Saturday, Oct. 31, is Halloween. The year's biggest box-office surprise is a horror film. Obsession cost a reported $750,000 to make and has taken in over $523 million worldwide. It streams on Peacock. The Wall Street Journal's Esther Zuckerman picked five of the year's best scares and found a life lesson in each. We found two of them are about money.
Start with the hit. Obsession borrows a premise as old as W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story The Monkey's Paw. A lonely young man makes a wish on a gag-gift toy. He wants the girl he likes to love him more than anyone alive. He gets it, and it goes wrong. Zuckerman's point is that the one to blame is the wisher. He's too wrapped up in himself to see what his wish is doing to her. Lesson one is to be careful what you wish for.
Backrooms, the A24 hit now on HBO Max, has made over $400 million. A depressed furniture-warehouse owner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, walks through a wall in his store into a world where nothing is right. The lesson is to skip the trip down memory lane. Retro can just mean old and creepy. Resident Evil, still in theaters at over $363 million, is the one that caught our eye. Austin Abrams plays a medical courier who has already worked one job that night. He takes a late-night gig anyway. He wants a little extra cash, and he wants to put off a hard talk with his girlfriend, who is pregnant. The apocalypse follows. The lesson is to quit while you're ahead.
Be a good boss
Send Help, on Disney+ and Hulu, has made over $94 million. Sam Raimi directs. Dylan O'Brien plays a smug boss who mocks a longtime employee, played by Rachel McAdams. A plane crash strands the two of them on an island, and she gets even. The audience is on her side because he's so toxic. Zuckerman's lesson is the one worth framing. "Be careful how you treat the people beneath you." They don't always stay beneath you. The last pick, Faces of Death, made over $2 million on Shudder or AMC+. Barbie Ferreira plays a content moderator who can't stop watching. The lesson is to log off.
Our read
This is a Behavioral and Career story. Two of these lessons are money lessons in a mask. The courier's extra gig isn't about cash. It's about the conversation he'd rather not have, and the paper says so. The boss who mocks his staff finds out the org chart isn't permanent. We see both every week. The side job someone takes instead of sitting down with the budget. The manager who forgets that his people have long memories and other offers. Neither monster is on the screen.
The check for this week is the money talk you've been putting off at your own kitchen table. Pick the one subject you keep steering around with your spouse or partner. The card balance, the spending, who pays for what, the raise you didn't get. Put it on the calendar for a night before Thanksgiving, phones face down. The movie's point is that the extra shift doesn't make the talk go away. It just moves it to a worse night. We'd rather help you have it now, in daylight, than after the storm is already in the house. If a third chair at that table would help, ours is open.