A Variation On Vampire Lore That Won?t Die

FROM the outside Robert Nevilles red brick home looks like all the other stately Greek revival town houses facing Washington Square Park. But the interior, actually a set inside a Brooklyn armory, is something else entirely. The kitchen is stacked top to bottom with what seems like several years worth of canned goods and packaged food, and all the windows have floor-to-ceiling retractable steel doors that can be locked down at a moments notice.

Robert Neville, after all, thinks he is the last man alive in a time when a biological plague has created a race of night-crawling human freaks who would like nothing better than to penetrate his sanctuary. As played by Will Smith, he is also one of the few noninfected characters in I Am Legend, a Warner Brothers production that has been shooting in New York for release in December.

Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman (an Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind), I Am Legend is testimony to the unexpected durability of Richard Mathesons novel of the same name. It is the third film based on a book whose original impulse was to one-up the screen vampires of an earlier era.

First published in 1953, the novel is a taut, realistic chiller about a postapocalyptic world in which germ warfare creates a biological plague that turns humans into bloodsuckers. The idea was born, said Mr. Matheson, now 80 and living in the Los Angeles area, when I was a teenager and saw Bela Lugosi in Dracula.

I thought if the world was full of vampires, it would be more frightening than just one, he continued. And I explained vampires in biological terms.

I Am Legend was almost immediately optioned for the movies (Hammer Films in Britain originally owned the rights), but it wasnt until 1964 that Vincent Price appeared in The Last Man on Earth, a low-budget version shot in Italy. Then, in 1971, Warner released The Omega Man, a more expensive studio production, starring Charlton Heston, that made extensive use of Los Angeless deserted-looking downtown.

Both versions took certain liberties with Mr. Mathesons original concept, largely sidestepping its startlingly prescient, and philosophical, ending: In the book, some vampires have developed a pill that keeps the disease in check and allows them to live relatively normal lives. This element now plays as an AIDS metaphor, though the book was written 30 years before H.I.V. was even identified.

It is this idea of pandemic, along with the concepts of vampirism and the effects of solitude on the human psyche, that have kept Mr. Mathesons slim novel both contemporary and of interest to filmmakers. But the current version of I Am Legend nonetheless had a long road to the screen.

Warner Brothers has owned the rights to the book since 1970, and first decided to revive the project in 1994. I Am Legend was close to a start date in 1997, with Ridley Scott directing Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the studio pulled the plug when the budget climbed over $100 million, a huge sum at the time. (Studio executives declined to reveal the budget for the current version.) Then, in 2002, Michael Bay and Will Smith were set to hook up, but that pairing also fell through.

There have been issues with the budget, script issues between director and actors, directors and the studio, even issues with what the creatures should look like, said Mr. Lawrence, the director.

About two years ago Warner was about to drop the project for good when the studios president for production, Jeff Robinov, asked Mr. Smith if he would be willing to pair up with Mr. Goldsman to develop a new take on the material. Mr. Goldsman was one of the credited writers on I, Robot, which starred Mr. Smith. And he admired Mr. Lawrence for his work on Constantine, the 2005 fantasy-horror film.

Mr. Robinov says it is the notion of isolation that makes I Am Legend perennially attractive. For an actor it involves a lot of character, the idea of being the last survivor, he said. And for a director its the story, the ability to create a different version of society, of where the world is at that point.

Mr. Lawrence agreed. Ive always been fascinated by mans isolation in an urban environment, he said. How someone survives when theyre by themselves for so long. Physically survives, mentally and emotionally survives with complete social deprivation.

This time out the story is set in 2009, three years after something called the KV virus, developed in a laboratory but mutated out of control, has created a planet of bloodthirsty but still recognizably human freaks. Mr. Smiths Neville, a former military scientist, has not been infected and is trying to find a cure for the pandemic. Manhattan had been quarantined back in 2006, and as far as Neville knows he is the only human left on the island, if not the world.

The storys location was moved from California (the book is set in Compton) to New York. In addition to the interiors of Nevilles house, which were erected at the 66,000-square-foot Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg, the production has shot in TriBeCa and on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. The filmmakers have also rented the 152,000-square-foot Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, which they are using for a large special-effects-driven action sequence to be staged next month. And in a particularly brazen piece of logistics, the production company cleared the area around St. Patricks Cathedral for a ghostly New York-without-humans sequence.

Its hard to make Los Angeles feel empty, Mr. Goldsman said. Here, you just have to look down Fifth Avenue empty, and you understand something. Theres a conveyance of information and fantasy that is wonderful and amazing.

This version of the story also updates it to reflect current concerns. While the Heston film had a subtext with its roots in the early days of the environmental movement, the current film moves back toward Mr. Mathesons concept of a viral apocalypse.

There is a little bit of an AIDS metaphor here, especially in terms of dealing with the infected, because the people Neville deals with are infected, said Mr. Lawrence. Theyre not dead, theyre not vampires, they have a chronic disease.

For Mr. Goldsman, Mr. Mathesons seeming ability to foretell an epidemic reflects the magic of sophisticated fantasy.

People infected with AIDS have been on the forefront of understanding the truths about how viruses work, contagion works, stigma works, which is something I think Matheson was finding in that early novel, he said. He is like H. G. Wells and William Gibson, people who do a little leapfrogging imaginatively. And you wait around long enough, and suddenly youre in one of their books.

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