TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! 1964
43%
Written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Starring William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Jeffrey Allen
Synopsis
It’s the centennial of Deep South town Pleasant Valley, and the citizens know how to celebrate. Not only is there a parade on Main Street, but they’re luring, capturing, and killing Yankee travelers one-by-one!
Why We Love It
We go the theater and pay for horror movies to see fellow humans get tortured, slashed, crushed, stabbed, drowned, hung, mauled, electrocuted, hogtied, crucified, beheaded, degloved, and—in the case of two Jason movies—sleeping-bagged to death. You ever stop and think how that’s weird? Well, don’t, because it’s totally normal and there’s nothing wrong with it and we’re definitely not implying a primal response to our world of decayed morals and deadening light, so knock it off, will ya!
They used to sing and dance to solve their problems in movies. People concluded stories with body parts intact—and thoroughly exercised. That changed in 1963 when schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis released Blood Feast. Lewis had been making it as a director of nudie-cuties like Boin-n-g! and Goldilocks and the Three Bares, but with the market drying up, he needed a new hook. Guys ponying up to see naked women get off is a no-brainer, but would more pay to see people getting offed? Blood Feast’s runaway drive-in success proved it to be so, and from that was born a new kind of movie whose main purpose is to shock and excite audiences with blood and gore.
Blood Feast is the first splatter movie. Spiritual sequel Two Thousand Maniacs! is the first watchable splatter movie. It’s a given that a Gordon Lewis production will play clunky and feel slapped together. That is, of course, part of its ugly and durable charm. Two Thousand Maniacs!’s natural state of disarray makes the flick feel like it was pulled from a bayou swamp. People who lived in the area were cast as the townspeople and dispense southern hospitality with extreme prejudice—arms are chopped off, horses split a guy apart, and a boulder smushes one victim via carnival dunk game.
Two Thousand Maniacs! gleefully plays up the emerging social splintering of America that would be bedrock to the later unrest of the sixties: it’s one of the original movies to portray the South as a cauldron of unchecked fury toward the North. The movie delivered the knives and body parts to sate a violent appetite within that few had addressed before.