Horror’s refusal of closure expressed the sense that terror could never be truly finished.

Evidence

[There exists a] delight in thwarting the audience’s expectations of closure. The most famous example of this tendency are the surprise codas of Brain de Palma’s films—for instance, the hand reaching out from the grave in Carrie… . At the end of The Evil Dead, the monsters, after defying myriad attempts to destroy them, appear finally to be annihilated as they are burned to death in an amazing lengthy sequence. But in the last shot of the film, when the hero steps outside into the light of day, the camera rushes toward him, and he turns and faces it with an expression of horror. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 740

Categorization

• XREF: The monster-outlives-the-ending structure mirrors how the Muslim-monster recurs across centuries in the book — the image never fully dies.