2000 Maniacs! (1964)

I just watched 2000 Maniacs! and by god is that a prescient film. It's redneck horror at its most carnivalesque.

Herschell Gordon Lewis looks eminently prophetic as his 1964 film sets a template for a subgenre of horror that would thrive in the 1970s. Texas Chainsaw Massacre would give us the male remnants of a family of cannibalistic rednecks living just off the main road. The Hills Have Eyes would give us an extended family and/or clan of inbred hicks cannibalizing wayward travellers. Both of these films are better made and more artistically sophisticated than 2000 Maniacs!. But Lewis's film is more demented and visceral: after all, it gives us not a family or a clan but rather a whole town of Southerners, all 2000 of whom are berserk and bloodthirsty and cannibalistic, at least when dealing with Northerners.

And so the film presents us with the multifarious maimings of our Yankee protagonists, making way for a tide of that orangey blood that was a hallmark of Lewis's films. Oh, sure, there's dismemberment and cannibalism, but for me, the piece-de-resistance comes when the locals cajole a Yankee man into a barrel under the pretext that they’re going to roll him down a hill in good fun. This is a risky enough proposition to begin with, but then the yokels gleefully proceed to drive nails through the barrel. By the time the Yankee gets to the bottom of the hill, he's no more than a shredded, red-orange rag. The rednecks rejoice. They have collaborated successfully on a slaughter.

And in these carnographic, set-piece scenes, after the violence has been wrought, Lewis provides us time and again with panning closeups of the faces of the mongrel herd. The vibe is reminiscent of a story that appeared in EC’s Vault of Horror but a decade before, specifically issue 34 from 1953. In this yarn, the supervisor of a psychiatric institution is placed in a casket by inmates. Through a square window in the very top of the casket, all the unhinged inmates peer in, prodding and poking and gaping at their captive. And in 2000 Maniacs!, we get comparable images of the deranged visages, with their gap-toothed smirks and their moon-eyed leering.

The psychiatric holding-tank, then, is the South itself, and every single son and daughter of the soil can be counted as one of the inmates. They betray an unabashed giddiness as they mutilate. They exude joie-de-vivre while they deprive their Northern countrymen and women of their lives. This is inestimably jarring.

So while Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are better films, hands down, the former more artistic and the latter far more tightly plotted, 2000 Maniacs! is more horrifying. To stare into that joyous, murderous, and cannibalistic Southern horde is to stare into the faces of our present-day countrypersons. It is to stare into the faces of the Trump supporters and, more recently, the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Sorry Leatherface, but real-life horror doesn’t wear a mask.

And while the film sort of cops out at the end by suggesting (spoiler alert) hallucinatory or supernatural causes for the town with the eponymous population of 2000 sadistic rednecks, the implication is very real. There are people like this in our country, not just thousands of them but millions of them. They are the abscess on America that will never die. Worse yet, they are a cancer that might just kill you—that might just eat you alive.