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.
- The Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova, 2021)
The Scary of Sixty-First is a psychological horror directed by “dirtbag left” podcaster Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare. The film’s premise centres on two women who rent a Manhattan apartment formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein. The film details the psychological deterioration and apparent demonic possession of one female protagonist, who is intimated to be a fictional adult survivor of Epstein’s paedophile ring, while her housemate becomes entranced by conspiracy theories and fantasies. The flat is ambiguously either haunted by demons, Epstein himself, or – in a way that quite grimly stigmatizes and demonizes people who have experienced sexual abuse – the flat is most likely haunted by one of Epstein’s victims. Among the evidence of occult horror and paedophile-ring conspiracies found in the flat are two sparsely designed black-and-white tarot cards – the major arcana sun card (which they associate with Epstein’s island) and the minor arcana ten of swords (which they look up and discover its associations with mental anguish and destruction). Like Nekrasova’s podcast, the film revels in ‘edgy’ aesthetics and references (hence not using a fictional character based on Epstein when there are real-life survivors of his trafficking and sex abuse). Influenced by Noah Baumbach’s 16mm mumblecore and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) but most notably by Roman Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy Repulsion (1961), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), the film is infused with visual and narrative cues signalling a regression in terms of recycling genre tropes and aesthetics and a reactionary return to the aesthetic influence of another celebrity sex offender. This is film is included in the list not a recommendation as a good or particularly interesting film but as an interesting contemporary film using tarot imagery.
- Night Tide (Curtis Harrington, 1961)
An independent thriller starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor named Johnny on leave in Venice Beach when he falls in love with a woman named Mora (Linda Lawson) who plays a mermaid in the local carnival. Both the carnival and Mora have had a string of bad luck as every man she falls in love with turns up dead, and she has thus come to believe that she is host to a secret evil supernatural side – like Irena’s character (Simone Simon) in Cat People (Tourneur, 1942). However, Mora and her lovers are in fact victims of her obsessive guardian and owner of the carnival, Captain Murdock (Gavin Muir). It sounds like the plot of a Scooby-Doo mystery but the story is elegiac, strange and dramatizes the psycho-sexual fear of women as inherently destructive to those who find them attractive; it is also an early filmic exploration of sexual grooming. Johnny goes to a tarot-reader (Majorie Eaton) for advice on how to help free Mora from her delusion that she is destructive monster, and she warns that Mora is in a vortex of evil and that he too is in grave danger. An experimental short filmmaker as well a horror director, Curtis Harrington made a version of The Fall of the House of Usher when he was 16 and remade the same film when he was 76, both times playing the title roles, Roderick and Madeline himself. Towards the end of his life, Harrington was befriended by Danish horror and exploitation director Nicolas Winding Refn who restored Night Tide to HD with MUBI and made it freely available on the streaming service.
- Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Touch of Evil is a film noir set on the Mexican-American border: it is about racist police violence and the scapegoating of Mexican citizens for American crimes. Mexican-American prosecutor Miguel Vargas (played by Charlton Heston in brown-face) and his white American wife Susie Vargas (Janet Leigh) are honeymooning in a border town when a car bomb explodes nearby and they become entangled in a web of police cover-ups and planted evidence orchestrated by local police captain Hank Quinlan (Welles). Marlene Dietrich plays a fortune-teller, Tana, a long-time friend, sometime lover of the crooked cop Quinlan. Based on a 1956 pulp novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, Dietrich’s character is an addition to the story by Welles. Towards the end of the film when his police-coverups, skimmings off the top, and double-deals are about to be revealed, Quinlan asks Tana about his future. To which she replies “You haven’t got any…Your future is all used up.” Quinlan drunkenly pushes the cards on the table to reveal an accidental four-card spread, with the Wheel of Fortune (meaning what comes around goes around), a Knight of Coin (meaning a serious, hard-working, tenacious masculine figure), a Queen of Swords (a feminine figure associated with bare honesty and harsh truths) and the Two of Cups (suggesting two lovers, a compatible couple, a perfect pair). The spread suggests a triumph of truth, order, and the film’s initial heterosexual married couple and Quinlan appears to not to be represented at all.
- Braindead (Peter Jackson, 1992)
Horror fans are already familiar with Peter Jackson’s early 1990s low-budget zombie film Braindead (known in the USA as Dead Alive). In horror film, the tarot can signify alternative systems of knowledge acquirement: as opposed to the rational, methodical, and statistical, it is intuitive, symbolic, and abstract. This system of knowledge is not only gendered but classed and racialised. The tarot is an object that often signifies racial othering and dramatizes essentialised ideas of racialised minorities such as Roma Gypsies, who are already stereotyped as irrational, superstitious, and ‘spookily’ connected to the spiritual and occult. This can be seen in The Wolf Man (George Waggner 1941), in which Bela Lugosi plays a tarot-reading Romani fortune-teller (also named Bela) who is also a werewolf. In Thinner (Tom Holland, 1996) and Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009), older Romani women are witch-like monsters imbued with the power to cast curses on their films’ petty white middle-class protagonists. Similarly, Dietrich’s character in Touch of Evil has no specific cultural identity; she retains her German accent signifying her as alien to the Mexican/American border town, but her costuming and dyed jet-black hair and eyebrows suggest that we are not mean to read her character as strictly white European. She is simply ‘exotic’ Other.
Jackson’s Braindead is by no means a racially film (the opening scene is straight-forward colonial fantasy-horror in the style of Indiana Jones), nor is it a model for gender equality onscreen (see monstrous brow-beating mother trope). However, its use of the tarot in the context of race and gender representation is interesting. Near the start of the film, Romani shopkeeper Paquita (played by Spanish actor Diana Peñalver) is anxious about her romantic future and does a tarot reading with her grandmother (Davina Whitehouse). The reading reveals a Queen of Cups card which her grandmother says represents Paquita. The Queen of Cups normally signifies an emotionally mature, loving and generous person. It also shows a Knight of Swords – her love interest and the film’s real protagonist Lionel (Timothy Balme), and how he will reveal himself, through accidentally recreating the image of The Star card and the Ten of Wands card which, on the Thoth deck they’re using, features the word “Oppression” which her grandmother tells her to ignore. There is potentially room here to interpret “oppression” as racialised oppression in a majority white, settler-colonial country. The reading also permits a shift of focus from the male protagonist Lionel, who has the most screen time and serves to shape who Paquita is and what she wants (even if who she is happens to be a gendered ideal of generous femininity and what she wants is heterosexual love).
- Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
Not a horror film but probably one of the most famous examples of the tarot represented onscreen. Cléo de 5 à 7 or Cléo from 5 to 7 is arguably Varda’s most famous film along with The Black Panthers (1968) and Vagabond (the prolific director has made over 60 shorts and features). The film follows in almost real-time singer and model Cléo (Corinne Marchand) in the two hours before she is due to learn her diagnosis from a biopsy. At the very start of the movie (a title sequence filmed in colour, when everything that follows is in black and white), Cléo attends a tarot reading hoping to learn more about what to expect. The fortune-teller (Loye Payen) makes her draw from a 58-deck minor arcana selection and a 20-card major arcana, and in the latter reading she sees the Death card. The tarot reader says that she sees an illness and a transformation but that she should not to interpret the Death card literally. However, the reading puts Cléo in a fearful and anxious frame of mind, and the ninety minutes before the meeting with her doctor are filled with superstition, existential crisis, fear of death, while she also tries to be physically present and appreciate each moment as it comes.
- Now and Then (Lesli Linka Glatter, 1995)
The 1990s was an excellent time for gothic and horror themes in children’s and young adult films. Now and Then is a coming-of-age drama marketed as a female companion to Stand by Me (Reiner, 1986). It centres on four girls and flashes forward to their adult lives in the frame narrative (the now and then of Now and Then). Three of the girls are played by child actors later turned horror stars Thora Birch (The Hole [Hamm, 2001]), Gaby Hoffman (Lyle [Thorndike, 2014]) and Christina Ricci (whose early work was defined by PG-gothic and horrors film of this kind). As the girls go through their own emotional traumas and rites of passage (bereavement, parents’ divorce, etc) they bond through true-crime research and experiments in the occult, including a séance at the grave of a young boy who died fifty years before and a tarot reading session (read by Janeane Garofalo with an excellent shag mullet) to learn the real circumstances of the boy’s death. Here the tarot is just one of their picaresque summer adventures, their dabbling in the occult is a way for them to navigate the liminal period of adolescence, engaging in experiences that would have been forbidden or scary to them and ultimately leaving them behind with childhood.
- The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)
Like Mike Flanagan’s recent Poe adaptation, The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix, Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death mashes and remixes the source text with reference to Poe’s other famous works such as “Hop-Frog,” “The Raven,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Also like Flanagan, Corman and Beaumont updated Poe to include contemporary fears and anxieties by making Prospero and his wife avid Satanists (in fact they were ahead of the curve of horror representations of the Satanic – with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby really setting the craze alight in 1967. Vincent Price plays the decadent and sadistic medieval Prince Prospero and also the figure of the Red Death himself. The Red Death is a plague sweeping the Italian countryside, leaving victims with scarlets sores on their skin as well as a physical figure of pestilence (at the end of the film we see other Reaper/Deaths shrouded in various colours). Meanwhile, Prospero, his court, the invitees to his opulent masquerade ball, and a local peasant Prospero capriciously selected from a village convent, are ostensibly safe from the plague. The set design is beautiful and gaudy at the same time – the budget perhaps did not allow for all seven of the original story’s monochrome chambers but there is yellow, purple, white, and black, all captioned by future Don’t Look Now (1973) director Nicolas Roeg as cinematographer. Tarot cards function in this film as part of the production design and art direction with Price’s Red Death figure shuffling tarot cards in the opening and closing scenes of the film with the Death card prominently displayed as the final card in the deck. The film’s closing credits sequence is composed of a red and black animation of a hand placing tarot cards on a surface.
- The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016)
Anna Biller’s film centres
around a recently heartbroken young witch, Elaine (Samantha Robinson) who turns out to have a monstrous appetite for male affection that hurts herself and other people. Anna Biller’s film is a cult classic, and Biller herself is a prime example of a hyphenate auteur. She wrote, directed, produced, scored and did the costume and production design for both The Love Witch and her debut Viva (2007) in which she starred as the title character. She was in control of every detail, even famously hand-making the film’s iconic pentagram rug. Tarot in The Love Witch is not just a recurring part of the plot but embedded in the art direction, as Biller based the colour palette and the set design of Elaine’s apartment on the Thoth deck. The Thoth deck includes all original designs painted by Lady Frieda Harris in consultation with notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who conceptualised the changes from ubiquitous Rider-Smith-Waite deck (e.g. the major arcana Strength card is replaced with Lust). The Thoth’s vivid colours and the aesthetic mix of dreamy retro femme and fierce nightmarish violence are baked in to Biller’s story of the toxic need to be loved and adored at all costs. She also cites Varda’s husband Jacques Demy as an influence – in particular, his surreal musical fairytale adaptation Peau d’âne (1970).
This one also is featured on Dread Central’s web series Terror Tarot.
- Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020)
Based on the fictional 2014 novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley does not pretend to be an accurate biopic of Gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson. Instead it is a fantastical reimagining of Jackson (played by an equal-parts despondent, mesmerized, and manic Elizabeth Moss), her marriage to Stanley Hyman (Michael Schulberg), and her creative process in the writing of her first novel Hangsaman from the perspective of a fictional visitor, Rose (Odessa Young) who becomes Jackson’s companion, rival, and muse. The film resembles the strangeness and uncertainty of Jackson’s own writings and the tarot reading is one of the first signals that the film is not a realist telling of Jackson’s life-story but a psychological and potentially supernatural drama. “Shirley” does a reading for Rose early in the film when she is struggling with her writing, and after Rose splits the deck in three, she pulls an impossible three identical cards (out of what is meant to the 78 unique-card deck). The card she pulls three times is The Hanged Man. Visually and culturally, the card is ominous, suggesting death by suicide or suicidal ideation, which is a theme in the novel Hangsaman. However, in the context of tarot iconography, The Hanged Man is more so associated with a kind of contented or patient liminality, waiting, uncertainty, and unproductivity which are all consistent with the frustrations and processes of writing.
As a final aside, the use of the Smith-Rider-Waite deck in Shirley is interesting not only because it is accurate for the time period – the deck was then (and to a certain extent, still is) the most foundational and commonly available deck – but its history involves an erasure of female creative labour. Until relatively recently, the deck was primarily titled the Rider-Waite deck after the publisher (Rider) and the scholar A.E. Waite who wrote the accompanying book The Key to the Tarot (1909), while the artist who designed the deck remained uncredited formally until a 2009 centenary edition by U.S. Games Systems. An artist and fellow Golden Dawn member, Pamela Coleman Smith (sometimes known as Pixie Smith) integrated into the deck her own interests in theatre and myth as well as Waite’s interest in Arthurian legend. Her association with horror and horror imagery is still perhaps under-researched, as she did first edition illustrations for Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm (1911).
Here is the trailer for Shirley:
For more on the art history and iconography of tarot cards, please see Library of Esoterica Volume I: Tarot, edited and written by Jessica Hundley. Essays by Penny Slinger, Johannes Fiebig, and Marcella Kroll. (Taschen, 2020)
For more on tarot reading in horror films see Dread Central’s “Terror Tarot” video series.
Dr Máiréad Casey is post-doctoral researcher with the MSCA-funded REBPAF project in the University of Galway and a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies with the School of English, Media and Creative Arts. Her PhD research focused on demon possession and sexual violence in post-Great recession American horror cinema.
