I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 27

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Always use caution when crossing the road. Also please don’t drink and drive. Finally, do not dispose of corpses without first making sure they’re dead.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a standard slasher flick that utilizes known actors in a slightly different premise than seen before. It’s not horrible, but also is not extremely memorable either, other than having a number of young adults make horribly bad decisions.

Before Viewing

The trailer features four friends having a bonfire on the beach and telling scary stories. On their way home they are driving recklessly and hit and kill a pedestrian. Rather than report it to the authorities, they dump the body in the water and go on with their lives. The next summer they begin getting mysterious notes as someone begins stalking them. Soon we will all know what they did last summer!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

On the 4th of July in Southport, North Carolina, four students enjoy the end of their high school lives while partying on a beach. Two couples, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) & Max (Freddie Prinze Jr) and Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) & Barry (Ryan Phillippe), enjoy drinks and making love before getting back into their car to head for town. Barry is too drunk to drive his own car, so Max takes the wheel. On the twisty, hilly road Barry spills a bottle of alcohol on Max and while he is distracted, accidentally hits a pedestrian. They cannot identify the man, as his face is too bloody. The friends argue about what to do with the body, narrowly avoiding having it seen by Max (Johnny Galecki) as he drives by. They decide to dump the body into the water after Barry convinces them they will all fry for this. Julie has some difficulties with the plan, but Barry threatens her, and the group agrees to never discuss this again.

One year later, Julie is finishing up a summer term at college, having done poorly that year. When she returns home, her mother provides her a note that arrives simply stating “I know what you did last summer.” Showing this note to Barry and Helen, who are back in town, yields few results. Barry believes it to be Max trying to scare them, so he threatens the dock worker. After Barry leaves, a fisherman dressed in a slicker and hat shows up with an ice hook and murders Max. A short while later Barry has his jacket stolen from the gym and is attacked by the same person outside. He is hit with his own car, threatened by the fisherman and hospitalized. Later, at the hospital, Julie suggests they look for more information on David Egan, the name of the man they hit.

An online search reveals that a year prior to the accident with the teens, David lost his girlfriend in a similar accident in the same place. Julie and Helen decide to look up David’s sister, Melissa (Anne Heche). At her house they two see a similar slicker hanging from a hook. Melissa believes that David wanted to die and committed suicide, but gives them the name of “Billy Blue,” a friend of David’s that visited after his death. That evening the fisherman sneaks into Helen’s house. When the beauty queen awakens the next morning, she finds her hair has been butchered, and a note on her mirror says “soon.” Driving to her house Julie hears something in her trunk. When she opens it she discovers Max’s dead body swarming with crabs. Bringing Helen and Barry to show them, the trunk is now empty.

Barry believes that it is now Ray behind the whole affair. No one has seen much of him now that he works as a fisherman on the docks. Realizing that may not be the case, they decide to trap the killer at the 4th of July parade the next day. Helen is the reigning queen and needs to take part in the festivities, so Barry acts as a lookout. He chases several men in slickers but none of them appear to be the killer. Meanwhile, Julie returns to Melissa’s house for more information, getting a creepy vibe from the sister. That is, until she presents a suicide note left by her brother that says “I will never forget last summer,” in the same script as Julie’s note. It is then that Julie realizes they didn’t hit David, but someone else.

At the beauty pageant, Barry is attacked and killed in the gallery by the fisherman. Helen sees something happening but when she finally convinces a police officer of the danger, neither can find anything. The officer drives her home, mocking her jitteriness. He is forced to take a detour into an alley where the fisherman attacks and kills him. Helen escapes and runs into her family store, trying to hysterically explain to her sister, Elsa (Bridgette Wilson), that they’re not safe. Elsa is soon killed as well, and Hellen jumps from a second-story window to escape. As she is about to exit the alley into the parade, the fisherman jumps her and kills her, as fireworks go off in the background.

Julie drives to the dock to tell Ray that she thinks Ben Willis (Muse Watson), brother to David’s fiancée, killed David and was the one they hit. She notices the name of Ray’s boat, “Billy Blue,” which freaks her out thinking he’s part of this. As she runs from Ray, a local tells her to get on his boat. The man turns out to be Willis and stalks Julie. Ray takes a small motorboat towards Willis’ boat. If Julie had any questions about Willis’ guilt, they are soon answered when she sees photos of her and her friends by his workstation and discovers Helen and Barry’s bodies in the hold. Ray manages to tangle Willis in some rigging which rips his right hand off before throwing him into the ocean. Back on shore Julie and Ray explain to the police they have no idea why this man wanted to kill them. They reconnect and kiss. One year later at Julie’s school she discovers the words “I still know” written on the steamy mirror, just before a figure crashes through the glass. Cut to black.

“I’m not interested in what’s right anymore, Ray. I wanna do what’s smart.” – Julie

I Know What You Did Last Summer is to Scream, what True Romance is to Reservoir Dogs. Did you follow that analogy? After the success of Quentin Tarantino’s debut, Reservoir Dogs, which he also wrote, studios were anxious to find other work by him. That’s when a script written prior to Dogs was produced, called True Romance. The same thing happened here. Kevin Williamson hit it big writing Wes Craven’s Scream, so studios were eager to find something else from him and discovered the previously written I Know What You Did Last Summer. This film had some similarities to that previous hit, including the disguised killer and plenty of red herrings, but Last Summer included a much smaller cast and not the same level of ingenuity that Scream displayed.

For the most part, I Know What You Did Last Summer focuses on utilizing a group of famous actors as a series of friends that end up making a very stupid, and costly, mistake. The cast were mostly made up of famous young actors. Hewitt was known for her role as the older sister Sarah on the youth drama Party of Five. Gellar had just started her role as Buffy Summers, the teenage vampire killer, in the hit show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Phillippe had made several movies, as well as had an extended role on the soap opera One Life To Live. Prinze had a few TV guest starring roles under his belt, but was mainly known as the son of Chico and The Man star Freddie Prinze. Together they made for a strong ensemble of young actors, but maybe not ones that would get involved in a plot such as this one. Directing them was Jim Gillespie, who made his feature debut with this film, after directing episodes of several shows in the UK in the prior years. He would go on to do a couple more films, including the 2005 horror film Venom, not to be confused with the Marvel superhero film of the same name.

In the same way that Scream makes use of and parodies conventional tropes of horror films, Last Summer does something similar with urban legends. The film opens with the kids sitting around a campfire on the beach telling, and discussing, variations of an urban legend called “The Hook.” The story is very much like they tell it: an escaped lunatic with a hook for a right hand is seen in the area of lover’s lane, the girl hears the news report on the radio and gets spooked and wants to leave so the boyfriend peels out, when they get to her house, there’s a bloody hook on the passenger side door handle. The others interrupt this story to mention variations of the story which include the lunatic having killed the boyfriend (when he goes to pee) and banging his head on the roof, or one where the boyfriend is hung from a branch above the car, with his feet (or fingers) scritching on the roof. It’s a popular enough legend having made its way into the camp comedy Meatballs, horror films He Knows You’re Alone, Final Exam and the 1997 anthology Campfire Tales (which opens with a segment about “The Hook”). Even the first film reviewed this year, Night of the Creeps has an homage to this with the escaped lunatic (but with an axe).

Of course Julie then reminds her friends (and the audience) that “it’s a fictional story created to warn young girls of the dangers of having premarital sex,” which it, and all other slasher films (this one included) are. And writer Williamson uses this film in a similar way. Rather than a puritanical diatribe against premarital sex, the film shows the real, and often heightened, consequences of bad choices. Choosing to drink and drive, which the characters do make a smart choice about, can lead to lasting repercussions. But so too can assuming that nobody will believe Ray was driving Barry’s car. And then choosing to lie about hitting someone. And even going as far to dispose of the body without ensuring that the person was actually dead. The fisherman coming back to haunt the kids with his bloody hook, is just an external manifestation of the anxiety all the characters experience in the film. Julie, being the protagonist that drives the events of the film forward appears to be the moral center of this anxiety, as it reflects on her schooling and general demeanor the most.

Much like Friday the 13th, the film has the audience constantly questioning which of the characters might be the killer. And also like that film, it introduces a new character in the final act who turns out to be the killer. Some people may find this a cheap ploy, and in some ways it is. But especially by now, horror audiences need to realize that filmmakers often withhold plenty of information about characters or plot points in their films to purposefully mislead. If anyone wants to be angry with anything about this film, it should be with the way these kids listen to Barry and agree with his drunken assessment of the situation. There certainly would have been repercussions to their underage drinking, but whatever the case they would all still be alive years later. Of course, without that momentary weakness of character, the film would not have been the morality tale it became, so there’s that.

Of the cast, Gellar followed this film immediately with Scream 2, and later two of The Grudge films. She also appeared in two live action Scooby-Doo films with her husband Freddie Prinze, Jr. Prinze and Hewitt also appeared in the direct sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. This film was popular enough film to warrant two sequels, a recent television series (which only lasted 8 episodes before being canceled), and was the inspiration, in part, for the plot in the original Scary Movie and the comedy spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, both from 2000. Elements of the film are still relevant such as the perils of alcohol, or being a good and ethical person. But there are moments such as the late 90s use of an internet search engine that feel horrendously dated. Overall I Know What You Did Last Summer is a fun film and one of the only horror films to take place over the July 4th holiday.

Assorted Musings

• Dawson’s Beach, where the kids have their first bonfire, was named after Dawson’s Creek, a teen soap opera which Kevin Williamson worked on.
• The opening song, which plays over the credits,  is a minor key version of Summer Breeze, originally by Seals and Crofts.
• One obvious goof in the film comes after Julie finds dead Max in her trunk, swarming with crabs. When she shows her friends moments later there’s no body (presumably removed by Willis to mess with her), but also no sign of wet, dead bodies or dozens of crabs.