Yes, ‘I Am Legend,’ the 2007 movie about zombie vampires, is now a part of the vaccine conversation – By Sonia Rao (The Washington Post)/ Aug 11 2021
“I Am Legend,” Francis Lawrence’s post-apocalyptic thriller in which a virus genetically re-engineered to cure cancer instead destroys mankind, is famously not a documentary. You’d be hard-pressed to find people who believe its lead actor, Will Smith, to be an actual virologist for the U.S. Army.
And yet as recently as earlier this week, it behooved one of the “I Am Legend” screenwriters to clarify that the 2007 film is, in fact, a work of fiction: “Oh. My. God,” tweeted Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the adapted screenplay with Mark Protosevich. “It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s. Not. Real.”
In “I Am Legend,” loosely based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, people who aren’t killed by the re-engineered measles virus turn into vampire-like zombies. Goldsman was responding to a snippet from a recent New York Times story about a business struggling to get its employees vaccinated, one of whom expressed concern over a vaccine turning “I Am Legend” characters into cannibalistic mutants. In the film, it isn’t actually a vaccine but the virus itself that causes the transition.
