Conan the Barbarian Collection

Robert E. Howard created Conan for Weird Tales magazine in the early 1930s, writing twenty stories and a novel before his death at a young age in 1936. The character kept a devoted following among later fantasy writers who continued it after him, but what actually shaped this film's look wasn't the prose — it was Frank Frazetta's cover art for the 1960s paperback reissues, which cemented the image of a "virile, axe-wielding, fur-bearing, cranium-smashing barbarian" that the movie is visibly built around.

Getting it to the screen took two years just to secure the rights. Producer Edward Pressman originally wanted John Milius to direct, but Milius stepped away first to make Big Wednesday, so Pressman brought in Oliver Stone — fresh off his own breakthrough writing Midnight Express — to draft a script. Milius then came back, rewrote Stone's draft substantially, and directed it with a specific intent he stated directly: he wanted Conan to read as "a Northern European mythic hero." That ambition shows up explicitly on screen — the film opens with a line directly attributed to Nietzsche, "that which does not kill us makes us stronger," which isn't subtext so much as the film telling you outright what register it's operating in. Worth knowing if you care about the source material specifically: at least one Howard scholar has pushed back on how faithful this version actually is, arguing the character's personality on screen differs substantially from the one on the page.

This was the film that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, not just another role for him — his first real lead in a major production. It also landed in a specific moment: a small cluster of early-80s sword-and-sorcery films chasing the same post-Tolkien, Frazetta-influenced fantasy wave, with this film and John Boorman's Excalibur singled out as the genuine standouts among a run of far cheaper, more disposable imitators that followed in their wake — the same cheap-knockoff tier this very library has already run into elsewhere, in the Ator and Sorceress and Wizards of the Lost Kingdom variety.