Films

Pleasant Valley is a town of Confederates — defenders of social inequality and defeated in the Civil War — that resurrects every hundred years to take re venge on its northern neighbors. In a succession of scenes featuring mutilation, sadism, and burlesque, “Two Thousand Maniacs!” moves away from urban settings and refocuses horror cinema on American mythology and the wounds of the country’s remote areas, frozen in tradition. It is a horror classic that combines social commentary with a frenzied cele bration of gore, in which any resemblance to contem porary American extremism is far from coincidental.