Directors/Screenplay – Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg, Based on the Novel Horrorscope (1991) by Nicholas Adams, Producers – Elyssa Koplowitz Dutton, Scott Glassgold & Leslie Morgenstein, Photography – Elie Smolkin, Music – Joseph Bishara, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor – Robert Munroe, Visual Effects – Temprimental VFX (Supervisor – Phillip Moses), Special Effects Supervisor – Adrian Popescu, Creatures – Daniel Martin at 13 Fingers FX, Production Design – Felicity Abbott. Production Company – Alloy Entertainment/Ground Control/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Harriet Slater (Haley), Adain Bradley (Grant), Jacob Batalon (Paxton), Avantika (Paige), Humberly Gonzalez (Madeline), Wolfgang Novogratz (Lucas), Larsen Thompson (Elise Murphy), Olwen Fouere (Alma), Suncica Milanovic (The Astrologer)
Plot
A group of friends from university in Boston get away for the weekend to a big old house in the countryside. Having run out of alcohol, they search the house, looking for something to do. They break into a locked room to find it contains occult paraphernalia. There Haley discovers a uniquely designed deck of combined tarot/astrological cards. The others push her to conduct a tarot reading for them. She reluctantly does so, while issuing warnings that it is bad luck to do so using somebody else’s deck of cards. After returning home, members of the group begin to experience strange deaths one by one as the figures in the cards come to life and deal out a fate as was foretold by the reading. Haley makes the realisation that she was using a deck of cursed tarot cards that are inhabited by the spirit of an astrologer who was killed for delivering a fate was unfavourable to the ruler of the realm.
This is a film based around the phenomenon of tarot – a deck of cards where the order in which they are dealt and the symbolism attributed to the drawings on the cards has supposedly divinatory significance. Despite claims made that the cards date back to Ancient Egypt and earlier by cartomancers (practitioners of card divination), tarot cards originated in 15th Century Italy. (The name tarot comes from the Italian name for the cards ‘tarocchi’). In fact, early tarot cards were actually used as a game and it was not until the 18th Century that any esoteric or divinatory power was attributed to them. Their popularity has spread to the point that tarot cards are now a regular part of the arsenal of most common fortune tellers.
There have been no major English-language films devoted to tarot before this. There was however a Filipino film of that name in 2009 and an Indonesian horror film in 2015, as well as the Spanish thriller Tarot (1973) and a German-made film called Tarot (1986), which has no supernatural elements. The nearest you might get in English language treatments might be the character of the cartomancer Solitaire in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973). (A film memorabilia collector friend of mine once showed me a special Live and Let Die themed tarot deck that has been released as tie-in for the film). The use of tarot cards has been widespread in films and can be seen in the likes of Nightmare Alley (1947), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), The Last Witch Hunter (2015) and The Deeper You Dig (2019). In fact, the scene where the psychic gives a reading and the card keeps coming up as Death has become a bad cliché in genre films.
Tarot represents a directorial debut for Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg who had previously collaborated on several short films. Prior to this, Cohen had written Extinction (2018), Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall (2022) and Long Distance (2024), as well as delivered the story for Expend4bles (2023). Halberg has a handful of credits as an actress – she can be spotted here as one of the investigating detectives – and has produced all of Cohen’s films. The film is adapted from Horrorscope (1991), a novel by Nicholas Adams, a house name used by several writers in the Young Adult Nightmares series. (In this case, the writer was John Peel, a British author known for his Doctor Who and Star Trek novelisations).
Harriet Slater conducts a tarot reading
I had low anticipation for Tarot before it opened. It looked exactly like another teen horror – see examples such as Darkness Falls (2003), Slender Man (2018), Truth or Dare (2018), Countdown (2019) and Polaroid (2019) to name the most prominent. And it is not long in before I was proved right in everything I had predicted. It fits exactly to the formula. The victim line-up is a completely characterless group of teen/twentysomethings – the only one among the group who stands out with any distinctiveness is Jacob Batalon, Ned in the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, who gives a spirited comic performance that steals the show out from everybody else. The teens’ only distinction appears to be that the casting call has been to appeal to ‘inclusion’ such that every single member of the group comes from a different ethnic group – indeed, you could make a new type of horror film where the horrors are not pop-up shocks but filmmakers forgetting to include everybody. How more safe a horror film can you get than one that has to tiptoe around making sure it includes one of everybody among the line-up of faces being butchered unless someone gets offended?
The shocks in the show come by formula where we are distracted by effects and some not-bad creature effects. The shocks that Cohen and Halberg churn out all feel like ones that have been overused to the point of tedium by other films – areas of shadow advancing down a hallway causing the lights to go out one by one; people being abruptly dragged away by their heels; even a killer clown at one point. You feel that the only person likely to be scared by the film is maybe someone around 12-13 who hasn’t had much of a grounding in horror films as yet. (It is significant that the film is based on a book that was originally written for Young Adult audiences, although the film in itself is not a Young Adult work).
Not to mention there were frequent times that the film stretched basic plausibility and your suspension of disbelief in proceedings to snapping point. We have a group of teenagers who can just call up AirBNB and book an entire fricking mansion – shouldn’t there at least be some discussion in this where we get mention that their parents are billionaires? There is also the absurdity of the scene where Avantika is in a magician’s cabinet where her attacker is using a handsaw blade as though it were a sword to stab through the box, something that in real life would just end up with a bent blade. My viewing companion who had dabbled with tarot in her teens also found the notion of Harriet Slater shuffling the cards, something you are apparently never meant to do, to be an absurd one.
