Richard Matheson, 1926-2013

I saw a blurb yesterday on one or another of the sites that I visit on a daily basis that Richard Matheson had died at the age of 87. I didn't think much of it at the time, until I looked a bit more closely and saw just how much work he had done in Hollywood.

Matheson wrote the short story "I Am Legend", which was turned into a movie under that name a few years back, as well as two other major Hollywood releases, starting with 1964's The Last Man on Earth. He also wrote the novel "The Shrinking Man", which was turned into the 1957 movie The Incredile Shrinking Man.

One that I think was written directly for the screen is Die! Die! My Darling!. Matheson also wrote the screenplay for Jaws 3-D, but we'll overlook that one. There's also a lot of work for television, including several Twilight Zone episodes. One of those, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", was one of the four that wound up in the Twilight Zone movie in the early 80s.