A Soggy Seasonal Serial Chiller.
Dredged up from the discarded depths by the undertow of Scream’s cultural splash, I Know What You Did Last Summer rides the wave of meta-aware teen horror without ever really understanding the current. Where Scream revelled in its own genre-literate adolescence, Last Summer plays things markedly straighter, trading self-awareness for solemnity and hoping that sincerity might be enough. It’s little wonder that when it went looking for source material to spoof, Scary Movie went after this once it had strip-mined Scream.
When four high school friends – Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr), Barry (Ryan Phillippe), and Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) – accidentally hit a man on a dark coastal road after a night of partying, they make a panicked decision to dump the body and a pact to cover the incident up. A year later, their futures dimmed, and friendship strained, Julie receives a note bearing the ominous title line. Their secret isn’t a secret anymore and someone is determined not just to expose their wrongdoings, but their internal organs too.
Written by Kevin Williamson before Scream ever hit cinemas, the script for I Know What You Did Last Summer was hastily pulled into production after Scream’s success, without the benefit of his now-famous ironically self-aware subtext. What we get instead is another cast of chiselled jawlines and improbably thick hair, each with a secret, a scream, or a set of abs to bear where the rules aren’t so much rewritten as reinforced. The giddy thrill of characters dissecting tropes while being dissected themselves is absent and instead, I Know What You Did Last Summer plays it dead straight, offering earnestness in place of awareness and atmosphere instead of attitude, as if stripping away genre playfulness might somehow make the blood run colder.
The accident that binds our doomed foursome feels less like an inciting trauma and more like an awkward plot pivot. It’s handled with incredible irrationality and such weird character choices that it’s little wonder it haunts them for a year. A very uneventful year, if the character transformations are anything to go by. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s beauty queen Helen devolves into a cautionary tale about losing your sparkle, Freddie Prinze Jr’s fisherman doesn’t evolve so much as oscillate between brooding and wooden, Ryan Phillippe’s rage-prone jock turns meaner without motive, and Hewitt’s Julie becomes a wisp of anxiety and denim.
Where Scream gave its characters internal lives and witty cynicism, Last Summer leaves them stranded in archetype and cliché. They don’t question the killer’s methods or arbitrary targets unrelated to the hit-and-run or wonder why their assailant is so committed to his hook and rainslick aesthetic. They just… run. Occasionally hide. Often shout each other’s names into the dark. It’s not so much cat-and-mouse as hook, line and stinker.
The killer himself – a hook-wielding fisherman straight out of an urban legend – lacks the theatricality or iconography to elevate him beyond generic serial killer threat. He’s not a figure of primal terror or ironic punishment; he’s just… aggressive and slightly damp. Where Ghostface was clumsy, chatty (on the phone, at least), and laced with postmodern menace, this guy’s just here to catch fish and puncture teens, and he’s all fished out.
What’s faintly frustrating is that the film is made thinking it’s tapping the same rich vein of horror nostalgia that Scream vivisected with such glee. But Last Summer mistakes imitation for homage. The slasher DNA is there: the coastal town, the masked killer, the body count, but it’s been filtered through a Lifetime melodrama. The pacing limps. The tension’s all bluster. Even the kills lack flair, muffled by a film unsure whether it wants to thrill or moralise. A gory reckoning for youthful hubris? A cautionary tale about repressed guilt? A summer campfire yarn given cinematic legs? It keeps baiting all three hooks but never lands a clean identity.
It’s easy to forget, amidst the foghorns and endless rain, that I Know What You Did Last Summer launched an unexpected franchise even though it doesn’t have a calling card, and plays more like a place-holder. It wants to be a seaside Scream, but without the sass, the smarts, or the sadism. It’s horror with its collar buttoned all the way up, haunted not by guilt, but by the ghosts of better films lurking in its own recent past.
There’s some solid staging, a few genuinely squirmy set pieces (Gellar’s chase scene remains a high point), and the occasional frisson of nastiness but the film keeps swerving when it should lean in and while Scream let the audience in on the game, I Know What You Did Last Summer keeps its cards to its chest – not out of strategy, but out of uncertainty about whether it actually has a winning hand or is just bluffing. It wants to be an exploration of lingering trauma, or festering guilt, and mistakes of the past returning to haunt the present, but it singularly fails to critique or condemn the actions of its protagonists at any stage, meaning when the sou’westered avenger shows up, it’s hard not to concede he’s got, well, a point.
