REVIEW: WHISTLE Evokes the Golden Age of High School Horror

Chrys is just like every other high schooler: she loves listening to music, she is trying to make new friends, she has a crush on a girl in the hallway… and she has an ancient Aztec Death Whistle in her locker.

Chrys (short for Chrysanthemum) is the new girl in school. She has just moved from Chicago to a sleepy steel mill town, trying to escape whatever her previous life entailed. Whispers around campus are that she’s a junkie, that she killed her dad, that she just left rehab. But it doesn’t matter what’s true or not, it just matters that she can get through the rest of the school year in one piece. When she is assigned the locker of the star basketball player who mysteriously self-immolated six months ago, it happens to contain a mysterious object: an Aztec Death Whistle.

From there, it’s pretty straightforward: blow the whistle, hear its sound, and death comes for you. A franchise is born?

Whistle, which had its world premiere as the closing night film of Fantastic Fest 2025, doesn’t screen for general audiences until February of next year from IFC and Shudder. But the exceptional scares and heart of the film should carry word-of-mouth until then. English director Corin Hardy (The Nun) told the premiere audience that he wanted this to be a “traditional American high school horror movie, like A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Based on a short story and script by festival favorite Owen Egerton (Mercy Black), Whistle is a gruesome, funny, heartfelt throwback to films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and in fact, probably more successful in its attempt to cultivate that specific feeling than the aforementioned’s recent legacy sequel.

With any “traditional American high school horror movie,” it is imperative that the young cast manages to be likeable and believable, especially as their day-to-days turn into living nightmares. Luckily for Whistle