Can you believe there’s never been a horror film based on the Tarot deck before?

Of course, many movies have featured scenes of Tarot readings, but my research shows that there’s never been a movie where demons embody the characters found on Tarot cards for the purposes of murdering a group of bored and photogenic young people – until now.

In Tarot, that’s exactly what happens. A group of young friends violate what Sony Pictures calls “the sacred rule of Tarot readings: [to] never use someone else’s deck.” The movie’s official synopis goes on, saying the photogenic young people then “unknowingly unleash an unspeakable evil trapped within the cursed cards.” And of course, it goes without saying that “one by one, they come face to face with fate and end up in a race against death to escape the future foretold in their readings.”

Shudder.

Tarot was written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, and stars Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, Avantika, Jacob Batalon, ​Wolfgang Novogratz, ​​Humberly González, and Larsen Thompson. Tarot is due in theaters on May 19th.

Given the many occult games and toys that have been turned into horror movie concepts, it’s odd that the creepy card game hasn’t inspired a horror plot until now. The earliest references to the Tarot deck date back to the 1400s, in Italy. The Ouija board game, by comparison, was only invented in 1886, in Baltimore, and it has (loosely) inspired 20 or more flicks featuring evil emanating from the witchboard.

Though the plot of the Tarot movie takes obvious liberties with the actual use of the Tarot cards, used to predict the future of anyone getting a reading, the cards do feature some character archetypes often used in horror movies, like Death, the Devil, the Fool (think killer clown movies), and the Hermit (serial killers tend to be loners, don’t they?)

In addition to those cards, the Tarot deck features cards depicting the last judgment, the hanged man, the wheel of fortune, the lovers, the magician, and justice, along with suits of wands, swords, pentacles, and cups, not hearts and diamonds, etc. The artwork on cards tends toward the sinister, so for a movie art department looking to style their monsters, most of their work is already done.

While the cards are meant to be taken figuratively, rather than literally, it’s easy to see why a filmmaker would be drawn to the mystical, future-predicting cards – the cast of characters is built in to it. What’s odd is that in over a hundred years of movie-making, there have been none (that I could find) strictly about the Tarot.

After all, we’ve seen countless horror movies inspired by toys and games featuring the dark arts. We’ve had movies about board games (Ouija and Jumanji), puzzle boxes (Hellraiser), dolls, voodoo or otherwise, (Annabelle, Chucky), and of course, role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons -not the Chris Pine one- and Mazes and Monsters, which featured Tom Hanks in his first leading movie role).

One of last year’s best horror films. Talk to Me, featured a cursed object in the form of an embalmed hand that was turned into a deadly party game by enterprising Australian teenagers. Whether Tarot will be on par with that film is yet to be seen, but 2024 will be the year we see the Hanged Man, Death, and the Fool finally get their 15 minutes of fame.