Corin Hardy has come a long way from the young man who used to craft horrifying creatures in his parents’ garage, storming onto the scene with 2015’s richly textured creature feature The Hallow (2015) before tackling studio horror with the surprisingly effective spinoff The Nun (2018) from The Conjuring franchise (2013-). After turning the critically lauded AMC+ series Gangs of London (2020-) into a gory delight, Hardy returns to horror proper with Whistle, another mythology-focused story, like his debut, but this time set stateside rather than in the wilds of County Galway (a shame).

In Whistle, a group of teens — led by Logan (2017) breakout star Dafne Keen — are picked off one-by-one after stumbling upon an ancient artifact that speeds up their deaths. Equal parts A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Final Destination (2000), it’s an 80s throwback with one foot firmly in 2026, thanks to a hugely welcome queer romance and tons of surprisingly vicious violence. In this interview, Hardy discusses what drew him to the project, the challenges of filming in Canada (in often freezing temperatures) and why horror continues to be the ultimate genre to work in.

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Joey Keogh: So, let’s just start really simple: what attracted you to this project, first and foremost?

Corin Hardy: Owen Egerton’s script had three key things that drew me in. One was this very simple, effective, elegant and chilling mythology that I hadn’t heard before about an ancient, cursed object known as a death whistle [holds up the prop], which I have with me — the actual one. This idea that if you hear the sound of this thing — it’s going to call upon your future death to hunt you down — was really, as a horror fan and a horror filmmaker, and a lover of mythology, [surprising]. Yes, we’ve seen a cursed object movie like The Ring (2002), or Hellraiser or something — the cursed object genre, let’s say, is out there — but I haven’t seen the death whistle movie.

That’s quite exciting when you come across something like that, and credit to Egerton who came up with that idea, and to find out that it’s a real thing, and it has its own very mysterious history. The other two things, though, were the undercurrent of horror with heart. It had this love story going through the horror, with the character Chrys, played by Dafne Keen, and Sophie Nélisse’s Ellie, and it was something I could relate to — the teenage angst, then the romance and the heartbreak. I’d always wanted to do an American, high school-set movie that [could include] my own memories of being 14 to 17, failed romance and that heightened world as part of the atmosphere of the movie. And the last thing was that this movie had a series of really inventive, terrifying and outrageous deaths in it, so it was a chance to bring those to life. Or death.

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JK: I’m glad you mentioned the death scenes because, to me, they are much gnarlier and more violent than we’d typically see in a mainstream horror movie. Usually, we cut away from the carnage. Would you agree with that? Were you really able to go there with them? Was there less of a constraint than there would be on something like The Nun, for instance, which is a bit more controlled?

CH: Sure. Yes, it’s definitely part of the charm of Whistle when you understand that concept, which is you might live 90 more years or you might have a terrible accident in a few weeks’ time. Whatever your death is, the whistle knows what that looks like and when, but when you’ve heard its sound, it’s going to make that happen tomorrow, or in the next couple of days. It’s a chilling concept, and once you accept the mission, it would be a mistake not to explore in detail what those — I’m calling them “perishments” — are. To me, they should be shocking, but they should also be fascinating and strange. The characters almost get visited by their death; they get almost a tease of what they might be and how they might turn out that way. And then it was a real case of going for it with a variety of different techniques, and effects — practical FX, prosthetics, aminatronics, puppetry, stunts and contortions. That was really something that appeals to me as well.

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JK: I know you’re a big practical guy, so I was wondering when it comes to that mix of practical and CG — because obviously some of it has to be CG when pulling off these huge set-pieces — is there one death scene you’re most proud of, or one that really sticks out to you?

CH: They’re all special.

JK: You can’t choose!

CH: My little death children! I really wanted to try and push the challenge and achieve different illusions with them, so I was very proud of… well, the first one was a really nice. I don’t want to spoil anything, I don’t want to give too much away! I’ll say this: the one that happens in the bedroom. It’s hard to talk about without giving it away, and I want people to be able to experience it for themselves, so I’ll let the audience decide which one they enjoyed the most, but there are quite a number to choose from.

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JK: They gradually get more gruesome as well, I noticed. They kind of escalate in intensity as the movie goes on, which is a nice touch.

CH: I think you’ve got to with a horror movie, you’ve got to up whatever it is — the tension or the scares or the shock factor or the gore, depending on how it’s handled, to make sure that you’re reinventing something. This isn’t a movie where you have a masked slasher who stabs people and that’s inevitably what’s going to happen. There’s more to it than that.

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JK: Whistle is set around Halloween-time, which is always good, and it actually looks cold for once, which is always appreciated. Did that present any challenges, particularly when it came to shooting the outdoor stuff, where you can see the actors’ breath? I was just thinking, “Oh my god, they must be frozen.”

CH: It presented a great challenge. We shot in Toronto across November, December and January. And Toronto, as you might know, is between minus 10 and minus 20, if you’re lucky, so it was incredibly cold. There were a lot of exterior shots, and a lot of locations, and the actors were real troupers to shoot through that. Sometimes, we’re doing an exterior night pool scene, and it was absolutely freezing, and there’s a lot as you can see in the movie going on, where they’re having to be in and out of water, or in different weather. When we shot the sequence in the middle, at the harvest festival, we had a lot to do in two long nights, and the second night it started snowing, suddenly, incredibly, so continuity was very difficult, and we had to shoot around the snow. I actually had to have the entire crew going around with straw, putting it over the snow, so you couldn’t see the snow on the ground. So, yeah, there are a lot of challenges with this kind of practical movie.

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JK: Well, you definitely, definitely can’t tell onscreen, at least. How do you feel like this movie fits into your filmography?

CH: That’s a good question! My filmography, which [includes] my original stop-motion movie Butterfly [2003], which is a short film that’s half an hour long. [Then I did] The Hallow, The Nun [and] two seasons of Gangs of London, which was a British crime/action show, so it was nice to return to horror and do something all-out, pure horror. But within each horror movie, I [also] want to [do] a different type of horror, and this was an ode to the 80s movies that I loved growing up, like The Lost Boys (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street, Fright Night (1985) and The Breakfast Club (1985), things like that, so it was ticking my box of that kind of movie. I’d always thought maybe I’ll do a high school horror movie at some point, to be able to tap into that teenage angst, like in movies like Donnie Darko (2001) and stuff. I guess I like to play with different genres from horror to action and crime, sci-fi, and mix them up sometimes.

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JK: Widening the scope, how do you feel like Whistle fits into modern horror?

CH: Horror is a brilliant, un-killable genre. It’s always exciting to see when you get movies like Frankenstein (2025), Sinners (2025) and Weapons (2025) doing really well, as well, and that. I loved Sinners, and I loved the music and everything in that film, so that’s almost like a bonus,. To be working, sometimes, in the genre that is the main genre outside of superhero movies, that gets people to the cinema, because I think it’s a genre that demands mystery, intrigue, [a] rollercoaster ride, adrenaline… you come out talking about it. It’s like human beings want to be taken on a journey, and on a ride, and be scared of the dark. So, I think horror is always going to have that appeal, as long as it keeps reinventing itself. With Whistle, I was trying to tell a contemporary story that hearkens back to the thrill I felt when I watched a lot of movies in the 80s, like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Lost Boys (1987), where they were fun and entertaining, as well as gruesome and scary, and they also had characters you could care about. Whistle has a certain throwback element to it, but it’s still modern, and I hope people enjoy the entertaining rollercoaster ride of it, as well as the deep undercurrent of memento mori, which means “remember that you will die.”

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JK: What a nice note to end on!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Whistle released theatrically on February 6, 2026.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.