This first cinematic foray into Robert E Howard’s extensive œuvre was born out of the unstopp­able rise of heroic fantasy through the 1970s and the then-recent succ­ess of Star Wars on the big screen, which had demonstrated that putting a modern sheen on mythic Campbellian narratives was a valid – and phenomenally profitable – way of resuscitating the cinema of high adventure that had long died out in Hollywood. Howard’s distant Hyborian Age – post-Atlantis, but some millennia before recorded history – was a product of the same Weird Tales milieu that had introduced readers to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Clark Ashton Smith’s tales of Zothique (the three kept up a keen correspondence).