Two Thousand Maniacs! is a 1964 American supernatural splatter film written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and starring William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Jeffrey Allen, Ben Moore, and Gary Bakeman. It follows a group of Northern tourists who are savagely tortured and murdered during a ghostly Confederate celebration of a small Georgia community's centennial. The story was inspired by the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon, which also features a spectral town that manifests once every 100 years, populated by ghosts of its past inhabitants.
Shot in Florida and released in mid-1964, Two Thousand Maniacs! screened largely at drive-in theaters, and performed particularly well in the Southern United States. The film was met with some controversy due to its graphic depiction of violence, receiving significant cuts by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and being banned in the city of Chicago by the local police department and film board. Despite this, the film proved to be a financial success, and remained in circulation at drive-in theaters in the United States through the 1970s.
Two Thousand Manaics! has been noted by critics as an early example of hicksploitation in exploitation films, as well as for its sensationalizing of national perceptions between the North and South. The theme of social class differences between the regions has been cited as a prominent feature of the film. It also contains elements of supernatural horror, and its structure has been acknowledged as an influence on the contemporary slasher film.
The film was preceded by Lewis's Blood Feast (1963) and followed by Color Me Blood Red (1965), as part of what Lewis and film scholars have described as the director's "Splatter Trilogy." A remake titled 2001 Maniacs was released in 2005.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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