Death Comes Ahead of Schedule in Owen Egerton’s Whistle

Owen Egerton may have left Austin for New England but his filmmaking heart remains here, as shown when he debuted his latest film, gory horror Whistle, at Fantastic Fest last year. Adapted by Egerton from his own short story and directed by Corin Hardy (The Hallow, The Nun), it arrived Friday on dedicated horror streaming platformShudder.

The thrillride horror centers on a group of school friends who make the mistake of blowing on an Aztec death whistle, a real and mysterious artifact that the film uses to summon a premature demise. And not just any demise: whatever it was that was going to kill you anyway, just days, weeks, or even decades ahead of schedule.

Amid all the bloodshed, there’s a heartfelt drama about facing up to your own mortality. Egerton’s made all kinds of horror films – supernatural mystery in The Axe Murders of Villisca, psychological terror in Mercy Black, and throwback 80s terror in Blood Fest. With this film, he had one intention above all others. “I want this to be fun in the same way that the movies that I watch and rewatch and rewatch are fun,” he said. “There are certain horror movies that devastate me, and I love those and I certainly appreciate them, and then there are certain horror movies often that I have a box set for because I’ll get home and go, ‘I’ll watch Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives again tonight.’”

Egerton’s got a long list of those go-to fun films, starting of course with the original Universal monster movies. “Halloween IV is a big one for me,” he added. “A Nightmare on Elm Street one, three, and four are real comfort foods. And I really like Van Helsing. I know that’s an unpopular opinion but I have a blast watching that one. It is a buffet of delights.”

Austin Chronicle: So how did you find the fun in a story about an ancient cursed whistle that brings on the most horrific deaths imaginable?

Owen Egerton: Well, the idea came first and the fun came last. So, opposed to asking the common question of ‘What’s going to scare an audience?’ or ‘What’s going to scare somebody?’ the better question for me to ask is what scares me, and what scares me is the fact that I’m going to die – specifically, that my death is out there in a specific, concrete kind of way.

I started thinking of being haunted by my own specific death. What does that look like? Concepts of doppelgängers, concepts of premonitions of one’s own death. And while I was playing with that, that’s when I said, ‘But I want this one to be really fun.’ A lot of producers and potential collaborators I talked to went, ‘I don’t know what you mean by fun.’

I started building out the curse and I knew I needed a vessel, an object that would help be an incarnation of this. That’s when I started doing research and came across the Aztec death whistles, and earlier versions of that, Mesoamerican whistles that are found in Olmec cultures and Mayan as well. I love the idea that there’s so much mystery behind them. We don’t know what the whistle’s intention was in the culture that used them, and that was an interesting freedom for me as a writer.

So I came up with the idea that this is a single whistle that has gone through hundreds of cultures over thousands of years. It’s got little etchings, graffiti in languages that no longer exist. It’s lost, in a lot of ways.

Austin Chronicle: So, you’ve got this singular whistle in your head, and it becomes the central visual for the film. It’s the most important prop, so what was the design process?

Owen Egerton: When I was finishing the script for [production firm] No Trace Camping, it was leading into the writers’ strike. I’d sent them my research stuff on different whistles that had been found. There are some that are more intricate, some are really simple, some are made out of bone, and this is what they sound like. I turn in the script days before the strike and say, ‘By the way, if this strike happens, we won’t be able to talk. That’s the deal of a strike. Pens down.’ They took it and ran, and luckily they found Corin. He’s a British director, not a writer, so he was outside of the strike but he couldn’t talk to me. So, for him, he’s like, ‘Gosh, I hope this guy Owen likes my thoughts and the direction I want to take it.’

I only later heard about him as the strike was ending. I’d seen his movies, so that was exciting. Finally, we met on Zoom – I was in the States, he was in the UK – and during the call he was in his shed where he does a lot of his own sculpting. He’d been working with this Spanish designer, and he said, ‘Let me show you the three top designs for the whistle,’ and I’m looking at them and going, ‘Oh, oh, this is great.’ Because he understood that it has to have personality. It doesn’t move or anything, but he and the design team worked to make something that catches the light differently depending on where the source is. So at some times it looks like it’s grinning at you, at others it’s giving you this come-hither look, and at other times it’s calm, almost stoic to your sufferings. So they did a really beautiful job of making what would be a prop actually a personality.

Credit: Michael Gibson/Shudder

Austin Chronicle: The other big visual challenge is that, when a character dies, you see what would have happened to them as they’re dying but not the actual thing killing them. It’s the opposite of Final Destination, where you’re waiting for something horrible to happen: Here, something horrible is happening to a character and you have to unpack it. When did you get that idea?

Owen Egerton: So I’d had this idea of being haunted and hunted by our own deaths, so then the question is, what happens when your death gets you? So if you died very old then there would be this very old person, then it would take you a while to recognize that this is your own death. I think there’s something very human and strange about that concept. So what happens when your death gets you? Well, you experience that.

I knew that meant we’d see some visuals that I’ve never seen before, and in that first meeting that we had, Corin also showed me some storyboards about some of the deaths and some sequences. As he was showing them, I went, ‘This is the perfect guy to be directing this film.’

Austin Chronicle: So, the big question: What makes a good kill in a movie?

Owen Egerton: I was reading something recently where someone was like, ‘A great kill, you either feel really, really sad that someone died, or you feel really justified.’ I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s three things and – I know this sounds a bit geeky but I think you’ll appreciate it – but Aristotle talked about tragedy having two causes: fear and pity. Basically, that we pity the characters on the stage, and we fear that we could experience the same thing, and that’s the role of drama, specifically tragedy.

There’s something about that in a good kill. That we’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is happening to somebody,’ and it awakes something visceral in us as much as watching a car accident or someone falling down in the street. But there’s also a realization that I’ve been identifying with this character in some kind of way. They’ve been my avatar in this world, so it’s terrifying to see them taken away.

The third thing is that death is not a good or a bad force. It doesn’t have intention, it doesn’t have a moral goal. It’s not coming as a punishment, it’s not coming as a reward. It’s a force, much as a volcano or a thunderstorm. The rain doesn’t fall because we deserve it and nor does it hold back because of our sin. It just is, and that offers a sublime awesomeness to it. And I don’t mean the awesomeness of ‘Cool!’ I mean the awe and terror of the wide ocean or the expansive sky. Something that whispers of the sublime, uncanniness of eternity.

A good kill has all of that, mixed in with the real specifics of what it is to be a flesh-and-blood creature in a surreal world. Add a little humor in there, and you’ve got it all.

Whistle is streaming on Shudder now.

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