Classic Horror - Did "I Am Legend" firecharge the genre?

[MollyOlmstead]

Richard Matheson wrote I Am Legend in 1954 and yet it's still incredibly relevant today. Before Matheson's novel, the staples of horror literature were Frankenstein (1818), Dracula (1897) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), among other classic examples. But I think Matheson really turned the happy-go-lucky 50's culture on it's head with this terrifying novel.

Matheson writes in a way that makes us not only afraid of what's on the page — actually, if you ask me the actual plot content of I Am Legend isn't even that scary on its own! — but also what it implicates in society as a whole.