I was a card-carrying scaredy-cat through my childhood and early teen years, but the release of Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream single-handedly turned me from nervous Nellie to horror aficionado overnight. Watching Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott fight back against Ghostface helped me understand the delights of feeling deliciously scared.
But watching horror films does more than just raise your heart rate. Scary movies reveal and reflect the cultural fears we collectively grapple with, making each era’s horror films a time capsule of society’s biggest concerns at the time.
Money has always been a common source of anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that some of the scariest villains in our favorite horror movies can also represent our financial worries. Here are the surprising money lessons you can learn from iconic movie monsters.
The villain: Death in Final Destination
Unlike most movie bad guys, we never actually see Death as a character in James Wong’s 2000 film Final Destination. In this movie, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a high school student, has a vision that the plane he and his classmates are taking to Paris will explode in midair. Alex, plus five other students and one teacher, are removed from the plane before takeoff—only for the plane to blow up just like in the premonition.
Unfortunately for Alex and the rest, by getting off the plane before it exploded they have cheated Death, which will now claim the lives of each of these accidental survivors, in the order of their intended deaths. And because Death is a bit of a diva, each victim is killed in increasingly unlikely ways.
The financial lesson: Understand real risk
While the Final Destination franchise as a whole makes it clear that there is no satisfactory way to avoid Death, we can still glean some important financial lessons from the film. Specifically, it’s vital to understand the real risks you face.
In the film (and in life), Death is inevitable and impossible to avoid. Alex tries to keep Death at bay by hiding in a remote cabin. He tries to avoid all risk and makes himself nuts thinking through the creative ways Death may come for him in the cabin. Similarly, risk-averse individuals might keep their money in cash rather than investing it. To avoid a possible loss of principal, they condemn their money to inevitably lose value to inflation.
At the other end of the risk spectrum is Carter (Kerr Smith), who intentionally stops his car on a train crossing to prove that the survivors have nothing to fear. Although Alex saves him from an oncoming train, the crash kills their friend Billy (Seann William Scott) in an especially nasty fashion. Carter reflects the kind of investor who doesn’t believe anything bad can ever happen to their money. Rather than risk-averse, they are simply risk-ignorant and may need to be rescued from their reckless choices.
The villain: Samara in The Ring
Samara (Daveigh Chase) from Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film The Ring is one of the creepier horror villains in recent memory. As the homicidal ghost of a little girl, Samara finds her victims via cursed VHS tape.
Once you’ve watched the strange video, you have seven days before she arrives to kill you—by crawling through your TV. The only way to save yourself from Samara is to make a copy of the tape and ensure someone else sees it, so the villain can continue killing without end.
The financial lesson: Just say no to MLMs
Just like multilevel marketing, Samara’s curse depends on constant recruitment of a downstream network. Rachel (Naomi Watts) is able to avoid death because she made a copy of the original VHS tape that she gave to her ex-husband, who Samara kills. The film ends with Rachel helping her 8-year-old son, who has seen the tape, make a new copy for someone else to find.
As with MLMs, the only way to stay afloat after Samara’s curse is to bring her new people. Each recruit will either be consumed by Samara or provide her with new victims to consume. Similarly, each new MLM “employee” will either lose money to the scheme or bring in more people to help their recruiter make more money.
No matter how curious you might be, just refuse any opportunity to watch a creepy videotape or join a friend for a “product party.”
The villain: Tony Todd’s Candyman in Candyman
The titular villain of Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman was killed in a horrific lynching in the 19th century. After the lynch mob replaced his hand with a hook, they covered him with honeycomb and let a swarm of bees sting him to death. One hundred years later, Candyman continues to haunt and terrorize the residents of the spot where he died, which became the Cabrini-Green Homes public housing project in Chicago.
While the film offers a great deal of commentary about race, privilege, and class, the best financial lesson from the film was behind the scenes.
Candyman is associated with bees. They fill his ribcage and mouth, and he uses his bees to subdue Helen (Virginia Madsen), the main character. The late Tony Todd, who played Candyman, negotiated with Rose to receive an additional $1,000 bonus for every bee sting he got during filming. His 23 bee stings increased his salary by $23,000 ($55,236 in 2026 dollars).
The financial lesson: Create a win-win in difficult circumstances
Although the bee scene required Todd to have his mouth filled with the stinging insects—a process that reportedly took a half hour to complete—the actor recognized the significance of the bee symbolism for his character and the film. In a 2019 interview, Todd said, “Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain. Once I realized it was an important part of who Candyman was, I embraced it.”
But Todd didn’t just accept these truly difficult filming conditions. He negotiated a way to make each potential bee sting a personal win, while also giving the production a financial interest in keeping him as safe as possible.
It was inevitable that Todd would get stung during these scenes, so he found a way to make it less likely and worthwhile. When we are similarly faced with unavoidable difficulties, we can take a page from Todd and turn the inevitable negatives into a win-win scenario.
Scary and savvy
You may not expect to learn a thing or two about money when you sit down to watch a scary movie. But iconic horror villains can teach us better money management even while scaring us.
This Halloween, whether you revisit Death’s Rube Goldberg machines in Final Destination, Samara popping out of a television in The Ring, or Candyman bestowing a bee-filled kiss in Candyman, you can learn to better understand risks, ignore the siren song of multilevel marketing recruitment, and negotiate win-win scenarios in difficult situations.
But you may also want to be careful around stoves, televisions, and mirrors, too. Just in case.
