In World War Z, for example, the zombies are created with a virus and the hero has to find a vaccine. In truth, it is very hard to find any movie at all where the vaccine is the bad guy. This, in turn, caused the film’s co-writer Akiva Goldsman to tweet: “Oh. Still, though, the I Am Legend theory regained momentum this week when the New York Times ran a story about anti-vaxxers, claiming that an employee at an eyewear store had refused the vaccine because “she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film I Am Legend to turn into zombies”.
When a globally respected news organisation has to use its precious resources to explain the plot of a disappointing Christmas movie from a decade and a half ago, you sense the battle has already been lost. The mutant vampires in I Am Legend became mutant vampires because they were exposed to a genetically re-engineered strain of the measles virus in order to cure cancer (courtesy of Emma Thompson’s ambitious doctor). Back in December, when vaccine trials were nearing their completion, the rumours that vaccines created vampires became so insistent that Reuters had to publish a factcheck article to deny it.
This isn’t necessarily a new development. I Am Legend has entered the pandemic conversation because a small but insistent group has started to ask a simple question: “Wait, did those nice people turn into mutant vampires because they took the Covid vaccine?” Coming towards the tail end of his turn as the world’s biggest movie star, the film saw a lone Smith struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic New York that had been ravaged by mutant vampires (that look more like zombies).
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