DIRECTORS EXCLUSIVE
Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg on how fate dealt a hand for Tarot
GIVEN THE SHEER VOLUME OF horror movies, it’s surprising how few have exploited the subject of tarot. Sure, it’s featured – in films from Live And Let Die to The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones to A Dark Song – but barely any have made these mystical cards central to the story.
“It’s crazy to think that tarot has been around for hundreds of years and no one’s really made a movie about it,” writer/director Anna Halberg tells Red Alert, somewhat incredulously. “They’re so iconic and so inherently scary. I have friends who refuse to get readings done, because they just don’t want to know just in case.”
Tarot is the first co-directing feature credit for Halbert and her creative partner Spenser Cohen. In 2022 the two wrote (with Cohen directing) a horror short titled “Blink”. The film impressed Screen Gems, who promptly approached the duo about helming what would become Tarot. “We started writing the movie during Covid, and I feel like horror movies work the best when they reflect what’s going on in society or culture at the time,” Halberg suggests. “At that point, society was in a very uncertain place, and we saw this rise in astrology and tarot on social media. People who were looking to all these ancient practices to make sense of the world and to find answers and some certainty for the future. So it felt like a really ripe idea.”
Tarot centres on a group of college friends who start dying in ways that are related to their fortunes after having their tarot cards read. Halberg says the pair approached the film “like a Twilight Zone episode” (both are massive fans of the anthology series), while Cohen explains that they were aiming for a combination of “Steven Spielberg and James Wan… So a fun movie with fun scares.”
Halberg says they went into Tarot intending to make a PG-13 horror – meaning, presumably, less of a reliance on blood and guts.
“I’ve never found gore particularly scary,” she says. “Most of the time we feel it’s what you don’t see and where the audience uses their imagination that’s scarier than what you do see. For us, it’s really about the tension and insinuating what’s happening instead of showing it on screen.”
“We always go back to older movies,” adds Cohen. “We looked at Alien a lot – there’s not a missed second in that film, it’s just perfect. We also looked at John Carpenter’s The Thing, and we looked at Jaws. We were always going back to these movies from the ’6
