Director Corin Hardy talks to us about his grisly new horror, Whistle, stop motion animation, and lots more besides. Cursed objects are a cornerstone of horror, from the monkey paws of classic literature to the possessed dolls and, er, haunted cuckoo clocks of modern cinema. Whistle is the latest entry in this proud storytelling lineage, ... Whistle | Director Corin Hardy on high school horror, stop motion and The Crow
Director Corin Hardy talks to us about his grisly new horror, Whistle, stop motion animation, and lots more besides.
Cursed objects are a cornerstone of horror, from the monkey paws of classic literature to the possessed dolls and, er, haunted cuckoo clocks of modern cinema.
Whistle is the latest entry in this proud storytelling lineage, with the film’s teenage cast – including Dafne Keen, Sky Yang and Sophie Nelisse – encountering an ancient Mesoamerican instrument that brings terror and doom to anyone foolish enough to blow into it.
It’s directed by Corin Hardy, the stop motion animator, rock promo director and maker of the genre delights as The Hallow – a terrific 2015 horror steeped in Irish folklore – and 2018’s The Nun.
Based on a script by Owen Egerton, it’s both modern in its matter-of-fact depiction of a young romance between Keen and Nelisse’s characters, and also an unabashed throwback. Not just to supernatural literature, but to 80s horror cinema and the work of directors like Wes Craven and Chuck Russell – Hardy cites Russell’s A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and his sorely underrated goo classic, The Blob, as major influences.
On the eve of Whistle’s UK release, then, here are edited highlights from our interview with the delightful Mr Corin Hardy. For more on the filmmaker’s fascinating career in animation, rock promos and horror, do keep an eye out for the next edition of Film Stories magazine, due for release in March.
Whistle feels like a fusion of MR James Gothic horror story – the ancient cursed object – except the person that picks up the cursed object isn’t a dusty antiquarian, but rather a teenager.
Oh Whistle [And I’ll Come To You, My Lad – a famous James story]. Yeah.
I read Owen Egerton’s script and I could feel this instant, very simple, strong mythology about an ancient cursed object that I hadn’t seen a film about before. I’d been aware in the back of my mind of the idea of a death whistle. I think it gets mentioned in one of the recent Ghostbusters movies. But I hadn’t seen the [definitive] death whistle movie.
I actually thought, maybe this is completely made up. And then I was amazed to read, when I researched it after reading the script, that death whistles existed, and they’re shrouded in a lot of mystery themselves, harking back thousands of years to Mesoamerican times and the Aztecs and Olmecs. But there’s a lot of different beliefs in them, and mysteries and mythologies, and there’s no specific one.
So Owen had pulled different ideas together, and the idea of this ancient thing being found in the wrong environment, in an American high school. It felt like a great, simple premise for a horror movie.
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I really liked that you establish the high school setting, but beyond that, there’s the post-industrial feel of Pittsburgh or Detroit or somewhere like that.
That was exactly the plan. I wanted to set it in a fictional town inspired by what I’d seen in movies like The Deer Hunter, funnily enough, and Pittsburgh and Romero. In a place where, even if death hadn’t come for these kids, if they didn’t escape this place, they’d probably die here. So it was a place they needed to get out of.
Read more: How Whistle fuses A Nightmare On Elm Street with The Deer Hunter
I wanted to ask about [Easter eggs], because I saw there are Muschietti cigarettes, and Mr Craven, obviously.
Yeah. He’s the grandfather of this American high school genre [of horror]. And A Nightmare On Elm Street and Elm Street 3: The Dream Warrior is a big, big inspiration for Whistle.
Another one I saw was, um, Wook Juice.
Park Chan-wook, yeah. Blink and you’ll miss it. There’s actually a hell of a lot more. When I work with the props and the costume departments, you have to [come up with] names or brands. They can just do generic ones. But I said, ‘Any opportunity, please run it by me.’
We put way more than you see [in the finished film], because then you get to the edit and certain shots don’t make it. I think the basketball team you see at the beginning – all the names are horror heroines, heroes or villains. You only see a few in the final movie, but I’ve got photos of all of them. And, yeah, any branding – there’s some that are harder to see.
When it comes to working on a horror set-piece, and thinking about how you’re going to achieve it, does your background as a stop motion animator come into play there, because it’s problem solving in 3D space?
Yeah, absolutely. I think stop motion is the ultimate art form, right? I’m talking about physical stop motion. And when I made my first film, Butterfly, which is a 30 minute stop motion film, it was pre-digital. So I shot it all on film. I lit every frame, every model was made by hand, every model had an armature.
We see this less and less now, but every single frame is a little piece of art in its own right. And you’re doing thousands of them and bringing life to these inanimate objects. So every single part of a stop motion is designed, and the models have to physically support themselves and hold up, and they have to look a certain way. So it’s like an ultra-scrutinising process.
You do feel like you’re bringing something that didn’t exist to life, which is what I love about horror, and what I love about special effects and monster-making and creating illusions: you’re trying to suspend the audience’s belief.
I can see a through line from Butterfly [Hardy’s stop motion debut] to your later work, and themes of religion and death and grief. More glancingly, there’s a funfair in Butterfly, which looks a little bit like the one in Whistle.
There is. I love fun fairs. I love the romantic feel of them. I remember going to fun fairs and harvest festivals and bonfire nights over here in England. I live near Lewes [in East Sussex], and Lewes has the most epic November the 5th bonfire night. And I grew up going to that, and it was always the place, especially at school, where you’d meet your friends, and there was a different feel in the air and a romance. And – I don’t know – you’d see the girl you fancied through the fireworks.
In Whistle, Owen had written that there’s this harvest festival in the middle of the movie that they’re all going to. I was thrilled to be able to have that as part of the world. So although there’s this American high school setting in Whistle, I’m keen for stories and movies to have these different environments that take you on a ride.
The Hallow was an amazing feature debut. It feels like you could have made life easier for yourself by not having a baby in it, by not having it filmed on real locations. What was the experience of that like?
It’s funny how much you forget all those things. When you say that, immediately I get a kind of a shiver of like, ‘Oh my god’. How difficult it was. Because if you have a baby in a film, you basically have to cast twins so that you can use them for short bits of time. Then I had a complete animatronic baby, then I had a stunt prop baby. I had my daughter, who became the right age during post, when I needed some extra shots of another baby. And then we had an animated CGI baby. So it was tough to make a film around, because the baby is almost a central character. And then there’s two of them, so that was tough.
There was also casting for dogs and finding not only the right look, but also the right attitude… Joe Mawle [the lead actor] was very good with dogs, which was helpful. But, yeah, I guess I’d waited so long to make whatever my first feature film would be. I developed at that point four different movies that were all horror movies and monster movies. The Hallow was the most contained.
But I was really eager not to make a movie about a couple of people in a room. I wanted to make a big-scale, beautiful-looking movie based around Irish folklore and mythology. And I wanted to walk a line of science and mythology: fairy tales have been passed down for thousands of years. There must be truth in them.
There’s still very potent beliefs, particularly in Ireland, revolving around fairies and curses and folklore and mythology. I’m inspired by movies like The Thing and Alien, and movies that have treated its subject really seriously, like what Ridley Scott did with Alien, particularly in the biology of that thing.
So I wanted to combine that into a movie that could feel like a psychological drama between a family having a breakdown, struggling. But actually openly be a monster movie based around that folklore. I’d worked with John Nolan, who’s now huge, having done like the last but one Jurassic World movie, and he built the dinosaurs practically for that.
When we did The Hallow, he was incredibly talented. He had a workshop that he still has in London, and we took it over. It was my dream come true, having a team of sculptors and people making everything in foam rubber, and we did all these animatronic tests and wrote the script and devised the different monsters and movements and sequences.
It was a huge amount of work. And yes, we filmed it all on location in western Ireland, sometimes throughout the night, in a peat bog field with sheeting 45 degree rain and actors in full prosthetic body suits, unable to see, breathing through tubes, crawling around with a guy holding a flaming scythe. So it was the nice balance of when you’re still a bit naive enough to just go for it.
I try and keep that feeling of being a bit naive.
Did you know what you’re going to make next?
I’ve got a mixture of projects. I always have a good handful or two of feature films or TV shows, things I’m developing, things I’ve written…. There’s always horror in there, but they’re not all horror. There’s thrillers and noir and crime and some sci-fi tinged ideas, but it’s a bit like race horses. You keep backing them and working on them, and you think one’s about to be the front runner, and then something changes, and another one pops up. So it’s always hard to talk about exactly what the next one is, but yeah, there’s a lot of mythology still to come.
I’d have loved to have seen your take on The Crow. What were your plans for that?
That’s a long story, but that was one of the few comic books… That was my kind of superhero. I grew up on James O’Barr’s graphic novel, and Alex Proyas’ movie was such a special thing for me, as an art student and teenager and heavy metal fan. So when I got a chance to do The Crow, it was first of all, very ‘No.’
Part of me was like, ‘Well no one should do The Crow. It’s a sacred thing.’ But James O’Barr’s graphic novel was the key to me taking that on, to putting a few long, long years into that movie. And like a lot of sad movie [production stories] it didn’t end up transpiring.
It happens. There’s the Revenger [a fictional comic book character] in Whistle – was that your little nod to The Crow?
You’re the first person to make that observation, so congratulations [Laughs] I can’t deny, or, umm…
You can neither confirm nor deny!
…confirm nor deny, yes.
So Rel is written as a kind of outsider, comic book nerd. He’s basically me when I was 14, 15.
It was written originally that he’s a big Green Lantern fan. So he had all these Green Lantern comics… And when he goes to the harvest fest, he was going to dress as Green Lantern. I’m not a massive Green Lantern fan. And so my initial instinct was like, ‘Oh, can he be The Crow, actually?’
But also, we couldn’t clear using Green Lantern anyway. And then I was like, ‘Well, if he’s not going to be Green Lantern, he should probably be the Punisher, because, because it’s also tapping into his [character arc… And I also loved the visual aspect, that he was going to go to harvest fest dressed in this gear, because I used to go out dressed as The Crow to virtually every Halloween [party] aged 15 to 20.
Anyway, we couldn’t get clearance of use for Marvel characters. And then I was like, ‘Well, we can just invent our own.’ And by that point, with Rel’s character arc, it made more sense that he needed something vengeful, rather than colourful, green spandex or something. So we designed this character and managed to get clearance on the name the Revenger. [He’s] inspired by Punisher, inspired by The Crow. Sky Yang, who plays Rel, when we did a camera test, I was like, ‘He looks fantastic.’ He really brought the Revenger to life.
He did. The cast in this in general is excellent.
I haven’t talked about a cast, because casting Whistle was really key. Both in creating the whistle itself as a cast member, and creating that with the concept artist – a Spanish guy called Daniel Carusco. And then casting what I call The Breakfast Club, which is our ensemble of teenage characters. Because having done The Hallow and having done The Nun and Gangs Of London, I realised I’d worked with a lot of adult actors and a few young kids, but suddenly I was aware that I’ve got an ensemble of at least five 17 to 18 year-olds.
So casting that, I look back to some of the films I grew up on, like The Lost Boys or A Nightmare Elm Street or Donnie Darko, and wanted to capture that teenage energy and angst and charisma between them. So getting Dafne Keen, knowing her from Logan and His Dark Materials, and Sophie Nélisse from Yellowjackets, and Sky Yang, who’d just done Rebel Moon… Percy Hynes White from Wednesday. Then getting Nick Frost and Michelle Fairley – it felt like building a really exciting group.
It’s a terrific ensemble. Corin Hardy, thank you very much.
Whistle is in UK cinemas from the 13th February.
