His main goal in life is to find survivors but he also has a secondary goal: to understand exactly how the vampires work. By night he retreats into his house, fully fortified against the hordes of vampires that wait outside.

By day he heads out into the desolate city, picking off unconscious vampires and raiding abandoned shops for supplies. One man, Robert Neville, has managed to survive both the infection and the onslaught of the infected. Their condition is caused by an infection, one that has been present throughout history – hence the existence of vampire legends – but which has now achieved epidemic proportions. Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend has a then-futuristic setting of the 1970s and depicts a world that has been conquered by vampires. That said, the cycle does have one shining success to its name: it produced a novel that can lay claim to being the first true classic of twentieth century vampire literature. Nothing dates as badly as a botched modernisation, and the 1950s trend for science fiction vampires is not particularly well-remembered today. It was not until Hammer’s 1958 Dracula starring Christopher Lee that the traditional supernatural vampire came back into vogue. More often than not, vampire films of the 1950s associated vampires with mad scientists: sometimes they were the product of mad science other times the vampires were themselves mad scientists, operating laboratories and unleashing monsters as in. The trend began in earnest with the film House of Dracula (1945), where the Count was portrayed as a victim of an exotic blood parasite who could conceivably be cured by medical science. But it was not until the postwar years that the idea of the scientific vampire reached its peak popularity.

Charles Wilkins Webber’s Spiritual Vampirism and Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire drew upon the pseudoscientific topic of psychic power to depict vampires who fed on something less tangible than blood. James Malcolm Rymer’s ramshackle Varney the Vampire introduced – and later abandoned – the notion that its main character was a man resurrected through galvanism. As far back as the nineteenth century, certain writers had tried to demystify vampires by coming up with scientific explanations for their condition and behaviour.

I am legend 1954