The Horror Genre in I am Legend by Richard Matheson

In I Am Legend, Richard Matheson both satisfies and subverts horror genre expectations in order to convey the idea that people are reluctant to change. He fulfills expectations with the usage of the zombie trope and through the characters’ desire to maintain a sense of normalcy. He subverts the expectations with abnormal details and by revealing who the true creature is. The zombies symbolize a change in the world and the characters’ curiosity symbolizes their need for answers in a world with no explanations. The usage of subtle differences offer something unexpected to the reader by paralleling the unexpected situation that Robert Neville finds himself in. Matheson uses these techniques in order to convey the message that even though our nature makes us reluctant to adjust to change, we mist free ourselves to adapt or else we become the abnormal ones of society. To help demonstrate this, I will employ close reading and Noel Carroll’s The Nature of Horror. The in troduction of abnormal creatures that fit in both zombie and vampire tropes represent our need to categorize the unknown in the midst of a drastic change.. In an early scene, the zombies wait outside of Neville’s home, offering the audience a glimpse into a typical night in the new world. The creatures are seen as abnormal. In The Nature of Horror, Carroll writes, â€Å"In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.† Just as in other works thatShow MoreRelatedA Hero Or A Monster?1485 Words   |  6 PagesDayue Bai Professor Greg McClure Writing 39B 23 October 2016 A Hero or A Monster? As Noel Carroll states in his essay, The Nature of Horror, horror is one of the genres â€Å"in which ideally the emotive responses of the audience run parallel to the emotion of characters† (Carroll 52). It is also true in Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. By showing the protagonist’s tragic experience, the author deftly engenders the audience’s sympathetic emotion to the main character, which initially makes the audienceRead MoreBram Stoker s Dracula And Richard Matheson s I Am Legend2160 Words   |  9 Pages A key element of the fantasy / horror / gothic genres is to fascinate and intrigue readers through stories that pose the â€Å"what if† questions, thereby teaching us something new about the society we live in. Sometimes these stories are helpful in explaining difficult concepts of good and evil, science and religion. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the mythical horror creatures, the vampires, have ma ny differences in their mythical abilities, functionality and origin; however