Whistle’s Sophie Nélisse & Corin Hardy Tease Horror Movie’s Creatively Violent Kills | Interview
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Whistle director Corin Hardy and star Sophie Nélisse about the surprisingly gruesome horror movie. The duo discussed the film’s unique deaths, blending YA and R-rated horror, and working with Dafne Keen. Whistle will be out exclusively in theaters on February 6.
“A misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Corin, I love the mythology that exists, that what would kill you in real life just comes at you quicker. What did you like most about that internal logic? Because you get to have a lot of fun with it.
Corin Hardy: It was one of the first things that stood out to me when I read the script was this really kind of, I felt unique and simple and chilling mythology of an ancient artifact, which I have here, by the way, the real one. The death whistle is not something I’d seen on screen before. I mean, we’ve seen sort of cursed object movies like The Ring with a videotape or Hellraiser with a configuration box. But I haven’t seen a movie centering around the death whistle and mythology surrounding that, where there’s a lot of mystery, and I think that concept, which Owen Egerton had come up with in his script of your future death, is out there.
It knows what it looks like and when it’s gonna happen, but when you hear the sound of the whistle, it’s gonna pull it to come and visit you in the next couple of days and give you its death. I just thought it was really not just scary, but it also had a lot of sort of thought behind it, kind of fascination, not only contemplating what finding out what your death might be, but also the underlying kind of message of mortality and that we are only all here for a sort of really sort of quite small amount of time. So, there’s a sort of positivity that flows through the sort of love story aspect with Sophie and Dafne’s characters, particularly, where they’re sort of fighting to live throughout this horror.
Sophie, one thing I really liked about the film was that it kind of feels like a YA drama at first, but there’s also just the most grisly kills and violence that comes in. As an actor, how is it finding the balance between those tones because it is such a unique feeling film?
Sophie Nélisse: Yeah, it’s what drew me to the project to begin with, was that idea that it was a bit campy at first. But that’s what’s so fun, is that you start rooting and caring so much for these characters because they have such a fun dynamic, and they’re all completely different. And not a group that you would think would kind of stumble upon each other, but for better or for worse, they kind of ended up together. You kind of like their dynamic, and then they just start, without giving any spoilers, but they kind of all start falling down like flies, and in the most brutal and merciless way. Then you’re just left with these teenagers who are supposed to try to outlive this death. It’s nearly impossible, but you still root for them.
I think that in all of the trauma and in all of the brutality emerges so much love and compassion and softness. And you know, you see the worst and the best out of these characters, and you love them despite the actions that they want to commit. You understand with Rel’s character what he’s going through. That’s not what you want him to do, but at the same time, you understand where it’s coming from. The same thing with like Ellie and Chrys trying to save each other and just putting each other’s needs in front of their own.
Corin, what really surprised me about this film was just the lengths it was willing to go with its brutality. Like, I was expecting a fun movie, and this is fun, but it is very gory. The car crash scene in particular was my favorite death and there’s a real variety to the kills. These are always the big set pieces that horror fans, the real sickos, really come to the movies to see. So how do you approach death scenes and making sure they pay off the anticipation that the viewer has?
Corin Hardy: Thank you. Well, as a sort of fan of horror since I was young and as a director of horror, there is a certain aspect of when you’re gonna do a horror movie that you are aware of all the movies that are out there and I’ve seen quite a few and you’re trying to desperately not repeat what’s being done and find new ways of putting in. By the nature of horror movies, there’s gonna be some death in it, I’m sure. So when I saw this script, you know, there’s, I won’t say how many, but there’s a good pair of hands worth of per going on in the movie that we had to, it was an exciting prospect to try and like a menu that you might get in a restaurant of all these different kind of deaths and what elements they would require.
That was also dictated by this sort of mythology of not everyone’s gonna just die in the same way, are they? So you know, each one was a specific recipe, and I wanted them to escalate in a way and have a trajectory of their own, like an arc of death, so that by the time you got to a certain point, you needed to be shocked again. So that’s probably why what happens to, as you referred to, the car crash, which was a fascinating thing to contemplate, and I hadn’t seen, I’d never read that kind of car crash before. I’m obviously talking around it and not giving away what specifically makes it unique, but hopefully people will discover that when they see it in the theater.
Sophie, one of the elements I really enjoyed about the film was getting to see the romance between Ellie and Chrys develop. Especially since it has time to develop, it’s not just like, oh, one moment after trauma, they’re together. It actually has a buildup to it, so what about that relationship with Dafne Keen’s character did you like the most?
Sophie Nélisse: It has a buildup, but what I like is that they’re forced to see the most brutally honest sides of each other from the get-go because of their circumstances. Yeah. It’s rare. Normal relationships develop over time in years and it is really when you undergo something so traumatic with someone that you really see their true colors.
So, I love how quick it dives into that and how they’re not scared of each other’s flaws and how, actually, what they, in themselves, as their own separate characters, don’t like is actually what draws the other character to them and what makes the other character grow and learn. And they really do bring out the best in each other. There’s this unconditional love and beauty in their relationship.
It was really important for us, despite all of the horror and the gore — because it is obviously very predominant in the movie — to bring a little bit of lightness and softness, and you don’t get those beats. But I do think that when they are there, they’re so strong and heavy that as an audience, you really wanna pay attention to that relationship.
Hardy: Yeah. You said it earlier – Ellie and Chrys are the Ying and the Yang, and to me, that was a really important balance, and it was the horror with the heart. These two characters that both need the part of the other one that they’ve not sort of got in themselves, and I love that they almost from the moment they see each other, that first look is only maybe three days in the timeline or something like that, but they’re going through so much, and it’s not forced. So it was nice that they sort of, at the time when they sort of come together and admit kind of their feelings, it’s it felt quite natural even though it’s a short space of time.
Thanks to Sophie Nélisse and Corin Hardy for taking the time to talk about Whistle.
Source: Comingsoon.net