His death was confirmed by his son Richard Christian known as R. C.
Mr. Matheson had a prolific imagination for the what if story and he drew his ideas from both actual events and other stories. After the unsettling experience of being tailgated by a truck driver he wrote the short story Duel about a motorist who is relentlessly stalked in a highway chase by a tractor trailer its driver unseen. The story became the basis for Steven Spielberg s first feature film starring Dennis Weaver.
An early novel and perhaps his best known work I Am Legend about the last surviving human in a world in which everyone else is a vampire was published in 1954 and adapted in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1971 as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston and in 2007 as I Am Legend with Will Smith.
Mr. Matheson was inspired to write it while watching the 1931 film version of Dracula.
My mind drifted off and I thought If one vampire is scary what if the whole world is full of vampires Mr. Matheson said in an interview with the Archive of American Television. In a widely distributed statement Stephen King who acknowledged Mr. Matheson as an influence said Matheson fired the imaginations of three generations of writers. Without his I Am Legend there would have been no Night of the Living Dead without Night of the Living Dead there would have been no Walking Dead 28 Days Later or World War Z .
Mr. Matheson s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man a frightening fantasy about a man whose simultaneous exposure to insecticide and radioactivity causes him to dwindle gradually in size was adapted twice for the movies once as a horror story The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and once as a comedy starring Lily Tomlin The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981).
In the late 1990s two of his books A Stir of Echoes a ghost story and What Dreams May Come about a man adrift in the afterlife were also made into feature films starring Kevin Bacon and Robin Williams respectively.
Another novel Hell House (1971) about four people investigating paranormal activity in what one character describes as the Mount Everest of haunted houses became the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House starring Roddy McDowall. The book showed off Mr. Matheson s gift for creepy atmospherics.
Edith turned and saw a body of water ahead a gravel path curving to its left Mr. Matheson wrote describing a character s first approach to the house. The surface of the water looked like clouded gelatin sprinkled with a thin debris of leaves and grass. A miasma of decay hovered above it and the stones which lined it shore were green with slime.
Mr. Matheson sometimes wrote the screenplays for the adaptations of his books including Duel and The Legend of Hell House he adapted Edgar Allan Poe stories for several films including House of Usher Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror and he wrote the screenplay for the 1965 film Die Die My Darling which starred Tallulah Bankhead as a grieving demented mother who terrorizes the young woman she blames for her son s death.
Mr. Matheson was also a busy television writer. He wrote for westerns like Have Gun Will Travel Cheyenne and Lawman and for the war drama Combat But he was mostly known for his work on science fiction and thriller series Alfred Hitchcock Presents Star Trek and especially The Twilight Zone for which he wrote more than a dozen episodes including the classic Nightmare at 20 000 Feet which starred William Shatner as an airplane passenger who spies a gremlin on the wing bent on crippling the plane.
Recalling the genesis of that episode Mr. Matheson said I was on an airplane and I looked out and there were all these fluffy clouds and I thought Gee what if I saw a guy skiing across that like it was snow because it looked like snow. But when I thought it over that s not very scary so I turned it into a gremlin out on the wing.
Mr. King wrote in a brief e mail Tuesday that Mr. Matheson was a seminal figure in the horror and fantasy genres as important in his way as Poe or Lovecraft.
In his statement he wrote He fired my imagination by placing his horrors not in European castles and Lovecraftian universes but in American scenes I knew and could relate to. I want to do that I thought. I must do that. Matheson showed the way.
Richard Burton Matheson was born in Allendale N.J. on Feb. 20 1926 and grew up in Brooklyn. His parents were Norwegian immigrants his father Bertolf installed tile flooring and helped operate speakeasies during Prohibition.
A voracious reader as a boy Mr. Matheson graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He served in the Army in Europe during World War II an experience that was the source of his novel The Beardless Warriors. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri after which he began writing fiction in earnest. For a time he worked at Douglas Aircraft. He published his first genre story Born of Man and Woman about a young couple who give birth to a monster and keep him in the cellar in 1950.
Mr. Matheson married Ruth Ann Woodson in 1952. She survives him. Besides his son R. C. he is also survived by another son Christian two daughters Bettina Matheson Mayberry and Ali Marie Matheson seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Asked if his father with whom he ran an entertainment company had a motto or a saying that he lived by R. C. Matheson said that he had kept a sign above his desk that read That which you think becomes your world.
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