In an interview with Reel.com, producer David F. Friedman recalled the origins of Two Thousand Maniacs!:
"I had been to New York and seen Brigadoon, a musical play about a little Scottish town that comes to life every hundred years. I came home and was telling Herschell [Gordon Lewis] about this play. Herschell, although he was from Chicago, was absolutely fascinated with the South. He had taught at Southern Mississippi, was a professor of English there. One of the reasons he and I got along was he had always thought I was an Alabama redneck - which I am! He said, "How about a little Southern town that was massacred by the Yankees in 1864 and comes to life in 1964? From that came the screenplay for Two Thousand Maniacs!."

Friedman traveled to the South to scout locations and discovered a sleepy little town near Orlando named St. Cloud that was the ideal setting. So in October of 1963, Two Thousand Maniacs! was filmed in St. Cloud, Florida on a shooting schedule of approximately 14 days with a budget of around $62,000.

Both Lewis and Friedman have stated the residents and city council of St. Cloud, Florida welcomed the filmmakers and cast with open arms and were completely supportive and cooperative during filming, allowing the crew access to shoot wherever they wanted. According to Lewis, it was like one giant family affair and the entire shoot was an absolute joy.

Actress Connie Mason (who also starred inBlood Feast) was reportedly difficult and frustrating to work with. The main reason she was brought back to star in Two Thousand Maniacs! was so they could exploit that fact that she was a recent Playboy Playmate (Miss June 1963), a detail that fit in very well with the lurid marketing campaign. In the garage sequence towards the end of the film, Lewis states that he actually had to cut out lines of her dialogue because she couldn't remember them...even after they had been written on the dashboard of the car.

Compiled by Eric Weber

Sources:
Audio commentary by director Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David F. Friedman on the Something Weird DVD release of Two Thousand Maniacs!, released by Image Entertainment in 2000.
Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste, John Waters, 1981 a Delta Book published by Dell Publishing.
www.reel.com