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MATHESON, RICHARD (1926– ). American writer.
Also: episodes of The
Incredible Hulk, Knight Rider, The Powers of Matthew Star.
Films based on his work: works
starred (*) and "And When the Sky Was Opened," episode of The Twilight Zone
(1959); It's Alive (Larry BUCHANAN 1968); The Omega Man (Boris
SAGAL 1971); What Dreams May Come (Vincent Ward 1998); Stir of Echoes (David Koepp
1999).
Take, for example, Richard Matheson.
If you want to stage a film festival filled with interesting
and entertaining films, select as your theme the films and television
programs written by Richard Matheson; your audiences will not be disappointed.
Begin—spectacularly—with The Incredible Shrinking Man, a film
that brilliantly employs the trope of gradual shrinkage to depict a man's
gradual alienation from society, his embrace of the nether world of little
people, his humiliating reduction to the status of his wife's doll, his
struggle to gain a piece of food from a spider—just about the only battle
between human and giant insect in the history of science fiction film
that means anything, as the spider is neither anthropomorphized nor demonized
but granted the status of a valid yet inhuman foe—and his final realization
of his true value as an individual. Next, show a few of his contributions
to The Twilight Zone, which include three of that series' best
episodes: "Little Girl Lost," an evocative horror story about a man's
daughter mysteriously transported to another dimension; "Nightmare at
20,000 Feet," where a passenger cannot get anyone to believe that he is
seeing a gremlin on the airplane wing, a scenario that effectively plays
on people's natural disquiet in the distant and confined environment of
an airplane; and best of all, "The Invaders," a script virtually without
dialogue, where a poor woman greets the arrival of little aliens as nothing
more than household pests tormenting her lonely life—and the final revelation
that the aliens are astronauts from Earth, the typical sort of corny twist
endemic to The Twilight Zone, here has an unsettling message.
In the 1960s, Matheson wrote primarily for horror films,
where assignments were at times less than stimulating and his work sometimes
suffered from others' interference—as in the mess that emerged as The
Last Man on Earth; but there are several good selections available
for the festival. The three episodes of Tales of Terror are the
best of his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, undoubtedly because he was not
burdened by the need to stretch a slender story to movie length; while
you should avoid the vastly overpraised The Raven, The Comedy
of Terrors is about as good as the genre of horror-comedy gets; Die!
Die! My Darling is diverting fluff; and his Star Trek episode,
"The Enemy Within," makes unusually effective use of a tired idea, the
man who splits into good and evil halves.
In moving on to Matheson's film and television work in
the 1970s, your festival will reach another high point with Duel,
which remains the best script Steven SPIELBERG
has ever had to work with, as its ferocious execution of a single horrific
motif—a driver pursued by a malevolent truck—perfectly suited Spielberg's
simple-mindedness. Yet there are signs of flagging imagination: although
written with intelligence and style, The Legend of Hell House seems
derivative, a film haunted more by its superior predecessor, The Haunting
(Robert WISE 1963), than by household spooks; his adaptation of Dracula
is unremarkable; and The Stranger Within mines familiar territory—a woman impregnated by aliens—to no great effect. But his script of
The Martian Chronicles is undervalued, since Matheson respectfully
chose the best moments from Ray BRADBURY's story collection, often with
impressive results. Considered as another of Matheson's anthologies, The
Martian Chronicles stands with his best work; it fails as a film for
the same reasons that Bradbury's book fails as a novel. And Somewhere
in Time is a charming and evocative time-travel story, rather betrayed
by Jeannot SZWARC's indifferent direction and the lackluster performance
of its star Christopher REEVE.
Only in the 1980s does the vector seem to falter, as
your festival may wind down a bit anticlimactically with an episode of
The Powers of Matthew Star and the toothless Jaws 3-D, which
a charitable observer might detect was originally an effective horror
scenario grotesquely distorted to accommodate the gimmick of 3-D. But
The Dreamer of Oz will serve as a mellow, heartwarming conclusion,
as Matheson evidently seemed to identify with its hero, L. Frank Baum,
a man who delighted in telling entertaining stories, surprisingly well
played by John Ritter.
In the arena where the horror film intersects with the
science fiction, Matheston stands as a masterful creator, virtually without
peer in the quality and quantity of his work. Many books have been written
that celebrate science fiction film producers, directors, actors, and
special effects artists, and these people surely merit some attention;
but somebody, someday, should write a book that pays tribute to a science
fiction film writer. And Richard Matheson would be an ideal subject. |
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