I was lucky enough to catch Whistle as the closing-night film at Fantastic Fest, and it’s haunted me ever since. The ’90s throwback centers on a cursed Aztec death whistle — and honestly, the moment I first learned such a thing existed, I knew someone would eventually build a horror movie around it. I’d been tracking the project for a while, fully expecting it to be either bonkers or outright terrible. Shockingly, it turned out to be a film I’m still talking up months later whenever it comes up.
The story follows Chris, a mysterious, goth-adjacent new girl who finds a strange whistle in her locker on her first day of school. It once belonged to the star basketball player who burned to death in the showers six months earlier. Naturally, someone blows it at a pool party — because of course they do — unlocking some of the most inventive cursed-object lore the genre has seen in years. The rules are simple and brutal: when you’re born, your death is already set. If you’re meant to live to 90, it’ll take 90 years to reach you — unless you blow the whistle, which tells your death exactly where you are. So if you were destined to die in a fire at 48, blowing it in the shower might bring that fate crashing in a whole lot sooner.
From there, we get classic horror high school archetypes scrambling to understand what’s happening as their classmates start dropping one by one — and trying desperately to stop it, Final Destination–style.
While Whistle largely follows the trajectory you’d expect, it delivers some genuinely gnarly on-screen deaths — including one out-of-nowhere car crash that brought the house down, myself included. The biggest twist is that instead of centering straight star-crossed lovers, the film focuses on two girls navigating both queerness and ancient curses in the most forgiving place imaginable: high school. The supporting cast feels more fully realized too — even the jocks and popular kids aren’t just disposable bodies waiting their turn.
If you’re steeped in ’90s horror, you know exactly where this is heading, and Whistle takes you there while delivering both unhinged kills and a Gen Z emotional sensibility that gives the characters real weight. As fans of those older films can admit, the characters weren’t always that deep. Here, you’re allowed to genuinely connect with everyone — even the jocks. Combined with its expertly deployed cursed-object tropes, the film feels like the launch of what could be the next great horror franchise. And after that ending, it’s very much in the cards.
