The Anthology Film Archives’ excellent series of gritty  1970s genre movies chosen by director William Lustig (“Maniac Cop”) continues through Friday. On Saturday  I saw one of them in a well-attended  show, Charles B. Pierce’s “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” (1977). The gripping, low-budget  thriller about a  real-life masked slasher who terrorized Texarkana, Texas, in 1946 predates “Halloween” by a year and features Ben Johnson  as the Texas Ranger leading the manhunt. The film unreels once more, Friday at 9:30 p.m., at the Anthology, Second Avenue and Second Street.

It will be preceded, at 6:45 p.m., by Larry Cohen’s “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover” (1977), with Broderick Crawford as the perverted former FBI boss. Also in the cast are Rip Torn, Celeste Holm, Dan Dailey, Lloyd Nolan and Jose Ferrer.