Editing Horror film (section)

== History ==
{{Excerpt|History of horror films|templates=no}}In discussing narrative trends in horror, scholar Isabel Pinedo draws on ''Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie'' (1989), to map the development of the Anglo-American horror genre. She points out that early synchronized sound as well as post-war period films present threats to social order as external, while human agency (largely male) is what prevails. The focus is on the monster's acts of violence and character's failed attempts at resisting it, ending with male experts using violence or knowledge to defeat the monster and restore social order.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Pinedo |first=Isabel Cristina |title=Recreational terror: women and the pleasures of horror film viewing |date=1997 |publisher=State University of New York Press |isbn=978-0-7914-3441-3 |series=SUNY series, interruptions--border testimony(ies) and critical discourse/s |location=Albany, N.Y}}</ref>{{sfn|Tudor|1991}}

Pinedo presents the category of postmodern horror. She summarizes their narrative structure as indicating the prevalence of internal threats to social order through a combination of monstrous violence and ineffectual human resistance with open endings. These open endings may be that the monster triumphs like in ''[[Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer]]'' (1990); the monster is defeated but only temporarily like in ''[[Halloween (1978 film)|Halloween]]'' (1978), or have an ambiguous outcome like in ''[[Night of the Living Dead]]'' (1968), ''[[The Texas Chain Saw Massacre|The Texas Chainsaw Massacre]]'' (1974), ''[[The Thing (1982 film)|The Thing]]'' (1982), and ''[[A Nightmare on Elm Street|Nightmare on Elm Street]]'' (1984).<ref name=":0" />{{Horrorfilmlist}}