The Last Man on Earth

"The Last Man on Earth" (1964) – A Grim, Gorgeous Apocalypse Before the Apocalypse Was Cool

There are movies that drag their feet through the wasteland. And then there are movies that crawl bleeding through the ruins with a cigarette in their teeth and a loaded stake in hand, daring you to call them slow. "The Last Man on Earth" (1964), directed by Ubaldo Ragona (with some whispery co-direction by Sidney Salkow), isn’t just the grandfather of modern zombie horror—it’s the filthy, unshaven bastard father that never got the birthday card it deserved.

And in the middle of this black-and-white coffin of dread? Vincent Price. Oh yes, Vincent Price. Smooth, tragic, haunted—he’s a walking elegy in a trench coat, drinking daylight and swatting at vampires like a man half in love with death. There’s no camp here, no arched eyebrows or velvet capes. This is Price at his loneliest, his most human. He’s not fighting monsters. He’s fighting memory, routine, isolation—the kind of real-world hell that hits harder than any CGI apocalypse.

You see, this beast is based on Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend”, the ur-text for every post-apocalyptic orgy of gore and moral collapse we’ve choked on since. Romero saw this. Romero ate this film for breakfast, and by dinner he had Night of the Living Dead on the stove. Without this, there's no zombie genre as we know it. No Dawn, no Day, no fucking Dead.

Sure, the film’s low budget shows its ribs. Some of the dubbing sounds like it was done in a bathroom stall in Rome. But hell, that only adds to the charm. This thing reeks of post-war paranoia and cold war nihilism. It’s a love letter from the end of the world, typed in blood and sealed with ash.