Twenty years ago today, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1997) hit theaters. How does it hold up?
#31DaysOfHorror: October 17
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
When I was young, before I discovered Stephen King, I spent a summer working my way through the novels of Lois Duncan. Her tightly-plotted suspense books like Killing Mr. Griffin, Don’t Look Behind You, Ransom, and I Know What You Did Last Summer filled my twelve year old mind with fear and dread, and also a little nervous thrill, at the thought of growing up and having to face terrors like the ones the teenage characters in the books encountered.
When my library book club read I Know What You Did Last Summer that year, they capped off the discussion with a screening of the film adaptation that had come out a few years earlier. I wasn’t allowed to attend the screening; while my parents had figured I could handle the story in book form, the movie — which only loosely followed the events of the novel — was rated R, and that just wasn’t allowed. That’s okay; the book was enough for me then. In the novel the friends kill a child with their car. Since I got my driver’s license, I’ve had recurring nightmares that I do the same. I blame Lois Duncan.
So I never saw the movie version. I saw a number of its imitators over the years — including Urban Legends — and I’ve read about its importance in the teen horror wave of the late 90s, but I had never seen the full film myself. For the 20th anniversary of the film’s release in theaters — and for #31DaysOfHorror — I decided to check it out. And you know what? It’s not half bad!
For #31DaysOfHorror this year, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the way that horror functions as folklore. This was most apparent in the Urban Legends franchise, of course, which has its characters enrolled in a folklore class in the first movie and has its characters making horror movies based on folktales in the second installment. (Please don’t make me talk about the third one ever again). Horror films frequently feature characters in familiar situations, often taking elements from other horror movies, telling deceptively simple stories that reflect the morals and ethics of the society that produced them.
Minutes into I Know What You Did Last Summer, while sitting around a campfire on the beach— reminiscent of the opening of The Fog, another horror movie about a coastal fishing town that’s very concerned with folklore and storytelling— the characters discuss the urban legend of the man with the hook for a hand terrorizing two teenagers making out in a car on lover’s lane. They bicker over making sure to tell the story “right,” or, as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character Ray puts it, “the way it really happened.”
“It’s a fictional story created to warn young girls of the dangers of having premarital sex,” scoffs Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character Julie.
He snaps right back at her, mansplaining a decade before the word came into usage, “Well, actually, honey — and you know how terrified I am of your IQ — it’s an urban legend. American folklore. And they all usually originate from some sort of real-life incident.”
The scene on the beach is dream-like and strange. There’s a beautiful longer take of Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar, six months into playing Buffy on TV) twirling along the surf holding a sparkler in one hand— it is, after all, the Fourth of July — and her just-acquired beauty pageant crown in the other. She’s Lady Liberty, gorgeous and freewheeling, unable to see that disaster lurks just around the corner.
When she reaches her relaxing, drunken boyfriend Barry (Ryan Phillippe), she tosses the sparkler over her shoulder, where it sputters out in the sand as she plans their future together. Their relationship, we imagine, is not long for this world.
Moments later — after Julie and Ray have snuck off to have sex behind a boulder — the foursome piles into Barry’s car to head home. Barry is drunk, belligerently so, and he relinquishes his keys after much protest and sticks his head up through the sunroof to feel the wind in his hair and to soak up his “last summer of adolescent decadence.” He drops his bottle of liquor in Ray’s lap. Ray takes his eyes off the road. Barry shouts. They swerve. They hit someone, hard, who flies up into the air and tumbles onto the shoulder. The car comes screeching to a stop.
In the next few chaotic moments, the four friends hash out a plan: they’ll dump the body in the ocean, where it will take weeks for him to wash up on shore… if he’s ever found at all. They’ll clean up the car and claim total ignorance, and they can go on and live their lives, not having to answer for the fact that they killed someone.
They carry the body to the ocean, but just before they can dump him in, the man wakes up and grabs Helen’s crown, clutching it in his fist as he sinks to the bottom of the sea. Barry leaps into the water and retrieves it, and they believe they’re safe.
They’re not safe, of course. The next summer, Julie returns home after a year spent at school deeply depressed and anxious that they’ll be found out. Sure enough, soon after she’s walked in the door, her mother hands her a note that’s shown up in the mail.
Someone knows what she did last summer.
What follows is an uneven, yet engrossing tale of investigation and murder. Julie and Helen race to learn more about the man they threw in the ocean, as a mysterious hook-handed man in a rain slicker begins to murder everyone involved in the crime, one-by-one. It’s as though the urban legend they argued over around the campfire exactly a year earlier has sprung to life from their nightmares, here to teach them a lesson — don’t run from your mistakes.
Being a horror fan, and watching the movie from the point-of-view of a #31DaysOfHorror marathon, I am far more interested in the latter than the former. Julie and Helen’s investigation of their victim takes them into the woods to visit the victim’s crazy sister, played believably by Anne Heche, who that year was beginning her much-publicized romance with Ellen Degeneres. After they visit Anne Heche in the woods, their investigation takes them… uh, back to Anne Heche in the woods again.
It’s not a particularly engrossing plotline.
The fisherman and his hook, on the other hand, make for the far more compelling half of the storyline. Julie and Helen are trying to get one step ahead of him intellectually, but sometimes you just have to run to get ahead, as the other characters quickly realize. The killer’s high-collared rain slicker, bucket hat, and gleaming metal hook make him an instantly iconic, recognizable figure, and his quick stride makes him a more realistic villain than the slow, plodding Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers.
His kills are quick and brutal, not particularly bloody but effective nonetheless. He is the walking, hulking embodiment of repressed guilt, a spectre from the past come back to haunt the teens of the present.
It makes sense that the film adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer was written by Kevin Williamson, the man behind the screenplays for Scream and Scream 2, which was released several months after IKWYDLS. In that franchise, he and his collaborator Wes Craven broke the slasher movie down into its essential building blocks and reassembled it as something postmodern and new. IKWYDLS was his second screenplay after Scream, a blatant attempt to fashion a new slasher that could carry the Scream ethos into the 21st century.
Williamson, who created the seminal 90s teen drama Dawson’s Creek a year after I Know What You Did Last Summer, understands how modern teens differed from the teens of the past. They are smarter, more aware of the mechanics of storytelling, as evidenced by the scene at the beginning where they discuss urban legends and their function as folktales. Teens of the 90s wanted more autonomy and more agency, but also, Williamson believes, less responsibility when things went wrong.
The best decision in the entire film was setting the action on the Fourth of July, over three consecutive years. This gives the plot immediate symbolic resonance, grounding it as a distinctly American tale.
The film is littered with images of Americana, including not only multiple Fourth of July parade sequences that include fireworks and sparklers, but a fun sequence where the fisherman stalks Helen in her home, the movie cutting back and forth between the hulking shadow of the killer, Helen in the kitchen drinking Coca-Cola, and her father in the living room watching a baseball game. It positions the killer, this lurking, savage personification of guilt-driven rage, ready to erupt, as just another slice of Americana… as American as baseball and Coca-Cola.
Helen is eventually killed during the final parade of the evening, savagely sliced to death in an alleyway just out of sight of the merry revelers, her dance of death with the fisherman lit by the strobing flashes of fireworks overhead, her piercing screams drowned out by the drumbeats of the marching band. The beauty queen: slain. It’s an American tragedy. It’s one tortured scream against an American flag away from being a direct homage to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out.
“At the end of the 20th century, everything was all right,” writes Andre Dellamorte in his review of I Know What You Did Last Summer on Blu-Ray. The Cold War was over for almost a decade, and America was still a few years away from being embroiled in the War on Terror thanks to the attacks of 9/11. I Know What You Did Last Summer exists in a weird space between the two, when America had a chance to turn its critical eye on itself, to realize that there was still something there… something very dark… some predilection for violence, and an ability to disavow that violence… always lurking beneath the surface.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is not a perfect movie, or even a particularly great one. But it’s very much of its time, and twenty years later, still an engrossing watch. I didn’t see it when I was twelve. That’s okay; I think I would have missed most of what was going on behind the screams. I would have missed the way it functions as American folklore, existing to pass on a moral to an entire generation: Next time you leave a man for dead, make sure he’s really dead!
That’s what I’m supposed to learn from all this, I think?
