Back in the early 1960s, it was possible to watch an episode of TV, read a short story or novel, and hit the drive-in movies all to see the work of one writer. Richard Matheson cast his net wide and if there was something odd to be written, he was your guy.
The ’60s were great for Matheson and many of his works became foundational to the horrors that followed. Can you imagine Night of the Living Dead (1968) if I Am Legend had not been published in 1954? Matheson’s masterpiece would be filmed three times on its own but many of the key points to Romero’s zombies are directly due to Matheson’s vampires. His 16 episodes of The Twilight Zone include classics such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Steel,” both based on his short stories. I’d argue, however, that mass audiences would not have put these together. It was the drive-in crowd who throttled Matheson into more popular awareness.
Matheson could do something that other people were trying and do it better than anyone else: he could take an Edgar Allan Poe story, get the gist — or decide to chunk it completely — and turn around a script perfect for Roger Corman to film and often for Vincent Price to star in. Price would later star in the first version of I Am Legend, scripted by Matheson under the pen name Logan Swanson and retitled The Last Man on Earth (1964). A string of what Stephen King called the “Poe pictures” came first. House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), and The Raven (1963) put Matheson’s name on the big screen with luridly colored title sequences, Price at his most menacing and his goofiest, and sat him rightfully alongside Poe as an American master of the macabre.
Like Poe (and some would argue, King), Matheson’s real strength was in short fiction. While his novels would often apply a scientific modality to horror and suspense, his short fiction leaned hard into microcosmic human experience and tension. A favorite of mine is “Witch War,” first published in 1951. Like many Matheson stories, this short piece is a direct response to World War II, which he served in. The story recounts a military agency overseeing a group of adolescent girls who can use their psychic abilities as weapons. Safely attacking from long distances, the girls could annihilate battalions while filing their fingernails and chewing gum. Their efforts are precise and effective and, of course, the male-dominate armed forces exploiting them are deeply afraid of their power. What if these girls decided to turn their focus to different targets, indeed onto those who were using them? Matheson not only predicts the experiments regarding psychic warfare but also the patriarchal fear that strong women would someday turn on men.
The smaller works also appealed to other filmmakers. The young Steven Spielberg turned Matheson’s short “Duel” into a TV movie masterpiece of suspense. Not long after that 1971 publication and broadcast, Matheson’s writing delighted TV audiences with The Night Stalker in 1972. His characterization of Kolchak, brought wonderfully to life by Darrin McGavin, is bolstered by knowing Matheson went to journalism school, earning his degree in 1949.
But like the best of the horror masters, Matheson knew when to reach for more mainstream audiences and use his skills with tension and suspense for other purposes. Moviegoers swooned for Christopher Reeves amid his Superman run during the film Somewhere in Time (1980), based on Matheson’s 1975 novel Bid Time Return. In the late 1990s, when Robin Williams was doing dramas, he starred in What Dreams May Come, based on Matheson’s 1978 novel of the same name. Both films are about desires that may go unfilled and the hope that there is more than just a linear life before us as humans.
Matheson knew what people wanted. He dished it out in popular media via film and television and gave readers a goldmine of novels and short stories that remain among the best American horror ever written. He tackled tropes such as vampires and zombies during a time when neither were popular. He told us that the small investigation conducted in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House would be the new wave in paranormal novels and ghost stories. He knew that road rage would be a thing and the fear of an unseen face in the cab of an 18-wheeler. He knew when to make us cry for a love that just doesn’t seem possible.
He knew. It’s one reason his work fits so well in The Twilight Zone motif. Like Serling, he could address the present and predict the future in ways that only the best speculative writers have done.
Before we part with the dearly departed Matheson (1926–2013), he has a connection with another writing world that many people do not know. The 1950s, when Matheson was cutting his teeth in both print and film, were heavily influenced by the Beat Generation: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and that crowd (which I, your humble messenger, also happen to love). Matheson wrote the screenplay for the 1959 crime noir film The Beat Generation. While it is not necessarily kind to our lonely poets and road writers, the film did move that nickname for the literary movement further into popular consciousness. And that, as they say, is groovy, daddy-o. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published has published six books, including The Blackhawk Cycle, a hardcover omnibus. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and is pursuing an MFA through the UCR-Palm Desert Low Residency program. Tranchell has also published work in Fangoria. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son and teaches at a community college. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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