A deck full of terror awaits in the new Screen Gems horror movie Tarot, which features a variety of new supernatural entities designed by concept artist Trevor Henderson.
Tarot, in theaters now, is written and directed by Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg, very loosely based on a novel by Nicholas Adams.
The plot sees a group of friends unleashing a curse when they decide to play with a mysterious box of tarot cards. One by one, they come face to face with their fate and end up in a race against death to escape the future foretold in their readings.
Trevor Henderson designed the creature concept art, which was transformed into the cursed tarot deck by artist Richard Wells. The supernatural Tarot entities were then brought to life on screen by special effects and creature effects designer Dan Martin (Possessor, Infinity Pool). Bloody Disgusting spoke with Henderson about designing the entities for Tarot, giving insight into each card-inspired creature.
As directors Cohen & Halberg previously told Bloody Disgusting, Henderson was the only artist they considered for Tarot. Henderson walks us through what drew him to the film.
“I couched it as doing a fun slumber party horror movie, like a Thirteen Ghosts kind of thing, and having the chance to do a whole bevy of different monsters in one film really excited me a lot,” he explains. “They came to me with an early draft of the script, so I was able to read and see the context with which each of the monsters has their own set piece scene and how that would work out. And just having a very vague idea of what role each monster would play and how they would look, move, and perform. I was left to my own devices, which was incredibly intimidating. But it was a lovely, lovely process getting to develop those characters up from the early script into the final versions.”
Tarot Cards in Screen Gems TAROT
Designing eight separate entities already makes for a daunting task, but Trevor Henderson took extra care to avoid creating familiar representations from the tarot deck.
Henderson explains the process, “I definitely tried to take the specific things that popped up over and over again in different renditions of tarot cards and bring those into a slightly newer way that people hadn’t seen it before. Then, from a creature design sense, whenever I’m doing creature design, I try to avoid anything like easy touchstones. In the early designs specifically, I avoided sharp teeth. I know that they walk that back a little bit in the final. When you see a monster in a movie, and it’s got that molded angry brow, I try and avoid that kind of stuff altogether. Anna and Spenser were really great about that, especially with The Hanged Man, which is my favorite out of all the guys that ended up in the film. They were just like, ‘No, no, it’s perfect.’ I just tried to take the things that popped up over and over again and try my best to make it something maybe people hadn’t seen so much, which was difficult when you’re doing the Devil and Death. How many times have we seen Death?”
The artist also shares how he collaborated with the SFX team to further hone the creature designs and what it was like to see it all come together.
“It’s been just a chain of creatives, people I really respect and admire, just working in close proximity with them,” Henderson tells BD. “Even after the fact, seeing the Tarot art that came after I was done. So, first, there were my designs, and then, towards the end of that process, I started working with Dan Martin at 13 Finger FX. We started being on the same Zoom calls just to maximize what would work and what wouldn’t work as I was designing it, so we didn’t have to spend time going back and forth. So, I would be like, ‘Here’s this guy with a weird face.’ Then Dan would be like, ‘This can work, this cannot work, we can do this with this fake hinge jaw I have from a Possessor,’ or something.
“But it’s been really cool seeing the renditions after the fact in Richard Wells’s very distinctive style. I think he did an amazing job giving them really great character in those little paintings in the cards. I know people are asking for a full set of that tarot deck, which I think they’d be nuts not to produce at least a little bit, a few copies of. But yeah, and then just even further down the line, seeing they did a prank trailer with actors wearing the costumes that I scribbled out. It’s just been really weird and satisfying to see it transmute into these different forms.”
Trevor Henderson walked us through each entity’s design, so let’s meet the monsters of Tarot. The below images are being exclusively shared here on Bloody Disgusting.
High Priestess
“The crown was really the centerpiece of that. [Cohen & Halberg] always wanted to have just an ornate magisterial crown and an almost like royalty thing happening with her. Then everything else shifted in. The weird blindfold she has was a very late addition. We went through a ton of different stuff just to see what stuck in a design sense. There was very little in terms of calling back to the meanings of the cards just from the design. I think a lot of that came through in the script and the writing more than playing back to the actual meanings.
“But for the character designs, I just tried to make something that would look interesting and distinctive and hopefully a little bit iconic on screen. Especially with the ones that had less screen time, you really want to have something that sticks. We just tried a million things, and then that was the one that just like, this is cool with the weird black tears and the blindfold.”
The Hermit
“Well, the idea behind the Hermit is he’s supposed to be a hermit in the context that he is a hermit, like the card, the tarot card. But he’s also a hermit, like a mountain man, someone who’s been sequestered away for a long time. So he has all these rags. And then also he’s a hermit, like a hermit crab, and he’s wearing skin – somebody else’s skin.
“So that was the idea, which I thought was fun. Originally, you didn’t see anything underneath this drooping mask, almost like the one Krampus has in the Krampus film. But they put little hints of a creature underneath in the final, which I enjoyed a lot more. I really liked the scene. His scene and the Magician are my two favorite parts in the movie.”
The Hanged Man
“A lot of the scurrying that he does is after my involvement. Not that I don’t approve of it; I think he’s great. He was the one that actually was the smoothest. I think I did one little page of just really rough sketches and then a couple of days of fine-tuning and rendering a little bit. Then they were like, boom, that’s it, that’s the one.
“That design feels like the most like the things I look for. It feels like maybe the most ‘me’ out of everybody. Just by having what he does in the scene, he had to be more of a CG thing. But I still like how you get that face reveal, which is the important part.”
The Fool
“In the beginning, he was a much more body horror guy. I think he was always going to have a jester outfit. But in the script, initially, he had just a mouth, just a blank face with a big smiley mouth. So we played with that for a while and then decided to go in some slightly different directions.
“The biggest thing with him was that we locked down his look pretty early because he has these different masks that change expressions. But we went over a lot at the end when he’s supposed to do a big reveal at the end, and we were going over all these different things about what could be under the mask. At one point, it was just a howling void, like a black emptiness that sucked there. Getting the general look was easy, and then it was the fine-tuning the details that were more tricky.”
Magician
“Originally, he was more of a skeletal figure. I wanted to really play up this really weird stage magician. That’s actually my favorite scene in the movie. I think it’s so weird and scary. But it also had one of the shortest turnarounds. I think that was just a one or two-day sketch session, and they were like, yeah, this is perfect. Though, I do like that they keep him as this is very underlit, in-the-dark figure. I think it works really well for that one specifically.
“I was just doing different sketches and seeing what stuck. And just this really worn old vaudevillian magician outfit really struck a chord.”
Death
“The brief for him was that he’s supposed to be like the film’s Michael Myers. He’s very slow, methodical, and precise. I really wanted this intimidating figure that had no mouth. He has this sinewy thing going on. Even in the original, I think he has eyes in the final version, but the original was just empty sockets, too. I wanted to just make them very alien.”
The Devil
“Between Death and The Devil, they get a lot of screen time. The way we worked was that we tackled the ones that had the most screen time in the beginning when we had the most time to play around. Then, as we got to the shorter and shorter scenes, there were fewer and fewer days we could spend fooling around and spitballing. So, we started with Death. Then right after that was The Devil because their scenes are intertwined. We really wanted a juxtaposition between Death and the Devil where Death is a slow, tall, stooping thing that’s stalking you, like an It Follows monster.
“The Devil is supposed to be this more animalistic, stopping and starting, like flying on a wall, crawling, bestial thing. So, it was important to get that juxtaposition happening. We spent the most time maybe on that one out of all of them. I think it was just a week straight, doing different horns and trying different versions of the horns over and over again. But I think we ended up in a really good place with that one.”
Trevor Henderson did design an eight entity for the film, a mastermind behind the cursed deck. You’ll have to watch Tarot to see it in action. The film is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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