If Robert Neville’s empty streets, boarded windows, and ritualized routines (checking garlic, burning corpses, scouring by day before the night siege) gripped you, you’ll feel that same bleak pull in The Road. A father and son push a cart through ash and silence, scrounging like Neville does on his daylight runs, measuring existence in cans, locks, and luck. It’s a raw, intimate portrait of survival where every small choice echoes the way Neville’s habits keep him human in a world that’s forgotten how.

Neville’s daylight lab work—testing blood, hypothesizing about bacteria and garlic, turning folklore into procedure—mirrors the way Mark Watney fights Mars with math, botany, and grit. If you loved watching Neville turn his house into a fortress and his microscope into a weapon, The Martian delivers that same meticulous, step-by-step ingenuity as Watney hacks life support, grows potatoes, and keeps a log like a lifeline against silence.

Those scenes of Neville hammering planks, checking mirrors, and enduring Ben Cortman’s taunts outside at night have a chilling cousin in Bird Box. Malorie blinds her windows, knots her rules into ritual, and navigates a world where going outside is a calculated terror. The claustrophobic focus on one shelter, one fragile routine, and predators you can’t safely face head-on channels the same nerve-fraying intimacy as Neville’s after-dark stand-offs.

If the revelation about Ruth and the new society—where Neville realizes he’s the nightmare of a changed world—stuck with you, Blindsight digs into that same unsettling territory. A crew led by Siri Keeton (including a resurrected vampire) confronts alien intelligence that upends every assumption about consciousness and empathy. Like Neville’s discovery that the infected have a culture and future, Watts asks whether our definitions of personhood are just comforting myths.

Neville’s loneliness—talking to himself, clinging to routine, the brief, aching connection with the dog and the fraught encounter with Ruth—finds a haunting echo in Temple’s journey through zombie-haunted backroads. The Reapers Are the Angels is intimate, lyrical, and violent, tracing a single survivor’s inner weather as closely as I Am Legend tracks Neville’s grief and stubborn will to live when meaning grows thin.