Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.

Three Conjuring Spin-offs Make A Post

The Nun (2018): I’ve never been much of a fan of the The Conjuring movies. Their combination of James Wan as usually wasting his considerable talents on bland scripts and these movies’ idolization of two genuinely horrible people simply rub me the wrong. Plus, I often have problems with straightforward Christian horror – I don’t even connect to The Exorcist beyond seeing its obvious technical achievements.

So colour me surprised I actually enjoyed two out of three of today’s Conjuring spin-offs. The Nun I’d even call a genuinely great horror movie. But then, there’s very little of the Warrens in here. Instead, director Corin Hardy basically turns out a loving Blumhouse mainstream horror homage to Italian horror – gothic and not – with a smidgen of Hammer gothic mixed in. This sort of thing is catnip to me, particularly when a movie fills the time between quoting Fulci and Bava and the ridiculous and very fun big budget (at least in comparison to its idols) special effects climax (re-)creating such a lovely mood of dread, decay, and the irrational as this one does.

Taissa Farmiga also makes a great horror heroine, filling the film’s more awkward moments – which is to say, everything to do with character bits – with life and personality.

The Nun II (2023): She’s also the only good thing about Michael Chaves’s sequel. Chaves is a curious case to be the guy to have taken over the series from Wan as a director, seeing as he has now repeatedly proven he can’t structure or centre a narrative to save his life, and can never sell his horror set pieces as anything but set pieces. Admittedly, he isn’t helped by a script that doesn’t understand how to tell the story of an investigation, not to speak of telling it engagingly.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019): This third Annabelle movie – and the only one worth mentioning – as directed by Gary Daubermann (who also co-wrote this and the first Nun) does contain rather too much of the Warrens, but at least, this is a film where the possessed doll becomes the ringleader of all the monsters trapped in the Warren’s badly secured creep dungeon (how badly? A fucking teenager gets in) to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter and assorted teens (worth mentioning are Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife). There’s a grumpy wedding dress, Black Shuck (apparently a hellhound), and much delightful running around and screaming through all of the tropes of seriously fun but mostly (monster) kid friendly horror. It’s probably not exactly art, but it is certainly a very good time.

The Hallow (2015)

aka The Woods (because there just aren’t enough films called like that)

Warning: spoilers are sometimes inevitable

Biologist (or maybe botanist, or conservationist?) Adam Hitchens (Joseph Mawle), his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) and their baby son Finn have moved into an old house in the woods somewhere in Ireland to evaluate which parts of the local forest are ripe for milling. The locals, particularly the family’s nearest neighbour Doyle (Gary Lydon), aren’t too happy with that, though not for ecological reasons but because they fear the revenge of the “Hallow”, the faerie population supposedly dwelling (and being unpleasant) in the area.

None of the grown-up Hitchens’ gives much about the vague superstitious murmuring around them, of course, which, given their improbability and vagueness does not come as much of a surprise.

Alas, even though they are interpreting things through a distorted lens, the villagers aren’t wrong; things are very much stalking the woods, and they are acting according to the traditional legends, if not for the reasons those legends would give. Given the child-stealing tendencies of the Good Folk that’s not good news for a family with a baby.

The first seventy minutes or so of Corin Hardy’s The Hallow are quite a wonderful achievement. The film cleverly updates classic faerie lore with a bit of body horror, providing a somewhat scientific explanation for it while still keeping most of the lore applicable and true. So, the non-scientific legends aren’t so much superstitions here as the result of people observing actual (horrifying) phenomena they can’t quite explain correctly because they lack the proper frame work for it, while on the other hand the scientific side discards these observations with their and because of their wrong explanations. This approach can’t help but remind one of Nigel Kneale, though Hardy doesn’t think things quite as far as Kneale would have.

Hardy presents this not in a dry and distant approach but as a tight creature feature with all the eye-mutilating ickiness you’ll hope for in a film that explains faeries via a fungal infection that leaves much room for body horror. Hardy makes good use of these body horror elements too, yet never falls into the trap of only banking on physically unpleasant transformations as the be all and end all of his film. Hardy’s a much too controlled director for that, instead using many a classic creature feature strategy to creep out his audience. There’s an intensity and a focus to the direction that looks very special to my eyes, the sort of directing approach that isn’t afraid of just cutting out the uneventful middle of the style of film he’s working in, going from the set-up directly to a series of climaxes without the film seeming to miss anything important.

The creatures (and babies) here are mostly based on practical effects (with a bit of digital help), demonstrating ably that this particular art still hasn’t died out, and giving the creatures a physicality and presence CGI (particularly on a budget) can’t always achieve without any visible drawbacks.

Having said all this, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat disappointed by The Hallow’s final climax (the final finale?), because it’s much too conventional for a film that has put this much energy and inventiveness into updating its monsters and changing its expected structure. So, we get a film that ends with the infected main character saving the life of his child because he can desperately cling to his humanity thanks to the power of baby love, followed by the film eschewing a possible and much more horrible final sting for one so been-there-done-that it left me in utter disbelief a film with this much clever stuff going on in it felt the need to go for a horror movie bullshit ending nobody will feel anything about instead of something actually disquieting and tragic that itself suggested so clearly before.

Of course, this does not turn The Hallow into a film not worth watching. For my taste, it however did turn a potential classic into a very good movie that just misses the final kick and falls back on highly competently realized conventionalities it should be too good for.