I Am Legend

In 2009, Dr. Alice Krippin announces on television that her re-engineered measles virus is the cure for cancer. The virus mutates and kills ninety percent of humanity. Most survivors become 'Darkseekers' — feral, light-averse, fast-moving infected with bone-pale skin and exposed teeth. Less than one percent of the population is immune.

Three years later, virologist Robert Neville is the last known human in Manhattan. The military's evacuation of the city failed; he lost his wife Zoe and daughter Marley in a helicopter crash during the chaos. He lives in a Washington Square townhouse with his German Shepherd Sam, fortified with steel shutters and a generator. By day he hunts deer through the empty streets, broadcasts a daily message at noon from South Street Seaport, plays golf off the deck of the USS Intrepid, and works on a cure in his basement laboratory, experimenting on captured infected rats and a captive female Darkseeker.

Sam chases a deer into a derelict building. Inside, Neville is ambushed by a swarm of Darkseekers and barely escapes, his SUV flipped. The alpha male of the local Darkseeker pod has begun observing him. The next day Neville sees that a mannequin he uses for target practice has been moved into a new position — a deliberate trap mimicking his own snare technique. He steps into it and is captured. Sam fights off attacking infected dogs that come at sunset; Sam is bitten and the infection turns her. Neville strangles her himself.

He snaps. That night he drives into the city, headlights blazing, attacks the Darkseekers head-on, and is nearly killed before being rescued by a woman named Anna and a boy named Ethan — immune survivors who heard his broadcast. They drag him home. Anna tells him a survivors' colony exists in Bethel, Vermont; Neville does not believe her.

The Darkseekers, having followed Anna's car, attack the townhouse in force the next morning. As the perimeter falls, Neville notices the latest serum trial has worked on the captive female — her skin is darkening, the infection retreating. He extracts a vial of her blood. The alpha breaches the plexiglass chamber holding her. Neville hands the vial to Anna, locks her and Ethan into the safe room, and detonates a grenade inside the chamber, killing himself and the Darkseekers attacking him. Anna and Ethan escape at dawn, drive north, and reach the gated Vermont colony. Anna delivers the cure. Closing narration frames Neville as the legend who restored humanity.