Richard Burton Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013) was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres.
Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "Little Girl Lost" and "Steel", as well as several adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for Roger Corman and American International Pictures – House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror and The Raven.
His early writing influences were the film Dracula (1931), novels by Kenneth Roberts, and a poem which he read in the newspaper Brooklyn Eagle,[2] where he published his first short story at age eight.
[3] He entered Brooklyn Technical High School in 1939, graduated in 1943, and served with the Army in Europe during World War II; this formed the basis for his 1960 novel The Beardless Warriors.
He was a member of the "Southern California Sorcerers" group in the 1950s and 1960s, a collective of west coast writers which included Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, George Clayton Johnson, William F. Nolan, Jerry Sohl, and others.
In 1960, Matheson published The Beardless Warriors, a non-fantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II.
However, he is most closely associated with the American TV series The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote more than a dozen episodes,[6] including "Steel" (1963), "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963), "Little Girl Lost" (1962), and "Death Ship" (1963).
For all of his Twilight Zone scripts, Matheson wrote the introductory and closing statements spoken by creator Rod Serling.
), starring Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers and based on the novel Nightmare by Anne Blaisdell; he also adapted for Hammer Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out (1968).
Three of his short stories were filmed together as Trilogy of Terror (1975), including "Prey" (initially published in the April 1969 issue of Playboy magazine), a tale of a Zuni warrior fetish doll.
Some tales, such as "The Doll that Does Everything" (1954) and "The Funeral" (1955), incorporate satirical humor at the expense of genre clichés, and are written in bombastic prose that differed from Matheson's usual pared-down style.
Others, like "The Test" (1954) and "Steel" (1956), portray the moral and physical struggles of ordinary people, rather than those of scientists and superheroes, in situations which are at once futuristic and quotidian.
Still others, such as "Mad House" (1953), "The Curious Child" (1954) and "Duel" (1971), are tales of paranoia, in which the commonplace environment of the present day becomes inexplicably alien or threatening.
Duel was derived from an incident in which he and friend Jerry Sohl were dangerously tailgated by a large truck on the same day as the assassination of John F.
Academy president Robert Holguin said, "Richard's accomplishments will live on forever in the imaginations of everyone who read or saw his inspired and inimitable work.
[19] Anne Rice stated that Matheson's short story "Dress of White Silk" was an early influence on her interest in vampires and fantasy fiction.
[22]On Twitter, director Edgar Wright wrote, "If it's true that the great Richard Matheson has passed away, 140 characters can't begin to cover what he has given the sci fi & horror genre."