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BY Emily Guy Birken

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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.…