slow, so at best they
can moan or call out Morgan’s name as they bang impotently against his windows. Yet, these
are still vampires. Morgan decorates his home with wreaths of garlic and
mirrors (in this version, vampires have reflections but cannot stand to look at
them). He meticulously works his way through the streets, staking sleeping
people.
The Last Man on Earth is one of the first films to dare
imagine that vampires are not monsters but human. Morgan calls himself the “the last man”,
screaming that all the others are “freaks”. Yet humanity is not dead, it has
merely changed. Morgan, like a Japanese Imperial soldier turned bandit in the
jungles of the Pacific, is fighting a war he lost years ago. The movie does not
dwell much on the enormity of Morgan’s crimes, it does not quite admit to calling him
the villain of the tale, yet he's left much closer to a quixotic antihero. We see, in spite of him, a world recovering. There are vampire
children. In a world full of the undead, the remaining mortal is the monster.
Still this movie is old and the budget is limited. The Last Man on Earth is cheesy
in a number of ways, right down to the wavy dissolve and harp noise to tell us
Vincent Price is entering a flashback. I still think this movie fucking rules.
It’s basically a long Twilight Zone episode and would have been one of the best
ones. This is one of Vincent Price’s very best
performances, as a vulnerable man desperate for any hope. Also, it is better than the Will Smith remake, mostly thanks to not succumbing to an utterly bullshit ending.
Next Time: After so much time with vampires inspired by Vlad the Impaler, we have
yet to meet the other great vampire of historical legend, Elizabeth Bathory. Let's fix that in
Daughters of Darkness.
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