Corin Hardy's New Horror Movie Whistle Has An Early Contender For 2026's Gnarliest Kill

Warning: Major Spoilers ahead for WhistleThe central premise for Whistle isn't necessarily groundbreaking, but it does tread some new ground as far as supernatural curses go. Wearing the mask of a classic teen horror movie, Whistle introduces an ancient artifact (you guessed it, a death whistle) that curses everyone who hears it to come face-to-face with their death—literally.

Those who hear the whistle's piercing shriek are stalked and eventually killed by a ghostly version of themselves in the form they'll be in when they die. For example, a smoker is confronted by a cancer-ridden ghoulish version of himself, while a teenage girl is chased by a shriveled crone of herself because she dies of old age. It's a fairly original idea that the movie does a decent enough job exploring.

One death stands well above the rest when it comes to shock value and gore, however. While Whistle earned middling RT scores, the grisly death referred to online so far as "the bedroom scene" is among the more inventive on-screen deaths in any subgenre of horror in recent memory.

Whistle Shows You Someone Die In A Car Crash—Without The Car

One of the teenagers who heard the whistle's shriek, a prototypical jock character named Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), is shown drinking and driving on multiple occasions. Most of the other characters' future deaths are rather obviously foreshadowed at some point, and in Dean's case, the drunk driving is the clear red flag.

While it's easy enough to show a smoker being followed by a bald, sallow-eyed version of themselves, it's far more difficult to show an entity that represents a person dying from a drunken car crash. Corin Hardy and his team made it work shockingly well though, with Dean first being accosted by a bloody, crushed version of himself.

What takes the affair to the next level is that Hardy and his team show the living Dean suffering the effects of a car crash right on screen. Dean is suspended in midair, and his body slowly breaks, twists, and shatters as a real human body would if subjected to the extreme force of a head-on car crash. It's breathtakingly gruesome, and really stands out as a visual that sticks with you.

The Gruesome Variety Of Kills Give Whistle Some Long-Term Potential

Whistle likely isn't being released wide enough to earn the box office haul that would get any sort of sequel greenlit, although the movie's ending certainly left the door wide open for more. However, if it earns cult classic status on a streaming platform, there is plenty more to explore with the concept of people being confronted by their own deaths.

The audience only sees a few different deaths at the hands of the whistle's curse, and two characters even manage to "trick" it into thinking they were dead and then passing the curse onto someone else. As cool as the car crash death was, there are unlimited ways for the curse to unfold on screen. A sequel to Whistle could not only further the lore behind the curse, but also show another handful of visually interesting deaths.