Weirdly, the horror movie that’s come up the most this year in relation to the pandemic is I Am Legend, which made the news recently for the dumbest possible reason. As we’ve mentioned before, anti-vaxxers latched onto the 2007 Will Smith movie as a justification for not taking the vaccine — which is a little like refusing to call 911 with a smartphone because of some shit that went down in I, Robot. Even dumber than turning down a potentially life-saving vaccine because of a movie penned by the screenwriter behind Batman & Robin, whoever started that particular conspiracy theory wildly misrepresented the premise of the movie, which involves a zombie-vampire apocalypse caused by a “genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.”
It could be argued that the movie that better encapsulates 2021 is another version of that same story. The book I Am Legend by legendary Twilight Zone/godawful buddy cop flick writer Richard Matheson was turned into two previous movies; The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston. And it could be argued that the Heston movie is a much better reflection of our modern existence. For one thing, The Omega Man is actually a vaccine success story. The reason why Robert Neville is humanity’s lone survivor (or so we think) is that he injected himself with an experimental vaccine.
Warner Bros.
And he pretty much spends his days alone watching stuff; sure, he’s begrudgingly screening prints of Woodstock in an old theater, not binging Tiger King in his pajamas, but still …
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
At night he battles a gang of zombie-vampire albinos in shades. But unlike other versions of the same story, in this version, the vampires are more like a cult, they love being vampires, and they’re attacking Neville because they blame science as a whole for the apocalypse. Sure, our current situation (despite what you might see on YouTube) wasn’t caused by bioweapons like in The Omega Man, but the vilification of the medical scientist who is trying to actually solve this problem plays way differently now in an era when mobs are literally storming hospitals. Unfortunately, the movie also features hopelessly stereotyped Black characters and a white savior narrative — but at least it’s got the star of Ben-Hur mowing down vampires with a machine gun.
And in a way, it makes perfect sense that we would turn to horror stories to help us understand medical emergencies seeing as so many of our greatest monster myths were, in essence, created by misinterpretations of disease. People assigned supernatural explanations to then-unexplainable maladies, like how porphyria, a blood disorder that can cause blisters when patients are exposed to sunlight and receding gums that make teeth look more pronounced, contributed to both the vampire and werewolf myths, as did rabies, which can cause confusion and hallucinations. And it’s probably not a coincidence that both creatures are created by bites. Diseases led to monsters, monsters led to stories, and those stories, in turn, help us to grapple with the horrors of illness; it’s basically a feedback loop of anxieties that somehow help us to cope with mortality. Because, when it comes right down to it, we’re all, one day, going to have to make that metaphorical horny trip to Camp Crystal Lake.
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Top Image: RADiUS-TWC
Related: Learn Something New In 2021 To Make Your Parents Less Disappointed
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