I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
I know all about accidents, and let me give you some advice: When you leave a man for dead, make sure that he's really dead!
On July 4th, 1996, I Know What You Did Last Summer characters Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray were involved in a hit and run that they swore they’d never speak of. A year later, the man they thought they killed comes back for revenge. Since the July 4th weekend just past, I thought I Know What You Did Last Summer would be the perfect movie to cover this week, and a great way to draw attention to summer slasher films, especially as the new I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot is set to hit theaters next weekend.
Revitalizing The Slasher Genre
While I believe Scream played a major role in the '90s resurgence of slasher films, I Know What You Did Last Summer contributed too. During its release, the film was number one at the box office for three weeks and ended its theatrical run with a worldwide total of $126 million on a $17 million budget. The plot and excitement for a new slasher film worked in its favor, but so did its quintessential '90s cast. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. all played the lead roles, and despite how unlikable they could all be at times, the actors made them charming. I Know What You Did Last Summer’s story works well because the characters are all guilty of a horrible crime.
They were drunk driving the night of the hit and run, and instead of seeking help for the man they hit, they feared getting in trouble and dumped the body in the water. What I like is that we see how the event affected them a year later. They didn’t go about their lives as if nothing had happened, even though they swore that’s what they were going to do. We see how Julie is struggling in college and nearly failing out of her classes, and how Helen’s dreams of going to New York didn’t work out. We also see how the friend group fell apart within the year after the tragedy, likely because staying together and acting like nothing had happened would have been too painful.
“Why would he try to run you over? Why did he make coleslaw on Helen's head? He's fucking with us! He's just out there, and he's watching and waiting!”-Julie James, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
In this way, I do have sympathy for them as a viewer. They’re very remorseful about their bad decision, and it is hard to watch how one mistake made by a group of teenagers could ruin their futures forever. However, they’ve also committed an unforgivable crime, and Helen and Barry have qualities that make them particularly unlikable, so when it's their time to get killed off, it isn’t too sad seeing them go. I Know What You Did Last Summer, from the same screenwriter as Scream, also has the nostalgia factor that keeps it relevant all these years later. There’s something different about watching a slasher film where the characters don’t have unlimited access to the internet the way they do today, and I’m interested to see how the storyline will translate in the modern reboot.
How To Make A Killer
What I Know What You Did Last Summer does differently than some other slasher films, is they gives us a killer who isn’t a part of the main cast. In all the Scream films, Ghostface is one of the main characters, and it's the viewer’s job to connect the dots and figure out which friend is behind the mask. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the film suggests anyone from the friend group could be the killer, giving a lot of false hints along the way, only to go in a very different direction by the end. While it’s often exciting trying to figure out which main character the killer is and anticipating the big reveal at the end, it’s also not always satisfying. I Know What You Did Last Summer had a more satisfying ending because the reveal was shocking.
“Yeah, Jodie Foster tried this and a skin-ripping serial killer answered the door!”-Helen Shivers, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
There were also a lot of great red herrings. We’re told pretty early on that Julie believes the man they killed was a guy named David Egan. While it seems Egan might be alive and trying to avenge the friend group, some other characters are suspicious too. A classmate named Max seems like the most obvious potential killer, as he was the only person driving by when Julie and her friends were trying to hide the body. However, once the masked fisherman figure kills him at the beginning of the film, it’s clear he has nothing to do with it. Later on, Julie’s former boyfriend, Ray, seems like the most obvious killer, after all, he works on boats all day and mentions his dad was a fisherman.
There’s a moment when Julie mentions he said he never knew his dad, which makes him seem even more suspicious. Then, as Julie points out, the name of the boat he’s working on matches the name of David’s old friend, who his sister claims had stopped by to see her. I wouldn’t have minded Ray being the killer, but I also think it would have been too obvious, especially since it's too similar to the killer reveal in Scream, which premiered a year earlier. Instead, it turns out, the group never did kill David Eger, because he was already dead. Just as they’d hit someone while drunk driving, David had accidentally killed his girlfriend, Susie Willis, in a drunk driving accident, and her father, Ben Willis, killed him as revenge.
Ben was the one the group accidentally hit, and despite how messed up his body looked, he somehow survived and waited a year to seek revenge on the teenagers–not everything in slasher movies makes much sense, but it’s still entertaining! Not only was Ben avenging the teenagers because they nearly killed him, but also because they shared something in common with the man who killed his daughter. His strong motive made up for the fact that we didn’t know who his character was throughout the film, and his big reveal, when Julie jumps on his boat to escape from Ray, was equally exciting.
Why Julie James Is The Perfect Final Girl?
Like Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Scream, Julie is a final girl of the new generation. She’s smarter and quicker and more clever than the women of the 70s and 80s, but she also plays into the tropes. The final girl is often the girl next door and the one viewers resonate with the most. While Julie was involved in the hit and run, she’s the one we have the most sympathy for, especially as we see how badly the event affected her first year in college. When we remeet Barry a year later, he doesn’t have much regret for what he’s done, and while his friends express concern over the threatening note Julie received, he maintains his original stance: they need to move on and pretend it never happened.
While Helen is less unbearable, she’s still the epitome of the popular, mean girl. Julie avoids the unlikable qualities of her friends, making her the one people are rooting for. Jennifer Love Hewitt is also an incredible scream queen, and we hear her scream a lot in I Know What You Did Last Summer. These rules also go for Ray. He survives the film too, and he and Julie end up getting back together in the end, just in time for the cliffhanger ending that suggests Ben still hasn’t died and is coming back to torment the friend group again.
While Ray is pretty suspicious throughout the film and seems like he could be the killer, he turns out to be innocent and lives. Because Ray isn’t like his friends–he’s not rich and he’s a lot nicer than Barry–we have compassion for him, even if he was the one driving the car. After all, Barry was the one standing out of the sunroof and causing a distraction, and the ringleader in convincing everyone to cover up the accidental murder. I Know What You Did Last Summer is not a perfect film, but it is a lot of fun to revisit every summer, and even if the '90s nostalgia can never be recreated, I’m excited to see how the new one holds up.