Herschell Gordon Lewis was pretty strong medicine when he burst onto the scene with 1963’s Blood Feast. America was just a few years past the shock of seeing Janet Leigh edited to death in a motel shower; to see an improbably large tongue plucked from a playboy model’s mouth, grimly dripping with garish technicolor, was another thing entirely. Emboldened by his success (and, more importantly, seeing dollar signs), Lewis went bigger and meaner. His follow-up, Two Thousand Maniacs! (emphasis on the punctuation), pushed the envelope even further. Lewis rode this crimson wave for the rest of the decade, before retiring to make his true fortune in advertising. His films, while ghoulishly beloved, would come to be eclipsed by the work of his followers: George A. Romero (R.I.P.), Wes Craven (R.I.P.), Tobe Hooper (R.I.P.), and John Carpenter (alive and well and taking his synthesizers to a city near you) would rush through the floodgates Lewis opened and create some honest to god art. In the home video boom of the ‘80s and the DVD renaissance of the ‘00s, Lewis would find new audiences, but age had rendered his films kitsch objects– transgressive, but not scary.
However.
Last Christmas, my girlfriend surprised me with Arrow Video’s incredible Herschell Gordon Lewis box set, and I watched Two Thousand Maniacs! for the first time in over a decade. And I was surprised to realize that the damn film got to me.
For the uninitiated, Two Thousand Maniacs! finds two groups of yankee tourists taking a detour through an unmarked southern town called Pleasant Valley, where the unnervingly gregarious townspeople are preparing for their centennial festival. Unfortunately for them, the centennial in question is the anniversary of the town’s destruction by General Sherman, and its residents are ghosts bent on collecting northern blood. Even more unfortunately, the travelers are rock stupid, and soon find themselves barbecued, drawn and quartered, rolled down a hill in a barrel filled with broken glass, and so forth.
So here’s the thing: I’m not saying Two Thousand Maniacs! isn’t stupid. Lewis, in his many entertaining interviews, commentary tracks, and memoirs, was never shy about the fact that his movies were crudely made, laughably acted, and ultimately mercenary. But in the past year, insulated yankees like myself have been abruptly confronted with the fact that we share a country with some scary fucking people. Watching the opening credits, in which revellers fill the screen with confederate flags and a peppy bluegrass band (fronted by the director!) sings “The South’s Gonna Rise Again” made my palms go sweaty and cold when I rewatched it this past December; I can only imagine what it’s like to watch it at this particular moment. The locals seem friendly and affable and welcoming right up until the moment they start hacking you to pieces. This is America, and Lewis, that canny son of a bitch, knew exactly what he was doing. A half century of homagists and imitators may have calloused us to his brand of brutality, but when the callouses are torn off, it turns out his films are just as strong as they ever were.
In a tidy bit of irony, Herschell Gordon Lewis passed away last September at age 90, on the day of the first presidential debate. I wasn’t alone in jokingly wondering whether popping in Blood Feast would provide a more or less gruesome evening of entertainment, not realizing at the time how close the question truly was. It’s something of a stock line at this point that horror movies are a reflection of social anxieties– one that Lewis would probably crack a wry grin at– but it’s undeniable that the things that keep you up at night at any given moment will affect which stories you respond to, and how. Two Thousand Maniacs! is silly, cheap, crude, and may be the most unsettling movie you see in a theater this year. All together now: Yeeeeee-haw!
Two Thousand Maniacs
1964
dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis
83 min
Screens Friday, 9/1 at midnight @ Coolidge Corner Theatre– in 35mm!
