According to Deadline, Logan breakout Dafne Keen and Shaun of the Dead star Nick Frost have signed on to star in the upcoming horror movie titled Whistle.
In addition, Sophie NĂ©lisse (Yellowjackets), Sky Yang (Rebel Moon), and Percy Hynes White (Wednesday) have also been cast in the high school-set project. It hails from The Nun director Corin Hardy, who likens Whistle to other classic films in both horror and the coming-of-age genres.
“The premise of Whistle is simple, immediate and has a fresh, haunting mythology. A cursed object that summons your future death to come and find you,” Hardy said in a statement. “The screenplay has echoes of some of my favourite classic horrors like The Ring, A Nightmare On Elm Street or It Follows, with elements of seminal high school movies The Breakfast Club and Donnie Darko. I’m thrilled to be working with this brilliant young cast to bring this inventive, terrifying and cinematic new horror to death… I mean life.”
Whistle is directed by Hardy from a screenplay written by Owen Egerton, based on his short story. It is produced by David Gross (Room) for No Trace Camping, and Macdara Kelleher (The Pope’s Exorcist) for Wild Atlantic Pictures. Production is expected to begin in early November in Ontario, Canada. It won’t be affected by the ongoing actors strike since it will be made under an ACTRA contract instead of SAG-AFTRA.
“In the film, a misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle,” reads the synopsis. “They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion.”