Две Тысячи Маниаков! (Dve Tysyachi Maniakov!)

1964 American horror film by Herschell Gordon Lewis
The film was the feature film debut of a nonprofessional Illinois stage actor named Taalkeus Blank (1910 1991; nicknamed "Talky" his entire life) who played Pleasant Valley Mayor Buckman. He used the pseudonym "Jeffery Allen" in all of his film appearances because he was never a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Director Lewis was so impressed by Blank's ability to perfectly mimic any type of Southern accent that he hired Blank to appear in many of his later films, among them Moonshine Mountain (1964), This Stuff'll Kill Ya! (1971) and Year of the Yahoo! (1972), playing various Southern accented characters under the Jeffrey Allen pseudonym. The film's budget was considerably larger than what the filmmakers had previously had to work with, and afforded the film a more polished production.

Two Thousand Maniacs! was heavily cut by the MPAA before its release, which resulted in the film being scantily screened across the country. Allmovie wrote, "drive in gore king Herschell Gordon Lewis reached a creative peak with this darkly comic slaughterfest". In a retrospective, Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle called the film "remarkably durable" and referred to it as "one of the sickest movies ever made."

Two Thousand Maniacs! was one of the early films to introduce audiences to the formulaic plot of Southern gore films: Northern outsiders who are stranded in the rural South are horrifically murdered by virulent, backwoods Southerners. This subgenre of grindhouse peaked with the release of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Two Thousand Maniacs! has been credited as being influential on Hooper's film. During the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, television and mainstream narrative films used the "rednecks" caricature rather than a realistic depiction of white Southerners like the televised news of the era. The film has been noted by scholars as sensationalizing historical anxieties that the rest of the nation held toward the South's history (and that of its white inhabitants) of extra legal violence, perceived primitivism, and unresolved regional conflict. In his essay "Remapping Southern Hospitality", Anthony Szczesiul explained the film's use of Southern hospitality and other Southern stereotypes: "The film's ironic parody of southern hospitality highlights the performative nature of the discourse. When Mayor Buckman delivers his promise of southern hospitality in his thick, cartoonish accent, the reference is immediately recognizable to all–the characters in the film, its actors and director, its original audience, and by us today–but here the possibility of southern hospitality is transformed into a cruel joke: the visitor becomes victim.

The 1980s alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs took their name in homage to the film as a way of making them stand out from other bands on the college rock scene. The John Waters film Multiple Maniacs is named in homage to the film, as well.