On Richard Matheson
A Writer Worth Remembering
Let’s talk about Richard Matheson—a writer who, in retrospect, is arguably one of the most influential storytellers of the 20th century…that no one has ever heard of.
He penned the most iconic episode of The Twilight Zone. He drafted the blueprint for the modern zombie genre. His copious output over a sixty year span has been consistently adapted for the screen—often with Matheson himself providing the screenplays and starring big budget actors like Hugh Jackman and Will Smith.
He even gave Steven Spielberg his directorial debut!
Okay, so maybe “no one” is a bit hyperbolic. But it’s undeniable that Matheson, for all the praise he’s received from his peers, never became the household name that someone like Stephen King—a similar dabbler in paranormal page turners (and someone for whom Matheson was a major influence)—did.
But for the people who know their stuff—the sci-fi nerds and the TV historians, the movie buffs and the genre tastemakers—he is, well, legend.
Richard Matheson (1926-2013) embodied the archetype of the working class wordsmith who seizes his manifest destiny to make it big as a tinsel town screenwriter. But despite going Hollywood, by all accounts Matheson remained an upstanding citizen and loving family man1 with none of the public dysfunction so typical of his literary colleagues—kind of like Harlan Ellison without the bad attitude.
Matheson was a genre hopper, writing everything from science fiction to crime thrillers, horror stories to fantasy and romance—as a veteran of World War II, he even penned a highly regarded war novel.
But for all its variety, a recurring motif that ties together much of Matheson’s work is that of paranormal phenomena being given a plausible pretense, while still maintaining said phenomena’s spooky bona fides—an impressive balancing act made possible by his grounded characterization and meticulous attention to detail.
For example, the vampires in I Am Legend (one of Matheson’s most famous novels) are explained as being the result of an anaerobic bacteria named bacillus vampiris that causes symptoms stereotypical of folkloric vampirism—the desire to drink blood, sunlight sensitivity, garlic allergy, et cetera—while the vampiric fear of mirrors and crucifixes is diagnosed as a kind of psychosomatic hypochondria caused by cultural superstition. Matheson provides similar forms of scientific hypothesis for haunted houses, psychic powers, time travel, and even the afterlife itself.
Matheson’s seeming desire (if not compulsion) to give natural explanations to supernatural experiences makes a lot of sense when you consider his background as a Christian Scientist—not a scientist who’s also a Christian, mind you, but a member of the Christian Science religion, an odd form of proto-New Age Christianity founded in the late 1800s that misguidedly attempted to synthesize Scripture with a mind-over-matter philosophy that turned the Bible into a kind of self-help manual for “spiritual but not religious” types. And while Matheson left organized religion as an adult in favor of his own hodgepodge spirituality, its influence permeates his work.
Theological errors aside, Matheson had the saving grace of being decidedly not a moral relativist, nihilist, or postmodernist: his belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil and the power of love in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds outshines any moral mistakes that would otherwise mar his work.
Richard Matheson died in 2013 at the age of 87, but even before his death his legacy as a writer worth remembering was assured—and his reputation will likely only grow with hindsight. The Penguin Classics Best of Richard Matheson compilation includes blurbs from famous authors like Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King all singing his praises, with King himself going so far as to say “[Matheson is] the author who influenced me most as a writer.”
So what are these stories that earned Matheson such renown? With a bibliography so big (dozens of novels and at least a hundred short stories) it would take a book longer than any Matheson himself ever wrote to write about them all, but there are nonetheless quite a few noteworthy highlights.
Matheson, debuting in 1950, may have missed the heyday of pulp fiction, but his gruesome short stories would have fit right in with the fantastical horrors of Weird Tales and the hardboiled grit of Black Mask.
“Born of Man and Woman”—Matheson’s first published story—tells the tale of a deformed monster locked away in the basement by its terrified parents, with the twist being that the events in the story are written in broken English from said monster’s perspective, to disturbing effect. Matheson was a master of the twist ending, making it no wonder that so many of his short stories ended up being adapted into episodes of Rod Serling’s iconic anthology series The Twilight Zone.
As referenced in the introduction, the quintessential Twilight Zone episode—"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a pre-Star Trek William Shatner is terrorized midflight by a grotesque gremlin that only he can see—was penned by Richard Matheson, based on his own short story of the same name.
A core part of Rod Serling’s writing team for The Twilight Zone, Matheson wrote the teleplays for most of the episodes based on his short stories2, including “Little Girl Lost”—a paranormal thriller in which a father attempts to save his daughter after she’s inexplicably transported to an alternate dimension (in a plot that bears a striking similarity to the 1982 horror film Poltergeist)—and “Steel,” a sci-fi story set in a future world where boxers have been replaced by robots (adapted again in 2011 into the big budget CGI-heavy action film Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman).
Some other standouts from Matheson’s short story collections include:
“A Flourish of Strumpets” (1956) - the concept of this comic dystopia where prostitutes act as door-to-door saleswomen seems almost quaint compared to our current real world dystopia where so-called “sex work” is openly celebrated
“The Distributor” (1958) - one of Matheson’s most disturbing works (and that’s saying something!) about a titular “Distributor” who intentionally distributes unbridled misery wherever he goes, in this case to an erstwhile happy suburban neighborhood
“Mantage” (1959) - a “be careful what you wish for” tale about a man whose life becomes a living movie montage in nightmarish fashion
“Button, Button” (1970) - a moral dilemma in the form of a button that, if pressed, will give the protagonists a large sum of money…in exchange for the death someone they don’t know; notably adapted as both an episode of the 1985 version of The Twilight Zone and a 2009 feature film
“Shoo Fly” (1988) - while the plot sounds inane—a man becomes increasingly annoyed by a housefly buzzing in his office to the point insanity—it’s the execution (and ending) that makes this one so memorable
Matheson’s takeover of television didn’t end with The Twilight Zone. Three of his stories were also adapted into the cult classic television anthology movie Trilogy of Terror (1975) starring Karen Black; and his 1971 short story “Duel”—in which a crazed truck driver chases a man across the country—was filmed as another made-for-TV movie in the same year, directed by none other than the aforementioned Steven Spielberg, years before he became a household name.
Matheson also wrote an episode of the original Star Trek series—“The Enemy Within” (1966)—if you’re into that sort of thing.3
From the small screen to the silver screen, Matheson wrote the screenplays for several of Roger Corman’s celebrated Edgar Allen Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Raven (1963).
Many of Matheson’s own novels were brought to life on the big screen over the years to varying degrees of success. Core novels from Matheson’s catalogue include:
I Am Legend (1954) - popularized the post-apocalyptic genre and, with its shambling hordes of the walking dead roaming the earth in search of—if not brains, then blood—inspired director George A. Romero to film 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the progenitor of the modern zombie genre
The Shrinking Man (1956) - filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man in 1957, with a simple, self-explanatory plotline that Matheson nonetheless takes as far as it will go—from the main character’s feelings of emasculation with his wife to an epic battle against a giant (from his perspective) spider, all culminating into a journey inside the quantum realm and beyond; one of the best of the many “scary science” films so ubiquitous to the 1950s
Hell House (1971) - a haunted house story that shows, in gratuitous detail, all the dark and evil things that were only vaguely hinted at in Shirley Jackson’s similar-in-concept 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House; unfortunately full of 1970s sacrilege and featuring a scene of blasphemy more obscene than anything found in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (published in the same year)
Somewhere in Time (1975) - originally given the Shakespearian title of Bid Time Return, reprints of the novel opt for the more consumer-friendly title of the Christopher Reeve film adaptation (1980); a temporal romance where time travel is achieved not by Wellsian machinery but Mathesonian parapsychology—the main character travels back in time via an odd kind of hypnotically-induced interactive dream retrocognition influenced by the theories of J.W. Dunne
What Dreams May Come (1978) - a well-written and enjoyable but theologically abysmal vision of a New Age-inspired afterlife where the recently deceased main character (played by Robin Williams in the 1998 movie version) journeys into Hell to save his wife’s soul—the Divine Comedy for hippies, in other words; Matheson includes a vast bibliography of “non-fiction” books, the research of which inspired him to write the novel—sadly it features nothing but a bunch of sundry psychic slop written by various self-help gurus and millionaire mediums, with Sacred Scripture nowhere to be found
Richard Matheson’s sons have followed in their father’s literary footsteps—Richard Christian Matheson adapted one of his dad’s short stories for the Masters of Horror anthology, and Chris Matheson co-created the popular series of Bill and Ted comedies
With the notable exception of “Third From the Sun,” which was adapted by none other than Rod Serling himself
Not for lack of trying, but I’ve never been able to get into Star Trek
Easily, hands down the best writer I've ever read and I just discovered his work this year.