Two Thousand Maniacs! may not live up to its title (there are far from two thousand bloodthirsty killers on the loose here) but this grisly reworking of Brigadoon (1954) is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ most consistently enjoyable film. Lewis himself hailed it the favourite of his films and it’s certainly the one where he gets the balance of his often very dumb humour, the gore and the basics (like a plot) just about right.

After we see a group of young children hanging a cat (off camera), we’re introduced to six “Yankees” – married couples John (Jerome Eden) and Bea Miller (Shelby Livingston) and David (Michael Korb) and Beverly Wells (Yvonne Gilbert) and Terry Adams (former Playboy Playmate of the Month Connie Mason, returning from Lewis’s first gore film, Blood Feast (1963)) and her hitchhiker Tom White (William Kerwin, another Blood Feast returnee, using the name Thomas Wood) – who are lured into the seemingly friendly town of Pleasant Valley as guests of honour at their centennial celebrations. Led by Mayor Joseph Buckman (Jeffrey Allen) and his henchmen Rufus (Gary Bakeman) and Lester (Ben Moore), the townspeople are actually the ghosts of people murdered by rogue Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War who return every hundred years to take their revenge on Northerners. Four of the group are murdered in inventive ways by the sadistic townspeople before two of them are able to escape and alert the police. But when they return to the site of the town, they find that it’s vanished, disappeared again into time waiting to re-appear a century later.

Two Thousand Maniacs! is an early example of what would soon become a horror staple, the group of damn Yankees wandering into the South where they fall prey to some of its more deranged inhabitants. It’s a trope that Tobe Hooper would later refine into an art form, its apogee being his masterwork The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). In truth, Two Thousand Maniacs! is stuffed full of crude stereotypes of Southerners. Lewis himself was an outsider, born in Pennsylvania though much of his work was set in the South. Since at least the 1960s, films have frequently represented the South as a hotbed of racism, incest, cannibalism and insanity creating a stereotype that endures even now. Two Thousand Maniacs!, with its town full of vengeful Confederate ghosts was at the forefront of this stereotyping.

Conversely, the Northern “guests of honour” are just obnoxious enough for us to enjoy the gruesome fates visited upon them by the people of Pleasant Valley. A woman is hacked up for barbecue meat, another has a large rock dropped on her, a man is rolled down a hill in a barrel full of inward facing nails, another torn apart by horses tied to his limbs and made to run in different directions. As a form of revenge, it’s all unnecessarily long winded (why not just lure Yankees to the town and shoot them?) but it makes for an enjoyably silly series of low-tech set pieces (the tearing apart by horses is represented by a single bloody stump being dragged along the ground).

Like all of Lewis’ films, Two Thousand Maniacs! is technically crude. Snippets of dialogue have clearly been looped in a studio, outdoor scenes having a disconcerting studio echo, a trait common in Lewis’ earlier films. Despite Lewis and his regular producer at the time David F. Friedman having more money to spend than they did on Blood Feast, it’s still a very shoddy film but at least it’s fun, less of an ordeal than the dreary Blood Feast and it has considerably more verve than most Lewis films. Admittedly it’s not so interesting between the murder set-pieces but at least it’s genuinely amusing this time and comes with some engaging oddities like cast members talking direct to camera, sometimes commenting on action taking place elsewhere in the town.

The largely non-professional cast run the gamut from zombie-like indifference to wild over-enthusiasm – the most guilty of the latter is Gary Bakeman as Rufus, a wildly out of control performance from an “actor” who never appeared in anything else so was presumably a local picked precisely for this larger-than-life behaviour. The best performance comes from Jeffrey Allen, known to friends and family as Taalkeus Blank or “Talky”, as the town’s garrulous Mayor Buckham. Lewis would become something of a regular in Lewis films, turning up again in Moonshine Mountain (1964), This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! (1971) and Year of the Yahoo! (1972).

The other stars of the film are the Pleasant Valley Boys, a trio of wandering minstrels who frequently intrude on the action to provide musical interludes or commentary (appropriate given that the film’s story is lifted from a musical) – the oft-repeated Rebel Yell (The South’s Gonna Rise Again), written by Lewis himself, is a particularly catchy ditty. The Pleasant Valley Boys were a real group (not to be confused with a more recent, identically named bluegrass act from California) with a handful of record releases to their name, including a hard to find 7-inch release of Rebel Yell.

Two Thousand Maniacs! was the second in Lewis’ “Blood Trilogy,” sandwiched between Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red (1964), a more typically dull Lewis film. American rock band 10,000 Maniacs supposedly took inspiration for their name from the film (John Waters certainly did for the title of his film Multiple Maniacs (1970)) and it was remade in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs by director Tim Sullivan and with Robert Englund stepping into Jeffrey Lewis’ shoes. In turn, it got a sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010).