He spun the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe into four excellent films ( House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven and Tales of Terror) for director Roger Corman and star Vincent Price.

He either turned his own novels into movies - the 1971 Hell House, filmed in 1973 as The Legend of Hell House - or adapted the work of others. (READ: TIME’s 1954 review of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend)Ī prodigious dreamer-upper of macabre twists on everyday life, Matheson wrote 28 novels, 88 short stories and dozens of movie and TV scripts (for Star Trek, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Night Gallery, among many others) he is as important in film history as he is in fantasy literature. A woman buys a Zuni fetish doll as a joke gift, then is attacked and assaulted when the doll comes to life (“Prey,” later a segment in the TV movie Trilogy of Terror).Īny of those ring a bell in the pit of your gut? A young couple is visited by a stranger who tells them they’ll be rich if they just push a button that will instantly kill someone they don’t know (“Button, Button,” The Twilight Zone). A man discovers he has psychic powers that make him hear the thoughts of his neighbors, and of the restless dead ( A Stir of Echoes). A plague of vampires roams the Earth (the novel I Am Legend). A driver on a lonesome highway is menaced by a killer truck (“Duel,” made into a 1971 TV movie by Steven Spielberg). A child disappears into the fourth dimension, her cries still audible to her father (“Little Girl Lost,” The Twilight Zone). An airline passenger sees a gremlin cavorting maliciously on an airplane wing (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” on The Twilight Zone). Here are a few of the images he implanted:Ī man notices he is losing wright - no, he’s getting smaller ( The Incredible Shrinking Man). In popular culture of the past 60 years, few writers deposited more images of dread in the cultural consciousness than Richard Matheson, who died Sunday June 23 at his Calabasas, Cal., home at the age of 87. If as kids we are scared witless by some moment in a story, movie or TV show, it goes into a bank of memories we can tap and withdraw, with a shudder or a smile, for the rest of our lives.

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