It’s the birthday of Richard Matheson, prolific writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and a major influence on such authors as Stephen King. Many of Matheson’s novels or stories have been made into movies, including his best known work, I Am Legend (1954), about the last human in a world full of vampires. I Am Legend has been made into movies three times: The Last Man on Earth (Vincent Price, 1964), The Omega Man (Charlton Heston, 1971), and I Am Legend (Will Smith, 2007), which features zombies instead of vampires. (Three times seems like plenty. Just tossing that out there. Although I did like the Will Smith version.)

Matheson was born in 1926 in Allendale, New Jersey, to Norwegian immigrants and raised by his mother in Brooklyn after his parents divorced. He served in the U.S. Army during WWII (later basing his non-science fiction novel The Beardless Warriors on this experience) and returned to study journalism at the University of Missouri. The journalism evidently didn’t stick: he began writing vast quantities of science fiction/horror/fantasy stories, first garnering attention with “Born of Man and Woman” (Summer 1950, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction). He began writing novels as well (Someone Is Bleeding, 1953; The Shrinking Man, 1956; and a heap more, including some westerns) and wrote for television as well, including the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” (1966) and more than a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone. His story Duel, based on his own harrowing real-life experience of being tail-gated by a truck, was made into a television movie directed by a young Stephen Spielberg (1971) and has a 7.7/10 rating on IMDb.

Matheson married Ruth Ann Woodson in 1952 and stayed married. They had four children, three of whom became writers. He said that the 1931 movie Dracula was his inspiration for I Am Legend: “I thought, ‘If one vampire is scary, what if the whole world is full of vampires?’” (Doesn’t that sound incredibly obvious, now that he says it? Insert anything into the following sentence: If one __________ is scary, what if the whole world is full of ___________s? Works with spiders, werewolves, persistent telemarketers…)

I am unable to find much on Matheson’s personal life, which leads one to suspect that in spite of his obsession with horror he enjoyed a satisfying and horror-free domestic situation. (That, or his whole family’s hiding something. We really don’t know, do we?) He died of natural causes on June 23, 2013, at the ripe old age of 87.

Have a satisfying and horror-free Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest, as ever, to the data.