Two Thousand Maniacs!

Herschell Gordon Lewis, USA, 1964, 16mm, 1.85, colour, 87′

THU September 18 / 19.00 / Slovenian cinematheque

Six Yankee tourists (including Playboy Playmate Connie Mason) are lured into a small Southern town of Pleasant Valley by “redneck” citizens preparing for the centennial celebration of the day Union troops destroyed their Confederate town and massacred its citizens. The unsuspecting travellers are to be guests of hours, their gory deaths the main attraction of a bloody fair.

Between Blood Feast (1963) and Color Me Blood Red (1965), and well beyond Hollywood mainstream and good taste, notorious B-movie producer David F. Friedman and pioneer goremeister and drive-in king H.G. Lewis created the second instalment of “The Blood Trilogy”. Forsaking the milieu of nudie-cuties, their threesome of original ‘splatter’ films invented a new graphic expression of gore for the horror genre, while this bloody parody of southern hospitality brought the narrative formula of Rural Gothic into exploitation.

“In Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) we find assembled for the first time many of the elements which would go on to feature prominently in the most formulaic sub-genre of the American horror film (save the slasher movie): the backwoods horror flick … Two Thousand Maniacs! helped establish a paradigm that would be replicated over and over again in the decades that followed, particularly once the success of John Boorman’s film version of Deliverance (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) ensured that these tropes infiltrated mainstream popular culture.” Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural – Gothic in American Popular Culture

“Lewis’ blood looks like ketchup, and his limbs and entrails are as realistic as those thrown around by the Monty Python troupe in their occasional jibes at Sam Peckinpah.”
– Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies

“The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments.”
– Variety

“Herschell and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously.”
– David F. Friedman