I Am Legend Showcases The Folly Of Not Using The Greatest Horror Ending Of All Time

In spite of everything, the first two-thirds of “I Am Legend” are pretty great. It’s different, but it’s still got that same sense of dread and loneliness as the original novel. Robert Neville in the book has been going a little crazy as a result of being completely on his own for so long, and Will Smith gets that same sense across with his performance here. Like the book, the movie also conditions you to be terrified of the dark. The movie also makes the smart choice of giving Neville a dog from the very beginning, rather than meeting the dog and slowly befriending it as he does in the book. A movie only has so much time to develop Neville’s relationship with his dog before the dog inevitably dies, after all, and it gives Neville someone to talk to now that we don’t have the book’s access to his inner thoughts.

However, there were some choices made from the beginning that should’ve warned us of the bad ending that would come. The first was the decision to de-personify the vampires. In the book, the vampires were intelligent and capable of talking the whole time. The book’s vampires would use their speech to try to coax Neville out of his home each night, whereas the movie’s vampires just sort of thrash around and let out animalistic screams. They’re closer to the sort of fast zombies you’d see in “28 Days Later” than the vampire-like creatures Neville encounters in the book. Both versions are terrifying, but the book’s depiction is more interesting because its monsters are clearly intelligent and, as a result, are more sympathetic from the get-go. 

The far bigger red flag, however, was the introduction of Anna.