Two Thousand Maniacs

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) exploits in an almost perverse way numerous Southern stereotypes: north vs. south hostilities, southern nationalism, hillbillies and rednecks, violence, humor, hijinks, decay. Production values are so low, acting so poor, the narrative itself so implausible, that it is difficult to view the film as little more than a sustained joke. The director Herschell Gordon Lewis made numerous films of C-level sex, violence, gore, and inanity during the 1960s. They offered titles such as Blood Feast, Moonshine Mountain, Sin, Suffer, and Repent, Blood Feast, A Taste of Blood, and Color Me Blood Red. Two Thousand Maniacs was often considered part of a triptych of films by Lewis, the “Blood Trilogy,” the others being Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red (they are not set in the South).

The film’s premise is that the citizens of Pleasant Valley in an unnamed Southern town are celebrating the centennial anniversary of an event that occurred near the end of the civil war, in April 1865. At first the nature of the event is unclear, but eventually we learn that 100 years before renegade Northern soldiers had wiped out the town, killing or maiming most of the townspeople. Now, in April 1965, the townspeople have returned to avenge the massacre. They do so by waylaying six Yankee tourists whom they convince or compel to serve as the special guests of the centennial.

One by one, four of the tourists are killed: one has her limbs chopped off with an axe—they are later barbecued; a second is drawn and quartered; a third is rolled down a hill in a barrel laced with nails; and the fourth has a boulder dropped on her. There are the requisite severed limbs, episodes of horrified screaming, and ample amounts of fake blood.

The townspeople all behave as demented buffoons, laughing and guffawing over their plans to avenge themselves on the Yankee tourists. The tourists themselves have not a clue as to what is going on, until one of them, a school teacher, manages to discover the nature of the centennial celebration. He and a young woman escape to tell the tale.

The central image of the film is the Confederate stars and bars flag, whose blood red background is linked with the blood so often seen in the film. Not surprisingly, since most of the people in the film are temporarily resurrected Confederates, there are no black people in the film at all. Instead we find the sorts of white people stereotypes that appear in Lil Abner comic strips and in TV series such as The Beverley Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Gomer Pyle. In this film, however, those stereotypes take on decidedly violent and macabre dimensions. By modern standards, the violence in this film is tame, and though it involves horrible acts against the Yankee tourists, the fake blood and primitive effects, not to mention the bad acting, eviscerate the horror.

Two Thousand Maniacs presents the American South as a self-evident joke. Though no one would take the movie in a literal way as a serious representation—most of the characters are absurd parodies and, after all, ghosts—in a more metaphoric sense the film presents the South as a geographical and cultural Other, a remote and marginal hinterland unknown and inaccessible to the outer world, a place that brings gruesome death to those unfortunate enough to enter it. More mainstream films such as Deliverance and Southern Comfort present a similar if more complicated view of the South.

Films of this type were fairly common in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of them were B- and C-grade films with titles such as Macon County Line, Bloody Mama, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Redneck Zombies, The Alien Dead, and so on. The list of such films is lengthy. These films helped perpetuate the notion of a violent and backwoods South, a notion that many were eager to accept since it accorded with the image of the South promulgated through accounts of racism and civil rights struggles in the South of the 1950s and 1960s.

For Director Lewis, who is not a Southerner, the South provided a handy setting for many of his exploitation films—a stereotypical place of violence and barbarism, a natural context for the content he wished to portray.