Skin Flicks: Haptic Ideology in the Peplum Film

This article applies recent work on haptic imagery in the cinema, especially Barker’s The Tactile Eye, to a quite different archive: “peplum” films, low-budget and frequently lowbrow movies set in classical antiquity with muscle-bound stars generally drawn from the world of bodybuilding, athletics, professional wrestling, and fitness. The peplum genre flourished at midcentury, and flourishes again today (300, The Legend of Hercules, Pompeii); its generous use of haptic imagery, however, is often deployed to cement conservative ideologies, particularly the idea that the time of true masculinity is always over, particularly in the peplum’s ancient world.