With this month’s release of Tarot (Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg), a horror-comedy supernatural slasher inspired by 2000s mid-budget American horror, I decided to count down nine other instances of tarot readings in horror, thriller and supernatural film.
It’s a moment of uncanny serendipity in horror film history.
The City of the Dead (re-named Horror Hotel in the US) – the first directorial project of Argentinian-born British director, John Llewellyn Moxey – was released in the UK in September 1960. Produced by Americans Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the film is generally considered to be the unofficial first of their Amicus Productions (a British company they would officially found shortly after the release of City of the Dead, and which had an impact on the horror genre in the 1960s that was second perhaps only to Hammer Studios)[i]. Filming commenced “at Shepperton Studios [in Surrey, England] in the Summer of 1959,” [ii] running at least through October.
The vastly more famous Psycho, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, made at Universal Studios in the US and distributed by Paramount Pictures, was released in New York City in June 1960 and saw general distribution, like City of the Dead, in September 1960. Also like City of the Dead, filming began on Psycho in the later half of 1959 (running, specifically, between November 1959 and February 1960).
In other words, there’s virtually no way that either City of the Dead or Psycho could have influenced the other. And yet, they share some striking similarities. They are also, I should add, profoundly different in their approach to horror. Both these similarities and this difference are worth exploring.
The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery, 2023) was released in April to much fanfare and has just recently landed on Netflix. While it performed well enough at the box office, it failed to wow the critics. It certainly didn’t rise to the level of The Exorcist (1973). In fact, the many possession/exorcism movies that have appeared since William Friedkin’s masterpiece have generally fallen short. One of the reasons seems to be the failure to really understand the religion portrayed. Let’s use The Pope’s Exorcist as a test case.
It’s summer, so shark movies abound, notably Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley, 2023) and The Black Demon (Adrian Grünberg, 2023). Both films feature not just a shark but a megalodon, suggesting the need to up the ante when it comes to shark fare – the ante, in this case, being the shark’s size. Neither film is faring terribly well at the hands of critics, although The Black Demon seems to be marginally more highly-praised. It’s not, in truth, a very good film. It is, however, an interesting one.
Now that spring’s in the air, the thoughts of horror fans turn to summer. Jaws might put us in the mood for the beach, but perhaps the most disturbing part of the movie is that women serve primarily as victims. Shark bait. Men solve the problem and men wrote, directed, and produced the movie. Why can’t women get a break with water monsters?
Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) challenged many conventions, making a woman the hero (and “Christ figure” as the resurrected redemptrix), but to get a sense of why it took so long for this to happen we have to cast our eyes back to what is generally considered the nadir of American horror—the black-and-white 1950s. This was the era of irradiated monsters that were often clearly men in rubber suits, wreaking havoc on civilization, or at least beachfront property. There are a couple of unsung women behind the scenes in at least two of these films, beginning with one of the classics from that era, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954).
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