In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to talk about something that has come up quite a bit recently, and I can only guess it has to do with the fact that Halloween is the season of horror movies and zombies. More people are crowding around televisions and flocking to theaters to see movies that embrace the spooky ideal. Which is great. It means that people like me get a chance to show others the movies we love and share our joy without getting looked at funny.

Believe me, it happens.

One thing I dislike most in life is when people refuse to acknowledge source material and/or the facts and continue on their merry way spouting half truths or outright untruths about something. And yes, it’s a small part of life that maybe I should let go of, but for some things I just can’t. This is one of those things. Maybe I can’t let go of this because it impacted the way that people watched the film, and thus impacted the reviews the film got. I think that it got a bad rap, didn’t get the acknowledgement that it should have gotten.

The movie? I know you want to know. I Am Legend.

In 1954 Richard Matheson wrote about the end of the world. It has come about due to a virus, something that is unstoppable and horrifying, turning people into monsters. This is a concept that most of us today are familiar with, because of Matheson. I Am Legend helped to shape the zombie apocalypse and the zombie genre. It sparked inspiration for Night Of The Living Dead. These days, the end of the world coming about due to zombies is commonplace, so much so that a lot of people refuse to go see any more zombie movies since they’ve saturated the market.

When the film version came out (which was proceeded by The Last Man On Earth and Omega Man), people went and viewed it as a zombie flick. Just another group of monsters that has been accidentally genetically engineered and have taken down humanity with very few exceptions. Animals and humans alike were taken by the infection. Those that succumb are, indeed, called Infected.

But they are also called Darkseekers. You see, these creatures are not, in fact, zombies. They’re vampires. A thing that the novel makes quite clear. There are clues to this in the movie as well, as long as you’re not going into it thinking zombies from the get-go, and remain unable to let go of that idea throughout. As a zombie film, I Am Legend comes off as a little weird. We don’t know zombies like this, and we’re loathe to accept new zombie species (which is weird, since the genre is filled with all manner of the flesh-eating walking dead).

Last Man On Earth also makes this clear. Starring Vincent Price, they never make any allusions to zombies at all. It’s always Price out on the hunt for vampires. Granted, this movie is mostly disowned by Matheson due to the monumental amount of changes to the script that he helped write. Omega Man suffers from Matheson having absolutely no input on the script at all. While technically the Infected in this could still be considered vampires, mostly they’re just weirdo mutants who call themselves The Family. If you look at I Am Legend with this knowledge, you’ll see that it stays much truer to the source material. There are deviations in the story itself, but the Infected remain vampiric in their nature rather than zombie-like.

When I first saw this film in theaters, I was told that it was a zombie flick and that I wouldn’t like it. Having read the novel previously, I wondered why the script writers would deviate so wholly from the source, thus I was ready to be up in arms and hate the whole experience. While sitting there, I couldn’t help thinking that these things were not zombies. They didn’t resemble zombies in any way that we knew. I’m not generally a person who needs all zombie lore to be cohesive. I understand that some people like their zombies to be slow, some fast. Some write it so that the virus infects all living creatures, some it’s only humans. Okay, whatever. That’s fine.

But these creatures were attracted to Neville’s blood specifically. And since when do zombies fear the sun? In I Am Legend, most of the population dies, only a small percentage survive. Those that get infected and don’t die, don’t die. They degenerate into these creatures that are super aggressive and feed off of the uninfected. The uninfected are those that are absolutely immune. They are either killed off by the vampires, or they routinely commit suicide.

In 2005, George A Romero dallies in the idea that eventually zombies might come around to lower-level thinking again. Since Night Of The Living Dead was influenced by the novel I Am Legend, it is reasonable to believe that this idea was also lifted from the story. In I Am Legend, the vampires begin to regain traces of humanity. They regain higher thinking and reasoning. They manage to return to something of a normal life after a period of a few years. Perhaps Romero’s delve into the idea stuck in people’s minds when they viewed I Am Legend a couple years later, I don’t know.

All I know is that since its release, I Am Legend has been stuck in the zombie genre by a gross number of people. What I want from the world is for an acknowledgement that they are not zombies at all. They are vampires. This is a vampire flick. Now, the rest of it might not appeal to you. Will Smith is the lone character aside from the dog for most of the film. He’s weird. He’s lonely. There’s a lot of talking to himself. I love the movie, but it’s not for everybody. I know that. I don’t care. I just want people to know: Vampires. Not zombies. Vampires.