Most characters don’t make it out alive in horror movies. Some survive until the final reel if they’re lucky, while others become bodies on the slab before the titles have even run! They are sacrifices for us bloodthirsty fans, but there’s more to them than that. They have wants never met. Stories never properly finished. In Always the Final Kill, Never the Final Girl, writer Matt Konopka digs up these poor souls lost under the shadow of heroes to give them the proper attention they deserve.
I wish I had seen a fortune teller that could’ve warned me away from new horror slop, TAROT, if only so I could spend the ninety minutes it took from me doing literally anything else. Eat nails. Take a swift kick to the nards. Gouge out my own eyes. Whatever struck my fancy.
Writers/directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s brainless horror film is the sort of bad that treats its audience like mouth-breathing ghouls, and that would be plenty reason to loathe it. Yet what left me old man-shaking my fist at the clouds over this filmic gruel is that, in the year 2024, a genre movie like this is still drawing the bury your gays card… and it does so in shockingly brutal fashion.
Let me save you the time that I lost to the deep, dark void of misfortune. TAROT centers around a group of paper-thin teens led by Haley (Harriet Slater), a young woman who surrounded herself with the world of astrology to cope with her mother’s cancer. Partying at a cabin in the woods for the weekend, the friends panic when, gasp, they’ve run out of beer! In a desperate search for booze, they stumble across an EVIL DEAD basement filled with mysterious astrological items… including a definitely haunted box of tarot cards. Deciding it’ll be fun to have their fortunes read, Haley’s friends pressure her into doing readings for all of them, including herself. Turns out, these cards are cursed by a malevolent spirit dubbed “The Astrologer” (Suncica Milanovic), who proceeds to terrorize them by shapeshifting into the creatures depicted on the cards associated with each teen’s reading. To survive, they must remember Haley’s conveniently precise descriptions of their futures… a tactic that every one of them manages to forget whenever convenient for what substitutes as “the plot.”
TAROT is WITCHBOARD meets FINAL DESTINATION with all the tropes of the ’80s and none of the charm of the films it emulates. The cis white lead saves the day. Beats the ghost. And gets her man. A happy ending… except for her friends, in particular, couple Paige (Avantika) and Elise (Larsen Thompson).
Before you wish the death card on me — mean! — I’m not suggesting filmmakers keep queer characters out of the body count, which would be another issue itself. Good representation means receiving the same treatment as everyone else in a genre where people dying is kind of a main ingredient! Yet in the case of TAROT, there’s a distinct discomfort in how the filmmakers handle the fates of the queer couple when contrasted against their counterparts.
The first mark in the red flag column comes in the guise of the utter lack of character attributed to both Paige and Elise. You could argue Avantika was the standout amongst a compilation of entertaining performances in the recent MEAN GIRLS musical. Here, you could be forgiven if you forgot she was even in TAROT thanks to the film’s refusal to give her any sort of personality. To be fair, no one shines in this script so lazy it forgets its own established rules mere minutes after introducing them, but most everyone gets something to separate themselves from the others. Paxton (Jacob Batalon) embodies the usual “dumb stoner” trope. Madeline (Humberly González) is obsessed with tech. Grant (Adain Bradley) and Haley have their will they or won’t they romantic arc. Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz) portrays the sweet boy next door. Elise and Paige though? TAROT doesn’t care about them outside of their relationship.
Not that Elise gets much of an opportunity to be anything else. That’s because horror films like TAROT are still burying their gays under the shed out back, killing the poor girl off first before she has a fighting chance. Elise gets to be nothing more than a jumping off point, first by pushing Haley to do the readings, then by becoming part of the puzzle that leads her friends to discovering what’s really going on. She’s more of a tool for the film than a three-dimensional person, even going so far as to throw all sensibility out the proverbial window when she finds her attic door open and figures hey, there’s a strange noise up there, better investigate! It’s forced. It’s eye-rolling. And considering Elise is one of two queer characters in the film getting killed off in such a mind-numbing, unoriginal way — the resulting death is ripped right out of FINAL DESTINATION 2 — it’s insulting.
Yet the film’s most egregious and unforgiveable sin lies with the nasty brutality in which both Elise and Paige are killed off. I don’t know what the Astrologer has against the gays, but she sure does enact a little extra cruelty on them compared to their counterparts. Elise is pummeled by a ladder in the back again, and again, and again, until her spine is crushed into dust. Paige finds herself trapped in a box and sawed in half by the sinister Magician to the cheers and applause of his ghoulish audience. For a PG-13 horror film, these are by far the grisliest deaths in the movie. By contrast, Madeline finds herself at the end of a hangman’s noose. Lucas gets hit by a speeding train. Quick and (mostly) painless. If everyone suffered as cruel and brutal of a fate as TAROT’s queer couple, I might be able to shrug it off and say that’s just how the cards fell. But to single them out and put them through such excessive agony compared to the others? Something stinks worse than the trashcan this film crawled out of.
None of this is new. TAROT is merely another addition in a long line of horror films that sacrifice their gays so the boring straight couple can have their happily-ever-after. But at a time when conservatives are pushing the country back by fifty years and the rights of queer communities are under attack again, TAROT’s carelessness with Paige and Elise feels irresponsible. How many queer “final girls” can you name in horror? What about queer couples who both made it to the end? This genre is for everyone. It’s long past time queer kids get to see themselves on screen as the survivors. Let them beat their demons. Give them their fairytale ending. Not all the time, but sometimes, at least! By reshuffling such tired tropes into the horror deck, films like TAROT only serve to set the genre back by a decade or two. That’s a reading for the future we could all do without.
Preferred pronouns: He/him
Tags: Adain Bradley, Anna Halberg, Avantika, Columns, Elie Smolkin, Harriet Slater, Horror, Humberly González, Jacob Batalon, Joseph Bishara, Larsen Thompson, Matt Konopka, Olwen Fouéré, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Releasing, Spenser Cohen, Suncica Milanovic, Tom Elkins, Wolfgang Novogratz
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