The commercial success of independent youth-oriented pictures such as those of AIP was matched by that of some more edgy and disturbing independent productions in the same generic territory, especially horror. Films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) proved highly successful at the box office, pushing back the boundaries of conventional exploitation- horror material and combining this with a more negative portrait of American society that resonated with contemporary angst and unrest in the era of events such as racial uprising, the Vietnam war and Watergate
