Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel I Am Legend, a science fiction-horror hybrid pitting the soul survivor of a global plague against vampires, has previously been adapted for the screen as The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. It also inspired George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Matheson—who wrote seminal scripts for The Twilight Zone as well as the novels The Shrinking Man, Hell House, and A Stir of Echoes, is a master at creating fantastic situations in suburban settings. In I Am Legend, his protagonist, Robert Neville, is an Everyman turned survivalist; to genre fans, the character is as important an American fiction icon as Huckleberry Finn and Atticus Finch.

The current version stars Will Smith as Neville. This casting generated controversy among armchair “experts” who don’t seem to realize that Price and Heston were horribly miscast in the role, or that Smith has acquitted himself well in such dramatic films as Six Degrees of Separation, Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. In fact, Smith is outstanding here and makes the best Neville yet.

This is a serious and sincere horror film, most successful in its first half, which finds Neville and his dog prowling the deserted ruins of New York City for food during the day. They hole up in Neville’s fortress brownstone by night, when vampire-like mutants created by a cancer cure gone wrong hunt them. The haunting images during this portion are an excellent example of how computer imagery can enhance a film, while the creatures resemble badly animated targets in a video game.

The story builds to the inevitable assault on Neville’s personal fortress, and I was pleased to see that director Mark Lawrence played the action straight and in a reasonably believable fashion, without any Die Hard-style stunts. I found the coda unsatisfying, but the filmmakers deserve credit for aiming this film at adults.