Whistle director interview: 'It's quite hard to see a new kind of death in a horror movie'

Enter Whistle, from director Corin Hardy (The Nun, The Hallow), in which an ancient Aztec whistle curses anyone who hears it to die in the present in whatever way they ultimately would have died in the future, be it lung cancer or a car crash. As soon as Hardy read the script by Owen Egerton, he was hooked.

“I recognized the effectiveness of this very simple, unexplored mythology of the death whistle,” Hardy tells Polygon. “Once you've heard the scream of this cursed ancient artifact, your future death will come and hunt you down. I thought that was quite enticing.”

The results are breathtakingly violent, rendered in gruesome detail by Hardy with a mix of practical and special effects. In theaters on Feb. 6, Whistle is a gory good time. As part of Polygon’s 2026 Preview, we caught up with Hardy to discuss the process behind the film’s many kills (or “perishments,” as he calls them), how Whistle is different from The Nun, and the horror movies that influenced him.

Polygon: What excited you about this script?

Corin Hardy: If you're going to make a horror movie, it's important to explore ideas that you haven't seen before. So the question of what the different kinds of deaths in Whistle might be and how they would be visualized and executed, forgive the pun, was part of the attraction to making Whistle.

Whistle is very gory. What was your goal in depicting the kills?

It's quite hard to see a new kind of death in a horror movie. We've seen hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of different kinds of ways of dying. Each death was a little bit like a menu of a different set of ingredients that would be put together to visualize these quite gruesome, but also some quite emotional and some quite traumatic, types of death.

What’s the balance of special and practical effects in the movie? And how do they complement each other?

There's every single type of technique going on in Whistle. I didn't want you to just be able to figure out what you were seeing. For me, it's all part of an illusion. That’s what got me into horror as a child. It's like a sort of set of magic tricks really where you're using different techniques and sleight of hand. We've got puppetry and we've got prosthetics and animatronics and we've got some visual effects and a little bit of CGI, and we're mixing different amounts of them depending on what the scenes require.

Your last movie, The Nun, was also pretty visceral and gory, and sometimes felt like a gross out movie. Do you see any similarities or differences between the two?

I suppose I like generally working with a dark canvas that you can bring the light onto. Like you would have an oil painting and you'd start with a dark background and then paint the layers of light. Visually, I try to build atmospheric worlds in which the horror takes place. But in the case of Whistle, it was an American high school movie, so it was a little bit more of a brighter, colorful world.

Are there any classic teens-outrunning-death horror movies that you were influenced by? What about that archetype were you drawn to specifically?

Absolutely. I grew up on a lot of American horror, and therefore a lot of American high school horror. Some of the films that hit me hardest when I was a teenager were A Nightmare on Elm Street, Lost Boys, Fright Night, The Blob, Pumpkinhead, and then films like Donnie Darko and It Follows later on. This was a chance to do my own. It’s almost a rite of passage to do an American high school horror movie at some point.

Before I go, is there anything else horror fans should know about Whistle?

I wanted to make a fun roller coaster ride horror movie. It's not a gnarly bleak somber experience. I wanted it to be colorful and remind me of the fun of horror movies that I grew up on, where it was horror with heart.

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Whistle releases in theaters on Feb. 6.