Rape Culture and the Zombie Apocalypse: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend

Abstract: This essay considers how the sexual violence in Matheson's iconic post-apocalypse novel dramatizes social tensions arising from Cold War "containment" policies that corralled affluent, white families in the suburbs to prevent socio-political unrest. Neville, the last man, must defeat a horde of zombie-vampire women and capture the lone woman survivor to restore the nuclear family and ensure human survival. Neville's rationalized gender violence recalls "wife-capture" tropes in earlier prehistoric fictions and anticipates recent zombie apocalypse texts that also naturalize sexual violence as necessary to reproductive futures, thus revealing the social logic of "rape culture."