Directed by: Sidney Salkow, Ubaldo Ragona

Starring: Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Umberto Raho, Christi Courtland

STORY

The world as Dr. Robert Morgan knew it is gone.

A mysterious disease has swept across humanity, killing nearly everyone it touches. But death is not necessarily the end. The victims return as vampire-like creatures who roam the streets after dark, searching for blood and surrounding Morgan’s home night after night.

Morgan, played by the incomparable Vincent Price, appears to be the last uninfected human being alive.

His existence has become a grim routine. During the daylight hours, when the creatures are helpless, Morgan searches abandoned buildings, destroys the infected and disposes of their bodies. Before darkness falls, he retreats to his fortified home, where garlic, mirrors and barricaded doors offer his only protection against the creatures waiting outside.

Among them is Ben Cortman, once Morgan’s friend, who returns night after night to call for Morgan to come outside.

But Morgan’s greatest enemy may not be the creatures surrounding his house. It is loneliness.

Through flashbacks, we discover the life he lost. Morgan once had a wife, Virginia, and a young daughter, Kathy. As the mysterious plague spread and society collapsed around them, Morgan desperately tried to understand the disease and protect his family. He could save neither.

Now he lives surrounded by photographs, memories and the remnants of a civilization that no longer exists.

Then Morgan sees something impossible.

A woman walking in daylight.

Her name is Ruth Collins, and her appearance forces Morgan to question everything he believes about the plague, the creatures he has been hunting and his own place in this terrifying new world.

The Last Man on Earth is more than a vampire movie. Beneath its horror story is a haunting examination of isolation, grief and what happens when the person who believes himself to be normal discovers that the world may have changed around him.

And at the center of it all is Vincent Price, carrying enormous portions of the film virtually alone and creating one of the eeriest portraits of loneliness in 1960s horror.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

BEFORE I AM LEGEND, THERE WAS THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

The Last Man on Earth was the first feature-film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s groundbreaking 1954 novel I Am Legend. The novel would later inspire The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in 1971 and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in 2007.

But Vincent Price got there first.

RICHARD MATHESON WROTE THE SCREENPLAY, THEN CHANGED HIS NAME

Richard Matheson participated in adapting his own novel for the screen, but he was unhappy with the finished movie. Rather than have his real name appear on the screenplay credit, he used the pseudonym Logan Swanson.

William P. Leicester also received screenplay credit, with Furio M. Monetti and Ubaldo Ragona credited on the Italian version.

THE MOVIE ALMOST STARTED AT HAMMER

Before the film reached Robert L. Lippert, Britain’s Hammer Film Productions had acquired the rights to Matheson’s novel and planned its own adaptation.

Matheson wrote a screenplay for the proposed Hammer production, but the project ran into problems with British censors and never moved forward in that form. The property eventually made its way to Lippert, and the production relocated to Italy.

VINCENT PRICE TAKES ON THE APOCALYPSE

Vincent Price had already established himself as one of horror cinema’s most recognizable stars, but The Last Man on Earth gave him an unusually demanding assignment.

For significant stretches of the movie, Price has virtually no one with whom to play a scene. Morgan drives through deserted streets, searches abandoned buildings, prepares his defenses and confronts the memories of his dead family.

The result depends heavily on Price’s ability to make loneliness itself dramatic.

ROME BECAME THE END OF THE WORLD

Although the story concerns an American survivor, the production was shot in Rome, Italy.

The filmmakers used Rome’s striking architecture and largely deserted locations to create Morgan’s abandoned world. Production began in early 1963, with Vincent Price arriving in Rome before principal photography got underway.

The unusual locations help give the film its distinctive atmosphere. Instead of looking like a conventional Hollywood backlot, Morgan’s world feels strangely empty, monumental and unfamiliar.

A VERY INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION

The Last Man on Earth was an American and Italian production with a largely Italian cast and crew working alongside Vincent Price.

The film was produced by Robert L. Lippert, photographed by Franco Delli Colli, edited by Gene Ruggiero and scored by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter.

American International Pictures distributed the film in the United States.

AINTOID: VAMPIRES THAT LOOK SUSPICIOUSLY LIKE ZOMBIES

The infected in The Last Man on Earth are vampires, but they do not always behave like the elegant supernatural vampires audiences had come to expect.

They move slowly. They gather outside Morgan’s home. They surround the building. They relentlessly try to reach the living man trapped inside.

That imagery makes The Last Man on Earth fascinating when viewed alongside the zombie films that would soon transform modern horror.

AINTOID: THE TITLE WASN’T ALWAYS THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

During development, the project was referred to by the title of Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend.

AFI records show the project being announced under that title years before production began. By the time principal photography was underway in 1963, it was being called The Last Man on Earth.

AINTOID: THE BOOK CREATED AN ENDURING HORROR LEGACY

Matheson’s I Am Legend proved remarkably durable.

The same basic story would return to movie screens in dramatically different forms over the following decades. Charlton Heston starred in The Omega Man in 1971, while Will Smith starred in the 2007 adaptation I Am Legend.

That makes Vincent Price’s Robert Morgan the first screen incarnation of Matheson’s legendary last survivor.

AINTOID: THE OFFICIAL RELEASE

The Last Man on Earth opened in Los Angeles on May 6, 1964. AFI records that it played at twenty Los Angeles-area theaters and drive-ins as a double feature with Circus of Horrors.

Its New York opening followed on September 2, 1964.

The film runs approximately 86 minutes and was released in black and white

DATE RELEASED

May 6, 1964

COUNTRY RELEASED

United States