We lost Herschell Gordon Lewis earlier this year, and in the wake of Bookvember and Spookyween I promised a look back at four films made by the Godfather of Gore. In 1963, Lewis' Blood Feast cracked open a new sort of filmmaking--gore-trash was born, and things would never be the same. Blood Feast was only the beginning, and it served as the opening part of what would become Lewis' "Blood Trilogy," consisting of Blood Feast, Two Thousands Maniacs!, and 1965's Color Me Blood Red and it's that second film we'll be looking at today. (We probably won't be looking at Color Me Blood Red because I think Lewis lost some steam on that one.) And before we start, I want to clarify something: when I started planning this month, realizing that Two Thousand Maniacs was a given (as it is on my A-List), I wasn't anticipating a Trump victory. In the wake of this election, a movie about a town full of right-wing Southerners trapping and killing Northerners to avenge the Confederate loss of the Civil War will be...interesting, to say the least. So break out yer finest moonshine, and pluck a song on the banjo. We're goin' down under the Mason-Dixon line.
We open with a song sung by none other than Lewis itself, recounting the defeat of the major Confederate generals during the Civil War, done in the style of a stereotypical "hick" ballad--like many things in Lewis' horror movies this is played for laughs. As this song plays we see a group of yokels move signs and tree branches to divert a pair of cars into the town of Pleasant Valley. The entire town comes out to greet these Northerners, proclaiming that they are holding their centennial celebration and they've been looking for outsiders to make into their guests of honor. Despite the oddness of such a proposal--and despite the fact that they've been invited to stay two whole days--the travelers agree to such "Southern hospitality." Almost immediately the audience is shown that there is something sinister about this town, aside from the fact that it is literally plastered with Confederate flags. And the characters only notice this when it is far too late: for the name of the game here, essentially, fucked up carnival games, like a "horse race" that turns out to be drawing-and-quartering, or going down a hill in a barrel...lined with nails! That's to say nothing of the "emergency surgery" they get ready for a woman who "accidentally" loses her thumb...or the cannibalism. Yes, this is all to make up for an incident a hundred years ago where the Union Army decided not only to butcher the Confederate forces they were facing, but the inhabitants of Pleasant Valley as well. Of course, there is a twist ending which reveals that these new folk in Pleasant Valley may not quite be the original victims' descendants.
Two Thousand Maniacs! is a movie that thrives on being high concept. A town of vengeful Southerners kill Northerners in wacky and gruesome ways, behind the guise of Southern kindness. That is your one-sentence premise; nuance is not what Lewis aims for, and I think that shows in that I can't tell you the name of a single character from this movie (though the movie certainly establishes its characters, even in a thin way--there are familiar faces). But what makes high concept, single-sentence stories interesting to talk about is that we get to fill in the nuance ourselves, in contrast to the didactic style of the complicated, experimental works which I will equally defend. Like I said, a movie like this is gonna say some weird things in the wake of a Trump victory. So let's get into my reaction.
When I first saw Two Thousand Maniacs, I found it as amusing and wonderful as the other Lewis movies I saw. I will not hide from the fact that now, today (I write this back on November 10th), Two Thousand Maniacs is actually pretty chilling if you are a minority concerned about the future, as I am. Never mind the fact that my new copy of the movie doesn't have the psychedelic Technicolor of the first print I saw, which highlighted that the blood was the too-bright red paint that Lewis employed to save money. Never mind the lack of realism concerning the violence, or how the characters handle it. What has happened in America in 2016 is a result of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of power and privilege, and that lack of understanding was carried by rural, non-college whites. For better or worse, the murderous Confederates in this film are part of the liberal narrative of who we should be afraid of, and even if I recognize that neither the liberal or conservative ways of things are absolutely correct, it's scary, having grown up with the liberal side of things, to be faced with the prospect of bands of regression-worshiping idiots (for remember, stupid people are scary 'cause they're immune to logic) who use their majority to torture and murder people. Of course, I'm of the mind that it's more complicated than both Lewis and the modern media let on: the people who support Trump, along with the people who supported the Confederacy, were victimized by Republicans (or Democrats, in the 1860s) who wanted to make them into their pawns, and shaped the media and education systems to this end. The xenophobia and intolerance shared by both Trump supporters and the slave-owning South are inherently unnatural, and culture can be changed to help people understand the intersectional function of power in our society--but I majorly digress. I am viscerally scared of the events of Two Thousand Maniacs if I understand that things are more complicated than my feelings let on.
Moving away from my own feelings, we have the movie itself. There's an interesting distinction I noticed. While 1964 was definitely in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, being fifty years closer to the Civil War has made a lot of difference. Even a lot of whites these days get on edge in the presence of the Stars and Bars, and yet the protagonists of Maniacs never seem to worry about being Yankees in a town that has spent millions of dollars on flag orders. Again, they are white--think of how different the movie would be if there was a single person of color in the cast--but we so readily assign that flag status as a symbol of hate today.
And that leads me to my next point: even beyond that detail, the protagonists are pretty naive. While I get that people might be more generally trusting, even outside the flag issue, in 1964, it takes a little bit of stupidity for someone to choose to derail their trip for two days to participate in a small town festival. The male lead of the story is even supposed to be headed for a teachers' conference, and his car has already broken at this point--only through hitchhiking with the female lead did he make it this far. And it's interesting to focus in on the fact that Lewis chose his male lead to be a teacher, of all things. He's played by the same guy who played the manly police detective in Blood Feast, so maybe his masculine charms are supposed to represent a self-assurance that things will turn out okay, but it's hard to write off the fact that the movie ends with our teacher friend telling the female lead that the best thing to do about discovering this patch of murderous, past-obsessed hatred...is to forget about it. What's that? The white middle-class educator wants to ignore a crime committed by his fellow whites? One which, because this is the Confederate South we're talking about here, is inevitably and irrevocably tied up in racism? Shocking.
I don't know if this style of filmmaking is what's needed for what's ahead in politics--and yes, that's a serious question I asked myself. I say that because I helped publish a book called The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble. It was published before the election, and it's one of those things where it takes an offensive group and wallows in their awfulness, out of anger, out of a complete inability to digest their worldview. I'm sure it was written with good intentions, but wallowing is stagnation. It doesn't help anyone, because it doesn't move forward. Two Thousand Maniacs wasn't intended at all, probably, to be a progressive film in any way, but I'll interpret it with that lens, because even if the Godfather were still alive today, I will claim Death of the Author. (And I celebrate it for his intended goal for it, a gory, silly horror movie.) Were it not for the fact that it implicitly calls out its Northern characters alongside its reactionary ones, Two Thousands Maniacs would be simply a slate for the anger its creator had over the crimes of the South, both in the past and the present, representing only how disgusting and low humanity can sink. (And the ending very directly says that this way of life is literally dead.) By adding in a degree of care to his plotting, Lewis has asked us to look at the bigger picture, and to understand where us "do-gooders" fall into the scheme of things when it comes to violence and hatred.
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