I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER 1997
42%
Directed by Jim Gillespie
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe
Synopsis
Four friends run down a mystery man on a road just outside their hometown and decide to dump him in the ocean instead of report the incident to the police. A year later, a mystery figure with a fondness for slickers and hooks shows up in their lives—and bedrooms, and locker rooms—to inform them that he knows their big secret.
Why We Love It
The problem for I Know What You Did Last Summer was that everyone—fans and critics alike—knew what writer Kevin Williamson had done the previous winter.
In December of 1996, almost a year before I Know was released, the Williamson-penned Scream, directed by genre master Wes Craven, had been a major horror hit—one of the decade’s precious few. Critics loved that movie’s super-meta take on a genre many of them reviled: loved that the kids in Ghostface’s sites were wise-cracking horror-loving smartasses; loved the audacity of snuffing out big-name-star Drew Barrymore in the first ten minutes. Williamson was horror’s Next Big Thing in 1996, and his follow-up film was always going to come splattered with high expectations: what would the guy who just revived the slasher genre do next?
When the answer turned out to be a conventional, almost irony-free slasher flick—the exact kind of movie he had just skewered—most critics shrugged it off as a disappointing sophomore slump. Fans, though, loved what they saw.
It had been a long time since Hollywood delivered an effective slasher aimed squarely at the teenage set, and, viewed away from the shadow of its overachieving older cousin, I Know gets the job done. The Christopher Pike–style plot is just a flimsy string on which to hang some gleefully tense set pieces, the best of which sees Sarah Michelle Gellar’s beauty queen, Helen Shivers, chased through what feels like every corner of the North Carolina fishing town in which the film is set. A scene in which the killer, shrouded under a plastic sheet, waits in perfect stillness for his chance to leap out at her is among the 1990s’ most effective jump scares—seriously, put down your drink the moment Helen’s clumsy-handed sister lets her in the shop.
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Gellar emerged from I Know as bona fide scream queens, and rightfully so; Hewitt’s “What are you waiting for?” moment, in which she twirls around in a suburban street and screams pointlessly at the sky, has been heavily—and affectionately—parodied, and Gellar would go on to star in TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream 2, and the US remake of The Grudge.
The movie falters mostly when it tries too hard to echo Scream; the whodunnit elements and bubbles of overly self-aware dialogue feel like they belong in a different and maybe more ambitious film. When Williamson and Gillespie pile on the violent hookings and double down on their eighties slasher vibe, however, I Know makes a killer case for repeat Halloween viewings.