The Omega Man (1971)

Adapted from Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (and the second of three film versions), The Omega Man gives Charlton Heston his loneliest role of an unusually apocalypse-heavy decade for him — a man rattling around a completely empty, sun-bleached Los Angeles, talking to a bust of Caesar in his apartment because there's genuinely no one else left to talk to. Director Boris Sagal shoots the depopulated city with an eerie, documentary-like emptiness, using real deserted downtown LA streets rather than sets, which gives the film's early stretches a genuine desolate power the low budget couldn't otherwise afford.

The Family, the robed and light-averse mutant cult hunting Neville, function as the film's most 1970s-specific addition — equal parts Manson Family paranoia and pseudo-religious technophobia, condemning Neville's guns and machines as the "creations of a dead man's evil world" even as they burn his books in ritual bonfires. It's cruder social commentary than Matheson's source material, but it gives the film's back half real menace, particularly through Anthony Zerbe's chillingly composed cult leader.

What still resonates is the loneliness at the film's center, and Rosalind Cash's Lisa — one of the more prominent Black female leads in a major studio genre picture of 1971 — whose relationship with Neville gives the film's back half genuine warmth before its bleak, deliberately Christ-imagery-loaded ending. Heston, an actor built for scale and command, spends much of the runtime with no one to command at all, and the film is smartest when it lets that silence do the talking.