Ciao! Benvenuti and welcome! I am Matthew Pungitore, thine aureolin-mantled flâneur, eau de Nil–dreaming aesthete, humble purple-typing scribbler, and ’tis in this article will I be interviewing “Alex” P. Alexander of Cirsova magazine. En passant, ye may recall how Alex and I together chatted similarly afore in an earlier discussion; up on the Castalia House blog, one can find it in the article “Guest Post: Interview with Alex of Cirsova Magazine,” though do bear in mind said conversation focuses, however, more on music and music scenes. Well, without further ado, on y va, for we shall commence tout de suite.

MATTHEW PUNGITORE: What a pleasure it is chatting like this again with you, Alex, though it be but via the internet, alas. Truly a pleasure. I’m most grateful, and I hope you have fun. Now, for those who don’t yet know, would you mind telling us a little bit about who you are, what you do, what Cirsova is, how long you’ve been at it, and such?
ALEX: I’m P. Alexander, the editor and owner of Cirsova Publishing, but most folks just know me as “Alex.”

I’ve been running Cirsova Publishing since 2016 as a publisher of adventure science fiction and fantasy. Our primary publication is Cirsova Magazine, which has been more or less quarterly since Spring of 2016.

One of our goals was to offer a home for action and adventure-focused fiction that was still being written in the tradition of the golden age pulps, particularly Planet Stories, but as we’ve grown over the years, we’ve encompassed more genres, including some gothic and horror—things that fall within the purview of “weird.” Though you could say that everything we publish in the magazine falls into the category of “exciting stories where things happen.”

Could you tell everyone about the Mighty Sons of Hercules thing, which I believe you’ve spoken about—yes?—and, I think, you’re getting ready to launch it fairly soon-ish, no? What details can you tell us about that, and why do you, specifically, think readers should be excited?
A few years back, I started getting back into the Sword & Sandal or “Peplum” adventure movies I loved as a kid. It turns out that a LOT of these movies are available for free in varying quality [poor to middling] on Youtube.

They used to show them on the weekends sometimes on TNT or TBS. The two I probably remembered the most vividly were Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, where Hercules washes up in Mesoamerica, and The Triumph of Hercules, because of the 7 Golden Giants, who are these huge dudes in gold body paint who wreck up the place at the behest of the big bad. But there were several other movies I remembered, including all these weird ones where you’d have “Hercules” fighting against the Mongols in the Middle Ages or other settings that really didn’t make sense for the mythical Hercules to be present in. But there he was.

There was actually a syndicated series called The Sons of Hercules that was still being broadcast as late as the early ‘90s. What they did was buy up the US distribution rights to a bunch of Sword & Sandal movies and offer them as part of a syndication package that could be broken up into hour-long chunks or you could show the whole movie in one go. They redubbed them to make them part of a “series” and gave it its own theme song and everything. Each film follows a different “Son of Hercules.” Nevermind that in none of the original films were these characters related to Hercules. For the Perseus and Medusa movie, the intro even hand-waves this, explaining that “some are Sons of Hercules in spirit.”

Cirsova Publishing’s The Mighty Sons of Hercules anthology is an homage to this project. We tapped a few of our top writers who we thought would be a good fit for writing Peplum stories. Each of the stories is an adventure of a different strongman, fighting injustice and defending the weak. Like the movies, they’re unrelated other than that they feature a “Son of Hercules.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ve spoken online about a character known as “Maciste.” If I’m not mistaken, Maciste is a character created in part by Gabriele d'Annunzio and partly by Giovanni Pastrone, right? Are we talking about the same character? Would you care to share with us your thoughts and opinions about Maciste?
Yes!

In fact, several of the old Sons of Hercules movies were actually Maciste movies that had been dubbed to change the name of the character. The most well-known of the Sons of Hercules movies, Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules, was a Maciste movie. Well-known, of course, for being feature on MST3K. But there were several Maciste movies that were released in the US that were not part of that series. The first Maciste revival movie, Son of Samson, is probably the most notable.

The easiest way to describe Maciste to people wholly unfamiliar with him is that he is a superhero and Maciste movies are superhero movies. He’s always there to protect the innocent and save the day using incredible feats of strength. He’ll bend bars, lift huge boulders, fight off dozens of men with his bare hands or improvised weapons, and even wrestle with monsters and dinosaurs. It’s just really cool and fun stuff.

While a lot of the more well-known Maciste movies take place in antiquity, he has shown up in both medieval and even early modern settings. In fact, Silent-era Maciste is technically a contemporary character, with a small caveat.

Maciste has a very long and complex history as character. It is true that he was originally created by Gabriele D’Annunzio as part of the silent historical epic, Cabiria, but Maciste grew in popularity almost astronomically beyond his first appearance. It was difficult to have more Maciste movies set in the Punic Wars, so they did a massive retcon in the second silent Maciste movie:

In Marvelous Maciste, Maciste (played by Bartolomeo Pagano) is revealed to be a real-life strongman who played the character Maciste in Cabiria. A woman who is on the run from bad guys ducks into a theater that is playing Cabiria, sees Maciste, and decides that only he can save her. She asks the actor for help, and hijinx ensue. The silent Maciste movies I’ve seen are largely characterized by impressive physical acting and action on Pagano’s part combined with some very good for the time special effects. There were nearly 30 silent Maciste movies starring Pagano.

Following the success of the Steve Reeves Hercules movies combined with the huge popularity of bodybuilders, who were becoming international superstars, the costume epics of the 1950s started to shift towards mythical strongman adventure. It was in this climate that Maciste was revived as a character for two dozen movies released over a 5 year period, starting with Son of Samson (Maciste in the Valley of the Kings) in 1960. Maciste would also be played by several different actors during this period, though Mark Forest and Kirk Morris are the names most associated with the role.

I am an enthusiast of the artful works of Gabriele D'Annunzio, especially those works of his which are connected with the Decadent movement. I believe D'Annunzio wrote, or at least contributed to, the screenplay and intertitles for Cabiria (1914), in which that Maciste character appears. Have you seen this film? If you have, how do you feel about it? Do you notice any elements of Decadent art in the film? Any elements of sword and sorcery?
D’Annunzio is credited with both the story and intertitles for Cabiria as well as for the creation of Maciste. But like I said, the Maciste from Cabiria is drastically different from the rest of silent-era Maciste, and he can probably be better attributed to Giovanni Pastrone [director of Cabiria who wrote the “sequel,” Marvelous Maciste], Luigi Romano Borgnetto who directed Marvelous Maciste as well as several other early silent Maciste films, and of course Pagano himself as the embodiment of the character.

Yet interestingly enough, the later revival Maciste movies have prominent echoes of D’Annunzio’s original character as well as the themes of Cabiria.

Cabiria is a masterpiece of its time, but it is very much of its time. I don’t mean in terms of culture or anything like that, but rather filmmaking. It goes all out, but its cinematic structure is relatively primitive. Compared to later silent epics like Ben-Hur (1925), Cabiria can feel like a slog at times. Maciste is a side character in Cabiria, but he steals the show in every scene he’s in. Which is why after Cabiria the Maciste movies become Buster Keaton-like physical action comedies centered around the star actor.

But the guy in a loincloth fighting huge battles against evil cultists and saving beautiful girls from being sacrificed to Moloch comes back bigtime in the 1960s revival-era Maciste. So we can still recognize D’Annunzio’s Maciste in that period’s interpretation of the character.

If anything, the character Maciste revolts against Decadence. He is simple and good, and one of his few weaknesses is that he is not particularly wily. The Decadent element tends to be within the domain of the villains: the evil queen who revels in the torment of slaves (Son of Samson), the weak male societies that coalesce around sadomasochistic female rulers (Mole Men), or the morally weak male leaders that indulgent pagan society creates (The Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules). Notably, the Moloch worship of Cabiria returns to underscore the degeneracy of the villains’ society in films like Triumph of Maciste/Triumph of the Son of Hercules.

When we were creating sending out the solicits for The Mighty Sons of Hercules, one of the key criteria was that the author’s Son of Hercules should be “good, fighting for justice, to protect the weak from evil.”

How familiar are you with Italian cinema? Do you watch many Italian films? Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964; Nights of Cabiria, 1957; The Decameron, 1971; Medea, 1969)? Federico Fellini (Fellini Satyricon, 1969)? Or Italian westerns? What about “sword-and-sandal” (“peplum”) films? How familiar are you with any of those mentioned, and what are your thoughts on them?
Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with Italian cinema as a whole to comment on those, nor have I seen those you mentioned. I’ve seen a handful of the Sergio Leone westerns and a handful of other spaghetti westerns. When it comes to the Peplum stuff, I’m more of a fan than a scholar, and I already worry sometimes I’m dipping into Dunning-Krueger territory.

What would you say is the foremost connection, a similar motif, an aesthetic quality perchance, mayhap a shared nexus, fons et origo, betwixt sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-sandal?
One of the reasons why I love the Sword & Sandal flicks so much is that there’s a huge overlap with Sword & Sorcery. In a lot of ways, they’re practically the same genre, and they often feature the same themes. A common theme in the strongman flicks is standing up to and overcoming a degenerate society for the benefit of a more moral society. The slavers are defeated and the slaves are liberated. The evil queen perishes and the virtuous princess prevails through the deeds of her champion. The vile wizard gets thrown into the sacrificial brazier of his own evil god.

One thing I’ve said once is that Sword & Sorcery stories are what you get when you tell the story of a mythic hero through a gothic lens. But what’s the story of that mythic hero? Sword & Sandal.

Please share your thoughts about the sword-and-sorcery genre, whether it be in prose or cinema. And what do you think about contemporary sword-and-sorcery tales?
I honestly can’t remember the last recent sword & sorcery movie I’ve watched. The thing about these sword & sandal movies I’ve been watching, though, is that there’s almost nothing stopping them from making a comeback. Just get some of the pro wrestlers who want to transition to doing movies, come up with some straightforward scripts that unironically champion the strongman as a force for good, and you could knock out several on a modest budget.

Heck, I’m reminded of the Hercules movie they made with Lou Ferrigno. The funny part about that is that it feels more dated than the movies it paid homage to because it tried relying more fancy special effects rather than practical props.

I think that there’s this fear that making a fantasy movie would require a huge budget, tons of cgi, and whatnot, but that’s really not the case. One reason why strongman movies were incredibly prolific was that they were relatively cheap to make: at the time, you could get a lot of the props, costumes, and sets second hand because they were making so many of them. Even The Ten Commandments reused the sets from The Egyptian. While there’s not a ton of handmedowns sitting around Hollywood today to make movies like this, you could still get away with a lot with talented set, prop, and costume designers.

All you need is to get actors who are talented at physical acting and stunt acting—which is why pro wrestlers would be perfect for it—some location sets, a soundstage, and costumes. You wouldn’t have to worry about any CGI stuff; just use cheap practical effects, foam blocks, rubber bars, etc. Not everything has to look like a bloated Peter Jackson ripoff. Just have fun with it.

Honestly, the hardest part is the mindset: these are basically superhero movies about good guys beating bad guys. You aren’t going to get a revival from deconstructionists, I don’t think.

Do you notice elements of the sword-and-sorcery genre in contemporary movies such as Robert Eggers’ The Northman (2022)? Have you seen it? Today, I’m almost tempted to say that movie has more in common with the Gothic. Anyone interested in my previous critique of Eggers’ The Northman can read my review of it on the DMR Books blog. Alex, if you have watched it, would you say The Northman was a good example of sword and sorcery? or would you say it is more Gothic? or something else?
I haven’t actually seen The Northman. I did see someone describe it as “Black Panther for white people,” which made me laugh and kinda want to see it. But I haven’t seen it yet.

Looking at Maciste and Cabiria (1914), and even Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô, and in addition, though in a far lesser degree, Aphrodite: mœurs antiques by Pierre Louÿs, we can see how Decadent art can be used to tell nigh-historical, supernatural yet realist, at times epic stories. How much of a Decadent character would you consider Maciste to be? In what way, what function, does a heroic character like him relate to, or operate within, Decadent storytelling?
I think I kind of answered this as part of one of your previous questions. In many ways, Maciste and the heroic strongman in general are a counterpoint to the Decadent. It’s a great place to use decadent art to highlight the degenerate aspects of modernism because then you can stick in a simple, pure, and moral hero with the strength to destroy the decadent. Heck, even going back to the Biblical Samson, you have a flawed hero who in his final moment of redemption is given the strength of the Lord one last time to destroy the temple of the Dagon.

So, even if the Decadent movement gave birth to a character like Maciste, the strongman is ultimately a force for toppling decadence. Even the names of some of the flicks, such as Goliath and the Sins of Babylon tantalize us with the promise of a glimpse of the decadence which the hero ultimately overthrows.

Though I’d be remise if I failed to mention that many if not all of these flicks have scenes of exotic dances held in the banquet halls of potentates—usually to underscore how decadent and degenerate they are!

Perhaps one of the strongest statements against decadence in the Maciste movies is in The Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules, in which we see Maciste have a falling out with his friend, the Emperor of Rome, because of the Emperor’s indulgence in banal pagan pleasures and cruelties—Maciste sides with a small band of persecuted Christians which the Emperor is hunting and becomes Christian himself.

Toward the preservation of art, noble culture, and the human soul, the aristocratic connoisseur of beauty should, one might advise, ingest the gamy tales tangy of immorality and debauched satire as well as the puissant stories sinewy with those important ideals such as family and community, individuality, heroism, masculinity and femininity, redemption, forgiveness, mercy, rehabilitation, and freedom. What principle do you think makes a hero true? And what are your opinions on antiheroes?
I like my heroes good. It’s fine to have heroes who are flawed, I think people can make mistakes and still be heroes.

One of the frequent twists in many peplum strongman flicks is that the hero makes a mistake: sometimes he gets tricked or makes a bad choice, usually because of his trusting nature; other times, he may do something terrible because a villain played into a moral or character weakness he had. In the former case, the hero may overcome it on his own or with the help of a friend who reminds him he must be true to himself; in the later case, the hero must overcome it on his own and earn redemption to once again be the champion of justice once more.

Antiheroes tend to bore me these days, if they don’t elicit disgust. Low mimetic and even ironic figures are fine: it’s fun to watch a character like Jack Vance’s Cugel either get his comeuppance or serve a comeuppance to scoundrels that are worse than him. I just don’t want to be served up a bad guy and told that he’s “good, ackshually.”

Now, there’s plenty of room for complex, nuanced, and troubled heroes. Mike Grell’s John Sable is a great example.

Bravo! Alex, grazie mille, merci beaucoup, danke schoen, thank you so much for this opportunity to talk together like this again. A pleasure and a privilege, verily it has been to mine honor. May you and yours be most fortunate, I pray. On to the finale, at the closing of this interview, is there one concluding message you would bequeath here unto our dear audience the readers?
Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to talk about peplum and to plug our newest anthology!

The Mighty Sons of Hercules will be crowdfunding on Kickstarter throughout July.

Since we still need to pay the contributors for their stories, this is an all-or-nothing project for us, where we will absolutely have to meet our goal.

Matthew Pungitore is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer. Matthew has written essays, reviews, articles, and more for the DMR Books blog. He has written articles that have appeared on the Aureus Press blog and the Castalia House blog. Matthew Pungitore is the author of “The Tale of Marius the Avenging Imp” (DMR Books, Samhain Sorceries, 2022). He is the author of the short story “Wychyrst Tower,” which appeared in the 2021 winter issue of Cirsova. If you have read his books and/or stories, please leave a valued review and rating on Amazon, Goodreads, BookBaby Bookshop, your blog even, or wherever convenient and proper. Thank you kindly. “To a Dead Soul in Morbid Love,” a gothic-decadent, sword-and-sorcery tale written by Matthew Pungitore, appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Cirsova!