The strains of the knee-slappin’ “The South Is Gonna Rise Again” open Herschell Gordon Lewis’s campy 1964 gorefest “Two Thousand Maniacs!” as two cars full of northerners take a fateful detour into the Southern hamlet of Pleasant Valley.
Little do these unassuming tourists know that they’re about to be the very special guests of the town’s Civil War centennial, a bloodbath of Confederate vengeance put on by the titular maniacs. These Southern stereotypes chug moonshine, hold their pants up with rope, wave Confederate flags, let out rebel yells, pluck banjos … and of course, detest Yankees. The unwitting visitors—the bickering couple, the promiscuous woman, the perpetually inebriated pleasuremonger, the dim-witted follower—are subjected to a variety of “festive” slaughterings, providing a veritable B-movie cornucopia of stilted acting, fake blood, and microbudget prosthetic severed limbs.
But following all this gleeful carnage is an unexpected coda. A pair of escapees flees to a nearby police station to report the massacre, putting their faith in local authority figures. It’s a potentially foolhardy move—after all, the mayor of the neighboring town has just led a killing spree—but the cop agrees to accompany them back to Pleasant Valley.
On the way, however, they discover that … there is no Pleasant Valley; it was by all accounts wiped out by the Union Army in 1865. Pleasant Valley’s inhabitants are nothing but vengeful ghosts of the Civil War South, spirits that materialize in human form just once every hundred years to hold this event. The contrast between the “residents” of Pleasant Valley and the flesh-and-blood policeman represents the South’s social progression between the Civil War and 1965, an evolution that points towards a future—perhaps in 2065—when, one hopes, the nefarious aspects of Southern history seem like things of a distant past.
It’s also a cautionary tale: If we don’t stay wary, these specters could come back to haunt us. And crush us with a giant boulder. And draw and quarter us. And maybe even roll us down a hill in a barrel full of spikes.
