The Last Man on Earth

Three years after a plague has turned the human race into shambling, light-fearing, blood-hungry night-walkers, Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price, in one of his most quietly devastating performances) is the last uninfected man left alive — spending his days driving through deserted streets staking the sleeping creatures that were once his neighbors, then boarding himself inside as they claw and moan at the doors all night. Shot in stark black-and-white on the empty streets of Rome standing in for a dead American city, this first and still most faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend was an Italian-American co-production directed by Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona, a low-budget fever dream that invented the modern zombie apocalypse years before Night of the Living Dead. Price carries the film almost single-handedly, turning a shoestring sci-fi horror into an existential portrait of loneliness that has only grown more haunting with time — a cult classic of isolation and dread.