Editor’s Note: This review contains some spoilers for the film, but honestly, it’s doing you a favor.
Lawyers love to watch courtroom dramas that grossly misrepresent the legal system and how it works; it’s fun to heckle from the position of the expert. Writers can be heard to guffaw in the back row when the author character collects her suitcase of money and sails off into the Caribbean with all her success. And Witches can often enjoy the film versions of ourselves, who worship fake deities, cast nonsense spells, and practice bonkers made-up magic.
Even those Witches will have a hard time enjoying Tarot, a new horror film by Spencer Cohen and Anna Halberg. Simply put, this movie is tarot-ble. (Editor’s note: Really, Meg?)
TAROT (2024) poster [Sony]
A standard complement of sexy teens gather in a spooky rented mansion to celebrate the birthday of their sacrificial strawberry blonde, Elise (Larsen Thompson). Bored and out of booze, the kids break the lock on the basement and prowl among the creepy artifacts inevitably stored there. They find the most obviously cursed object they can rub their little paws on: a deck of tarot cards in a carved wooden box. Designated silly goose Paxton (Jacob Batalon) exhales a cloud of vape smoke and pronounces “tarot” so that it rhymes with “carrot” so that right off the bat we know who’s going to draw the fool.
But wait! This movie is loosely based on a lousy 1992 slasher novel called Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams. Even though this film is titled Tarot, and even though the entire aesthetic is invented from a tarot deck that seems to have been designed by the fine folks who brought you the illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the tarot we know and love has been scrubbed of all meaning in order to evoke tired horror tropes. Even though the tarot deck is the very instrument of the sexy coeds’ destruction, the readings are entirely about the zodiac.
The 19th century occultist Eliphas Lévi suggested correspondences between the tarot and the astrological symbols of the zodiac, assigning a particular card to each of the signs. This correspondence was then incorporated into text by Israel Regardie in the seminal western occultist text The Golden Dawn, which seeded the fertile fields of every witchcraft 101 book churned out by Llwellyn over the last half-century. (See: History of the Occult Tarot, Decker and Dummett, 2001.)
Once I realized that this movie was going to inextricably link the zodiac to the tarot, as reader Haley (Harriet Slater) begins to slap down the cards and refers to her actions as “reading the stars” (???), I expected those correspondences to emerge. But no – this was a movie at which the Witch may heckle but never feel heard. The teens’ star signs correspond only to gruesome murder motifs and nothing more. At one point the birthday girl draws the high priestess; she is shortly thereafter bludgeoned to death.
It’s very thematic, you see.
Seeing that this script was written to echo 2000’s Final Destination with even less subtlety by someone who has perhaps walked past a case of tarot cards in a store, I settled in for the long, meaningless haul. I had checked the trailer out on YouTube to investigate how many jump scares there would be (hint: many!), and the top comment on the video was “I hope the characters have to Google their predicament!” Reader, this person is a prophet. The teens Google how to break curse and expert tarot curse near me and how to stop dying in a series of unintentionally hilarious scenes.
Between being jolted out of my seat by cheap screechy stimuli, I laughed out loud at:
- Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz) being chased to his death in a subway tunnel and stepping on a fake newspaper bearing his own picture and the headline: YOU DIE TODAY
- The kids looking up tarot death expert Alma Astrom (Eowyn Fouéré). “She’s been discredited by the entire astrological community!” they say, doubtfully.
- Astrom laying out her magic circle on the floor (a horror movie staple) and then adding a new layer of magick-flavored nonsense to the mix: crystals!
As subtle as a garlic sandwich, this film chases the Pisces Madeline (Humberley Gonzáles) to her watery grave as the hanged man, and the Taurus Paxton back to the safety of his own dorm room (us Taureans! So lazy!) (Editor’s note: I can confirm that Meg is, in fact, a Taurus.)
The final pair, Haley and her maybe-boyfriend Grant (Adain Bradley) confront the devil because he’s a Leo, and confront the fact that she’s ruined everyone’s lives because she’s an Aquarius.
Jacob Batalon as Paxton, making a face I imagine many in the audience also made during TAROT (2024) [Sony]
“I’m a Taurus,” one character says. “Isn’t being a dick like my thing?” (Editor’s note: Actually, I’m not going to comment on this one.) In the spirit of dickishness, here are some spoilers.
The deck was cursed by a Hungarian peasant witch who was sentenced to death because she correctly foretold the death of some nobles (girl, learn to lie.) To get revenge, she commits suicide and curses her cards so that she can look like the main baddie from the Nun franchise. Effects have her in a cheap rubber mask, and anytime the Astrologer (Suncica Milanovic) attempts to act in her non-speaking role, it ripples like it was fished out of a Spirit Halloween dumpster. Her will is done and the cards are cursed forever.
In one particularly bewildering scene, Paige (Avantika Vandanapu) is dragged off to be killed by her assigned trump: the magician. The magician is not designed as a character to look like the Astrologer’s 18th century notion of a magician, or the tarot’s hermetic magician, or even the magicians Paige the Virgo might be familiar with, like David Blaine. Instead, the magician is a creepy 1920s-style stage-and-carnival man, plucked out of time for no artistically consistent reason to saw in half the only member of this friend group who understands how to make or execute plans. RIP.
Pamela Colman Smith’s Six of Swords from the Rider-Waite Deck [public domain]
The one bright spot of this thing is Fouéré, whose baleful face and obsessive, chthonic delivery have elevated other fare like Mandy and The Northman to the point that seeing her appear means the viewer can expect that some spooky things are about to happen. She’s still as a snake in her role as a survivor of the cards, now driven to destroy them. Though the younglings have all drawn major arcana cards, Alma draws the six of swords (not a stabbing card! The ten was right there!) about 90 seconds before she is unceremoniously skewered by – you guessed it – six swords. What a waste. She deserved to be the final girl.
While researching this film, I was reminded that the final rescue (more spoilers) closely mirrors the infamous final scene in Jordan Peele’s incendiary 2017 horror/comedy, Get Out. Curious about whether there might be a connection between the two beyond simple theft on the parts of Cohen and Halberg, I did my own boring Google search. Inexplicably, I found a reviewer on Goodreads who claims that Horrorscope was actually written by Peele using a pseudonym. In 1992, Peele would have been 13 years old.
This was the spookiest part of my viewing experience.
Tarot was released in theaters on May 3, 2024. You can see it nearly anywhere, or you could turn over any card in your deck and take it as a sign that you should not.
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