I Watch Films: Tarot (2024)

 

Tarot (2024)

Seven college students rent a mansion in upstate New York to celebrate Elise’s birthday. They run out of booze and Haley and Grant have just split up making things awkward. Looking for something to drink they break into the cellar which has lots of weird artefacts. The discover a rather macabre set of tarot cards and convince Haley to do a reading. She combines horoscopes with the cards (the most accurate apparently), setting out a ring of twelve for the twelve zodiacal houses, and one card in the middle. Inevitably the one in the middle is a Major Arcana showing something gruesome for all seven.

They return to their campus in New York city. Elise is lured up into the attic of her dorm by the High Priestess and killed with the ladder, which inevitably matches up with Haley’s wording, if you take them out of context to design a murder. Then Lucas is lured into the back rooms of the subway by the Hermit, and killed by a train.

Suspecting there might be something up with the tarot reading they search online for tarot-related deaths and find Alma Astrom. She reveals the backstory of the deck (an astrologer foretold the death of a nobleman’s wife and child; in return the nobleman had her daughter killed; she created the deck with her own blood and cursed the nobleman and his friends and the deck before killing herself). Astrom did a reading with the deck back in the 20^th century. Astrom was the only survivor as she did not do a reading on herself.

Taking her advice to destroy the deck they travel back to the mansion, though one gets killed along the way and another goes back. In the mansion the deck won’t burn so they get Astrom to come and help; she summons the astrologer’s spirit but this goes wrong as the astrologer does a reading for Astrom and kills her.

A fairly standard occult-themed horror film that occasionally flirts with actual tarot practices. Mostly though it is about a creeping sense of dread as Major Arcana are transformed into supernatural murderous creatures for a gory death.

Watch This: Undemanding horror
Don’t Watch This: You demand more from your tarot lore, or from your horror films