Down South: Regional Exploitation Films, Southern Audiences, and Hillbilly Horror in Herschell Gordon Lewis's Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

Abstract

:This article analyzes Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), directed by “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, in the context of the history of 1960s independent exploitation film production. Lewis and Maniacs represent an important yet marginalized regional alternative—in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and audiences—to both the mainstream Hollywood film industry and the slightly larger-scale and more mainstream exploitation-style filmmakers of the era. Maniacs also importantly reveals the marginalized, rural, and predominantly Southern drive-in audiences that made up Lewis's primary market and to whom the film, in its representation of murderous rural Southerners, directly speaks in this historical moment of the Civil War centennial and the escalating civil rights movement. Furthermore, Maniacs establishes important precedents for the development of the horror film in terms of the introduction and mainstreaming of gore horror and its bloody effects as well as the “hillbilly horror” subgenre, which would be more broadly popularized on a larger scale in the 1970s.