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This chapter focuses on the view that works of music are not types, but continuants or (as they are sometimes called) historical individuals. Two versions of the continuant view are discussed: musical perdurantism (which has been defended by Ben Caplan and Carl Matheson), and which takes a work of music to have its performances, playings, and other ‘embodiments’ as temporal parts; and the kind of view defended by Rohrbaugh, which takes a musical work to be a higher-level object, ontologically dependent upon, but not constituted by, its embodiments. The chapter outlines compelling objections to both versions of the continuant view, and argues that neither version can adequately explain what the repeatability of a work of music consists in.

This chapter investigates the disappearance of most of the British trading companies between the 1980s and 2000. Although some firms suffered from failed strategies to diversify into regions and industries where they lacked expertise, the main problem was that British capital markets regarded these firms as unfashionable, and falling share prices were the result. The principal survivors, John Swire & Sons and Jardine Matheson, were family controlled.

Toward the end of the Qing Dynasty, foreign insurers in China began to open up to investments from local merchants. However, Chinese investors were entitled only to profits and not voting rights or any voice in management. In other words, these insurance companies were lopsided joint ventures at best and far from equal partnerships. The first foreign insurer that solicited Chinese investments was Union Insurance, which, when Dent & Co. founded it in 1830, had a significant capital injection from some Guangzhou business investors. In 1868, Jardine Matheson established the Hong Kong Fire Insurance Co. Ltd. Based on existing records, the first Chinese-controlled insurance firm was founded by a Shanghai trading firm with close ties to Jardine Matheson. Although that firm covered the cargo shipments of Chinese firms and little else, it served to stir up some competition for the foreign insurers.

This chapter traces the modern image of zombies back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novella, I Am Legend, and George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The chapter argues that because readers and audiences most closely identify with the survivors of an apocalyptic event, they often miss the larger implications of such narratives. Within many apocalyptic narratives, such as a zombie apocalypse, there is a overlying message of violent, transformative renewal that asks us to question normative humanist categories. Matheson and Romero both pointedly direct our attention back on our own body politic and demonstrate humanity's inability to discern its own capacity for inhuman behaviour.

This chapter presents a structural analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's story and Richard Matheson's script to highlight House of Usher's (1960) fidelity to Poe's original. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is often classified as the story that epitomises Poe's philosophy of composition. From the outset, it hurtles towards a dreadful and inescapable catastrophe from which only the narrator escapes to tell the tale. Adapting Poe properly for the screen means following Poe's method of plotting for unity of effect as well as translating the story's atmosphere of doom, hysterical characterisation, and macabre themes of death and decay into a language understandable to actors, cinematographers, and all the various artists involved in the production design. The chapter's analysis shows that Matheson indeed followed Poe's philosophy of composition carefully, adapting the nineteenth-century writer's literary conventions to create a cinematic narrative of high fidelity to its literary source that was also very filmable and appealing to the audience of the day.

The peak year of the Verne cycle was 1961, when four Hollywood Verne movies were released as well as several imports, along with television originals; never again would so many adaptations be produced in such rapid order. Verne filmmaking was about to move beyond spectacle and entertainment for the whole family to aim at younger filmgoers drawn by modestly budgeted but no less inventive science fiction; as one producer commented, Verne was as important a name as the biggest stars of the day. Some of these films, most notably Ray Harryhausen’s new version of The Mysterious Island, incorporated monsters reminiscent of those in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), while themes echoed Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. This was apparent not only in the return of Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island but also especially in Master of the World, based on two Verne novels and scripted by science fiction writer Richard Matheson to transform the novels’ vague global threat into a highly topical disquisition on pacifism.

This chapter focuses on dates and countdowns in apocalyptic films. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) opens with a scrolling text that starts with “Early in the 21st century.” In the exposition that precedes the opening credits of Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009), one sees many inscriptions of place and date that note the signs from all over the globe which announce the catastrophe: copper mine in Naga Deng, India, 2009—Lincoln Plaza Hotel, Washington, 2009—G8 Summit, British Columbia, 2010. It argues that a date is a countdown to the now, and it will always have been in advance. It is a countdown apparatus like all the chronometers that measure the time that remains, starting with the Mayan calendar brought up to date through today's fashion for the new age and ending with the Doomsday Clock, where the minutes separating us from the apocalypse appear. The chapter then considers the The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) and The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), the first and second adaptations of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, followed by a discussion of how the countdown was invented at the movies.

This chapter traces the 21^st century synergy between vampire and zombie back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, a book that both reinvented the vampire story as science-fiction by reimaging the vampire through the language of science, and served as origin text for the birth of the zombie genre with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Through an analysis of a range of adaptations of Matheson’s novel, including his own script written for Hammer Studios but rejected by the BBFC, this chapter considers how this text marks key transformative moments within the evolution of the horror genre on film.

Richard Matheson’s 1954 horror novel I Am Legend depicts the sole survivor of a vampire pandemic in his attempts to find companionship and meaning in a blasted apocalyptic world. Most literary critics engaging with the novel have interpreted the vampires as social or psychological symbols. They’ve overlooked their literal resonance as disease-bearing, unnatural predators well designed to activate evolved fears of predation and contagion. The chapter argues that the novel’s lasting power comes from the way Matheson taps into basic human anxieties—over predation, isolation, and a total loss of meaning—in his psychologically nuanced depiction of a flawed but sympathetic man’s struggles to survive and find fellow survivors after the apocalypse, and to find meaning in a secular antagonistic world. Matheson adapted the ancient vampire figure in his evocative exploration of one man’s psychological development in response to a hostile and meaningless world.