Peplum

Italian historical adventure films, also called sword-and-sandal, named after the short tunic the heroes wear.

Why it matters here

This is the first Italian genre boom, and it created the infrastructure. The studios at Cinecittà, the stunt crews, the co-production financing, the practice of casting an imported American lead and dubbing everyone, the willingness to abandon a cycle the moment it stopped selling. All of it was worked out here and then handed to the spaghetti western, the giallo and the poliziotteschi in turn. Sergio Leone worked on peplum before he made A Fistful of Dollars.

The trigger

Hercules (1958) starred Steve Reeves, an American bodybuilder with no acting experience and a Mr Universe title. Joseph E. Levine bought the US rights cheap, spent a fortune on saturation advertising, and made a great deal of money. Roughly three hundred peplum films followed in seven years.

The heroes

Hercules, Samson, Ursus, and Maciste, who is the strange one. Maciste was invented for the Italian silent epic Cabiria in 1914 and appears across dozens of films with no consistent period, turning up in ancient Rome, the Ice Age, and seventeenth-century Scotland. American distributors usually renamed him Hercules to avoid confusing anyone.

Where to start

Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), which Mario Bava directed and which looks like nothing else in the cycle.