Personal / Website News
Citations for The New Peplum
An essay from the collection Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination: The Fear and the Fury cites Dr. Wetmore’s essay, “In the Green Zone with the Ninth Legion: The Post-Iraq Roman Film” from The New Peplum. I am not sure which, but when I find out I’ll update this citation in The New Peplum resource page.
The New Peplum also gets an extremely positive mention in the preface in Christopher Wood’s book Heroes Masked and Mythic: Echoes of Ancient Archetypes in Comic Book Characters:
“Yet we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and therefore I should like to take a moment here to give a brief nod to those scholars and thinkers who have strengthened my own resolve to write this, sometimes as a catalyst to change, and others with whom I couldn’t agree more or have said it better myself.
The New Peplum: Essays on Sword and Sandal Films and Television by Nicholas Diak is one such book. His main focus is on the modern “sword and sandal” films, and by that he means in the past 30 years rather than including the 1960s. The author views the use of technology and narrative approaches that change the end experience of the viewer as something impossible to achieve at a time earlier than now.”
– Christopher Wood, Preface to Heroes Masked and Mythic
I’m extremely flattered to receive such honour!
Call for Papers
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
Podcast News
The Podcast Section of the website has been updated with episode dates and titles for the next few months.
Note: This Is Horror has their public nomination period open until January 15th. If you like the HP Lovecast Podcast and want to show support, consider nominating the podcast for the non-fiction podcast category. Info on nominating can be found at the This Is Horror website here.
General Neo-Peplum News
Spencer Alexander McDaniel has an article online about the white domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol last week and how they used iconography associated with ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Germanic peoples. The article can be read at his Tales of Times Forgotten website.
Rest in Peplum
Director Steve Carver passed away at the age of 75. He directed the original version of The Arena (1974).
Hammer actress Barbara Shelley passed away at the age of 88. She was in Nero’s Weekend (1956).
John Richardson passed away at the age of 86. He appeared in lots of Italian filone, though not so much in pepla. He was however in On My Way to the Crusades, I Met a Girl Who… (1969) and One Million Years B.C. (1966).