Whistle: Inside Shudder and Dafne Keen’s Sinister New Curse Movie

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Every generation gets the monster it deserves. For the Victorians, it was mad scientist Victor Frankenstein or regal bloodsucker Count Dracula; in the 1980s, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger violated safe suburban and summer camp spaces; and the 2000s saw the rise of torture porn franchises such as Saw, which reflected a nation’s debates about “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

With their new horror film Whistle, director Corin Hardy and writer Owen Egerton give teens of today their own nightmare in the form of visions summoned by an Aztec death whistle. A ghastly object with a grinning skull on one end and a thick, ugly pipe protruding from the other, the whistle is (loosely) inspired by real artifacts, and in this movie, it brings death via monstrous apparitions to anyone who hears its call. Nasty as these visions are, it’s the whistle itself that first strikes fear into the heart of the viewer.

“I knew it was like a leading character,” Hardy explains about the titular object. “It’s on screen throughout the movie and needs to hold up. So we went through maybe 50 or 60 designs, googling ‘death whistle’ and finding some pretty strange, creepy-looking things. Some are very simple bone carvings, others are elaborate or abstract.”

Hardy went so far as to enlist the help of Spanish designer Daniel Carrasco, whose credits include Crimson Peak and The Substance. Carrasco helped Hardy go through the designs, a process the director likens to “auditioning a cast member.”

“I didn’t want just an object that looked evil, with a nasty face. I wanted something that could take on a different personality in different types of light,” Hardy says. “Throughout Whistle, you see different environments, sometimes flames are reflecting on it, or sometimes light from a pool. Sometimes, I would light it with a torch to give it a vacant look. It could almost look enticing.”

The whistle looks particularly enticing to the teenagers who populate Whistle. Logan standout Dafne Keen stars as Chrysanthemum, Chrys for short, a troubled youth who comes to live with her cousin Rel (Sky Yang) in a steel town after a personal tragedy. As Chrys tries to navigate her new environment, she finds a kindred spirit in the sweet Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), but must also contend with a pair of jock bullies (Jhaleil Swaby and Mika Amonsen) and mean girl Grace (Ali Skovbye).

Things only get worse when Chrys is assigned a locker that previously belonged to a basketball star who died under mysterious circumstances. There she discovers a whistle inside, which, once blown, will cause six teens to face the unthinkable (or, at least unthinkable for adolescents with their whole lives ahead of them): a vision of their predestined deaths from decades down the road racing up to them in the here and now.

But then, forcing the young and seemingly invincible to face their mortality is the central appeal of teen horror.

Says Egerton: “One of the fascinating things about being in high school is that you start to discover that maybe you’re mortal, and you find something that represents death and begin flirting with it, whether it’s a Ouija board or drag racing.” In the screenwriter’s mind, this attraction to death extends from a youth’s embrace of life. “There’s just so much passion and heart and confusion happening in high school,” he continues. “I think Corin and I are both drawn to stories that have just as much death as they do life, and there’s a lot of that in high school years.”

For Hardy, Whistle’s high school setting forced him to rethink his approach to casting.

“This is different from everything I’ve done,” says the director, who previously helmed the Conjuring spinoff The Nun and served as showrunner for the action series Gangs of London. “I was looking at films like The Breakfast Club or The Lost Boys and searching for a group of up-and-coming actors who bubble with energy together. I wanted people who would make me feel excited about the prospect of seeing them do a movie together.”

Hardy found those newcomers in Keen, still hot off reprising her role as X-23/Laura from Deadpool & Wolverine, as well as appearing in Star Wars series The Acolyte, as well as Nélisse, one of the standouts in Showtime’s Yellowjackets. But Whistle isn’t just about the kids, as Hardy has assembled an impressive cast of veteran actors, including genre mainstay Nick Frost as a likable teacher and Michelle Fairley of Game of Thrones fame as a cancer patient with a connection to the whistle.

Like every great horror movie, the true appeal of Whistle comes in the nasty deaths its titular instrument calls forth. Whistle doesn’t just follow Final Destination and Fear Street in its themes of young people facing mortality, but also in the creative ways it dispatches its vivacious stars. One standout set piece sees a victim pursued through an elaborate labyrinth by their older self before perishing of old age while only 17. Another recalls a classic Nightmare on Elm Street kill, with the victim’s parents pounding on the door as the monster twists the teen’s body into horrific configurations.

Memorable as they are, neither the kills nor the cast of future genre greats are the true stars of Whistle. Rather, it’s the titular object itself, which beckons horror fans to give it a try.

Whistle opens in theaters on Feb. 6. This article contained reporting by David Crow.