Until “Longlegs” became the biggest box office surprise of the year, things weren’t looking all that great for horror in 2024. A usually reliable genre was seemingly losing some of its appeal, as no one single film was able to repeat the breakout success of 2023’s “Talk To Me” or “Skinamarink.” Sydney Sweeney’s dour nun horror pic “Immaculate” failed to wow critics and the generic yet enjoyable “Night Swim” couldn’t quite become the breakout hit Universal were surely hoping for. Neither of these films were out and out financial failures, but it’s actually quite difficult to lose a ton of money when your budgets are around the to $9-15 million mark.
Of course, the aforementioned “LongLegs” has proven that horror can still very much succeed at the box office, especially if you deploy one of the best marketing campaigns of recent years to support it. Which, as it happens, is probably something “Tarot” could have benefitted from. This under-the-radar horror film from Sony debuted in May, and we here at /Film surmised that while “Tarot” looked set to become a box office bomb, it may actually prove to be a sneaky hit. Wouldn’t you know, we were sort of right. The movie wasn’t exactly a “Talk to Me”-style success, but it actually made $49 million on an $8 million budget. Unfortunately, it also fell afoul of critics, who decimated the film upon its release.
Enter: Netflix. The savior of many a box office bomb has become notorious for giving such films a second life on streaming. Now, it seems “Tarot” is the latest film to benefit from the Netflix effect, as viewers have propelled the movie into the most-watched charts.
Tarot is a Netflix success
Directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg in their feature film directorial debuts, “Tarot” is a loose adaptation of Nicholas Adams’ 1992 novel “Horrorscope.” The film tells the story of a group of friends who rent a mansion, only to discover a deck of Tarot cards in the house that, as you might have guessed, is fully haunted. That is to say the deck was cursed by an angry astrologer and conceals an unspeakable evil, causing all the friends to die in exactly the same way as the cards foretold.
“Tarot” stars Harriet Slater, who played Fran in the unfortunate box office failure “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and Sandra Onslow in the Epix/Max series “Pennyworth,” which was hilariously renamed to “Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler” in 2022. It also features breakout star of the Tom Holland-led “Spider-Man” movies, Jacob Batalon — Ned, what have they done to you!? Unfortunately, neither of these actors could save the film, which was savaged by critics upon its release.
All of which makes it slightly odd to see “Tarot” creeping into the most-watched charts on Netflix. At least, it would be odd if the success of Michael Fassbender flop “The Snowman” in 2023 hadn’t confirmed that Netflix viewers will watch pretty much anything. Still, as streaming viewership tracker FlixPatrol shows, “Tarot” hit the U.S. most-watched charts at number three on August 2, 2024, having arrived on the service the day prior. Not a bad debut at all for a film that has just a single defender among its Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Critics were not fans of Tarot
Respectable box office numbers and a strong Netflix debut are all well and good. But is “Tarot” actually worth your time? Well, the answer, if you take a look at the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page, appears to be a resounding, “No.” Not that Rotten Tomatoes itself should be the arbiter of a film’s quality, but the reviews speak for themselves.
In his review for The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote that “Tarot” is “yet another throwaway teen schlocker, this time with an increasingly risible astrological bent,” concluding that, “It’s a horror film for the kind of person who’d tell a stranger they’re ‘such a Libra’,” so take from that what you will. Unfortunately, Mercury really must have been in retrograde when this movie was being made, as a majority of critics seem to share Lee’s opinion.
A common theme among these reviews is that “Tarot” tries to answer the question of, “What if ‘Final Destination’ was terrible.” In his Variety review, Todd Gilchrist dubbed the film “a ‘Final Destination’ knockoff neutered of its intensity — and its creativity,” writing that “Tarot” is “little more than a clearinghouse of horror clichés.”
Look, does a film have to be good to succeed on Netflix? Absolutely not, especially when it comes to horror. Last year, a terrible Spanish slasher similarly dominated the Netflix charts, and now we’ll have to see what’s in the cards for “Tarot” following its third place debut.
