on each film—used them as vehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), for AIP, might have "the look of tabloid sleaze," but one leading critic found it "perhaps the most intelligent film about American politics ever to come out of Hollywood." The gory horror film Deathdream (a.k.a. Dead of Night; 1974), directed by Bob Clark and written by Alan Orsmby, is also an agonized protest of the war in Vietnam. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg made serious-minded low-budget horror films whose implications are not so much ideological as psychological and existential: Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), and The Brood (1979) all involve a degree of self-reference that, as William Paul points out, "makes Cronenberg's status as a genre director somewhat odd.... His works foreground their meaningfulness in a way that is unusual for the horror film." An Easy Rider with conceptual rigor, the movie that most clearly presaged the way in which exploitation content and artistic treatment would be combined in modestly budgeted films of later years was the biker-themed Electra Glide in Blue (1973), a United Artists release directed by James William Guercio. Critical admiration was hardly universal at the time: Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote, "Under different intentions, it might have made a decent grade-C Roger Corman bike movie—though Corman has generally used more interesting directors than Guercio." The horror field continued to attract young, independent American directors whose work would prove especially influential. As critic Roger Ebert explained in one 1974 movie review, "Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they're brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can't get more conventional projects off the ground." The particular movie under consideration was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Written and directed by Tobe Hooper, it was made on a budget of somewhere between $93,000 and $250,000. It would earn $14.4 million in domestic rentals and become one of the most influential horror films of the decade. John Carpenter, whose debut feature, the $60,000 sci-fi comedy Dark Star (1974), had become a cult classic, made his lasting mark four years later. Halloween (1978), produced for $320,000, grossed over $80 million at the box-office worldwide, making it "the most successful 'indie' movie ever released." The film effectively established the