Filmmakers often say that they have to personalize their work. After all, they painstakingly devote at least two years of their lives to bring a film to fruition, but in the case of Tarot co-directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, they turned what would normally be a genre exercise into something from the heart.
Tarot — which serves as the writer-directors’ feature directorial debut — is a supernatural horror film involving a group of college friends who, during a weekend getaway, crack open a cursed deck of tarot cards to learn their ominous horoscopes. The tarot card reading is reluctantly led by Harriet Slater’s Haley, who, like Halberg, is a Minnesota native, and shortly after the friend group returns to their Boston-area university, all hell breaks loose as each individual reading comes true in lethal fashion.
Haley’s sole reason for originally getting into tarot as a child was based on her futile attempt to change the fate of her terminally ill mother, and this particular story point was actually inspired by Cohen’s own childhood.
“Haley is struggling to make sense of an illness her mom had and ultimately her passing away. My mom was sick when I was growing up, and she passed away when I was in my early 20s, which is close to the same age as Haley in the film,” Cohen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re always trying to make each story we tell feel personal, and that particular storyline was our way of putting an emotional stamp on the movie. Ultimately, Haley learns to let go in the end, which is something that took me a long time to do.”
Cohen and Halberg first joined creative forces at USC in 2006, and after a decade of writing and producing together professionally, they finally directed the Sophie Thatcher-led short film, Blink (2022), which quickly opened the door to directing Tarot, as both films are tied to Sony Pictures’ genre label, Screen Gems. The studio initially approached the duo about adapting the slasher-thriller book, Horrorscope, and while Tarot is technically based on this 1992 work by Nicholas Adams, Cohen and Halberg respectfully went their own way, opting to not even read Horrorscope.
“Sony pitched the concept of the book, but it wasn’t something that sounded particularly interesting to us. We were told that it was a slasher story, and while we enjoy watching those movies, we were more interested in telling a story that was supernatural,” Halberg says. “So we went away and came up with an original horror concept that blended horoscopes with tarot cards.”
With an $8 million production budget and a cost-effective, digital-only marketing campaign, Tarot’s opening weekend of $10.2 million at the worldwide box office has the film in solid financial shape moving forward. Cohen and Halberg also have two more feature films on the way as writers and/or producers, including the Anthony Ramos and Naomi Scott-led Distant at Universal, as well as the Alice Braga-starring House/Wife at Netflix. The creative partners may have received their directorial break by way of the horror genre, but they’ve mostly worked in science fiction so far, with AI playing a distinct role in the aforementioned stories. (Cohen also co-wrote Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, which features an AI threat.)
“I don’t know why we’ve always gravitated towards projects about AI, but we’ve both been fascinated by it. It always felt like something that was close but not close enough. It always felt like it was way in the future,” Cohen says. “But now that it’s here, it’s making me rethink and question a lot of things. So I think that talking about AI right now, and in different ways through film, is more important than ever. We have a specific project I can’t talk about, but it’s our take on the world right now with AI.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Cohen and Halberg also discuss Tarot’s homages to Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, before explaining how their 2012 spec script, High Value Target, became Expend4bles despite virtually no resemblance between the two projects
