Article by Joseph A. Ziemba

Believe it or not, there was a time in genre film history when not everyone was an authority on everything. In the days before DVD commentaries and the Internet, you had to fight for knowledge. Names like Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman were covered in black cloaks of mystery, spoken of in hushed voices with fervent delight.

In 1988, the curtain rose. Fantaco Enterprises, an Albany, New York based publisher, reissued paperback novelizations of Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, both of which were originally written by H.G. Lewis in the mid 1960s. The books were terrific artifacts, embellished with behind the scenes color photos and an unexpected slapstick tone that was vastly different from their filmed counterparts. But that's not all. Brief introductions, newly penned by Lewis, set the imagination on fire. Here was the story. The real story. Straight from the set.

No matter how much you study or dissect the gore films of Friedman and Lewis, the cracked hooks never waver. Herschell's introductions remain the only autobiographical reminisces the filmmaker has ever put to print regarding his work, aside from his foreward to Daniel Krogh's 1983 biography The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis. Sadly, these rare books have since lapsed into limbo, robbing a new generation of a perfectly charmed experience. Weep no more.

With Herschell Gordon Lewis's permission, Bleeding Skull presents part two of a two-part feature which "reprints" both prologues for your enjoyment. Although the actual content might be readily available elsewhere (Lewis and Friedman's excellent series of DVD commentaries from Something Weird, for one), nothing beats revisiting that old feeling of inspired discovery. Or rediscovery.

THE STORY BEHIND TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!
by Herschell Gordon Lewis

The course of history had been forever altered: Blood Feast was in release.

I didn’t see myself then as a footnote to motion picture history or as the originator of a new kind of film. No, what mattered was that a movie my partner Dave Friedman and I thought would play at midnight shows on Halloween was in general release, knocking them dead at the boxoffice, outgrossing major company pictures whose budgets were a hundred times the size of ours.

Now, what if...

What if we made one with respectable production values? What if we paid attention to the acting? What if the story actually had a plot?

Unlike most of my earlier motion pictures (exception: Living Venus), Two Thousand Maniacs! was thoroughly scripted. I knew, going in, my name would be on the credits as both writer and director. This would be my magnum opus.

I knew, too, we couldn’t shoot this picture in Miami. An urban setting would kill the visual impressions. So I went on a location hunt and found the perfect place: St. Cloud, Florida.

St. Cloud, in the pre-Disney World era, was a retirement heaven. Here, enjoying the fragrance of orange groves and the balmy Central Florida weather, it was impossible for anybody to be ill-tempered. St. Cloud was close enough to Orlando for us to send the daily footage to a New York laboratory. We also could draw on the surprisingly adequate pool of acting talent in and around Orlando.

Taking no chances, I brought two key actors with me: Bill Kerwin, who had played the lead in both Living Venus and Blood Feast and who was as helpful behind the camera as he was in front of it; and “Talky” Blank (who used the screen name “Jeffrey Allen”), an immensely talented and disciplined actor whose delivery of lines inspired the whole cast.

The town of St. Cloud couldn’t have been more cooperative. We hung a huge banner, “Pleasant Valley Centennial,” across the main square. Some residents were puzzled that Pleasant Valley, wherever it was, would hold its centennial celebration in St. Cloud; but they were too polite to comment.

We shot the key scene in the square on a Sunday afternoon. Our exposure meter went on the fritz, and Andy Romanoff and I, who ran the cameras, were guessing at the exposures on an in-and-out overcast day.
Then it started to dribble rain. We raced through the long shots which involved the crowds (half the town turned out as unpaid extras) and picked up the close-ups a few days later.

(Because the crowds were long gone, we had to shoot close-ups from below, so the absence of bystanders wouldn’t show.)

I made this a provision of employment for both cast and crew: When we recorded the theme song I’d written— “The South’s Gonna Rise Again!” —everybody had to show up at the recording studio to help yell “Yeeeee-Hawwwwww!” It’s my voice on that recording, not because I wanted to be a recording star but because I didn’t want to pay a singer.

To this day Two Thousand Maniacs! is my favorite film. It never did achieve the boxoffice success of Blood Feast, but I’ll stack it against all those mechanical “splatter movies” which use prosthetic and electronic thermal devices instead of the genuine horror we built into that early movie.

Just before writing these words I screened a videotape of Two Thousand Maniacs! I’m proud to tell you— my opinion stands.

Read HOW BLOOD FEAST CAME TO BE: From The Desk Of H.G. Lewis!

SPECIAL THANKS to Herschell Gordon Lewis for his permission to reprint “The Story Behind Two Thousand Maniacs!” © Herschell Gordon Lewis 1987. First published by Fantaco Enterprises, Inc., June 1988.