The
peplum film (
pepla plural), also known as
sword-and-sandal, is a genre of largely Italian-made historical or biblical epics (costume dramas) that dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by the
Spaghetti Western. They can be immediately differentiated from the competing Hollywood product by their use of
dubbing. The pepla attempted to emulate the big-budget Hollywood historical epics of the time, such as
Spartacus,
Samson and Delilah and
The Ten Commandments.