I Know What You Did Last Summer Movie Trailer. Today, telling somebody “I know what you did last summer”, and meaning it as a threat just wouldn’t fly. Everybody knows what you did last summer – it’s all over Facebook and Twitter, there are probably a thousand selfies on Instagram of you holding a cocktail the colours of a sunset, and a Vine video you took from a plane window. Back in the GeoCities land of 1997 though, things were different; it was almost possible to keep things private. Almost.
I first saw IKWYDLS a couple of years after its release, when I picked it up as part of a Blockbusters offer: four ex-rental DVDs for £20. I was into being spooked: I had snuck in, under-age, at the cinema to see the remake of The Haunting (in which Owen Wilson gets decapitated in a fireplace), and was obsessed with The Craft. I was also madly in love with Ryan Phillippe after seeing Cruel Intentions, which remains a favourite film, and which, during this period of time, I was watching approximately five times a week on VHS.
IKWYDLS comes from the same self-aware, witty, slasher-horror school as Scream, and was penned by the same writer, Kevin Williamson. The plot, loosely based on a 1973 novel, which in turn is based on a traditional American urban myth, concerns four best friends who have graduated high school in their small North Carolina fishing village, and are about to go their separate ways to college.
There is the buff, handsome, quarterback, who is called – wait for it – Barry, played by Phillippe, and his beauty-pageant girlfriend, Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar). There is intelligent, introverted Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and her boyfriend Ray, the working-class, wannabe writer (Freddie Prinze Jr).
The film opens with a swooping tracking shot across dark waters with darker rock music. Roger Ebert called this the best shot of the film, and it may well be – it’s an awesome shot. It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and our two couples are boozing on the beach, and telling the story of the Hookman around a camp fire. One drink-driving episode later, and the tyres of Barry’s BMW are drawing circles on a cliff-top road and the foursome are searching for whatever just made a crater in the windscreen. They hope it’s a deer – everybody in horror films who hits something with their car hopes it is a deer. Then they find a welly, and deer don’t wear wellies. Then, they find a man.
They dump the body in the sea, and manage to keep schtum. A year later and Julie, back from college for the summer, discovers an anonymous note informing her that someone saw what happened that night. Maybe a deer. We already know that Julie has been racked with guilt, because she has stopped washing her hair. Helen quit New York and is working with her bratty sister in their father’s shop. Ray followed his dad’s fisherman roots and has stayed put. Barry doesn’t really give a damn.
The rest of the film is a race against time for the four to find the person who sent the note, because in the meantime he or she is trying desperately to murder them under a disguise of sinister rain slicker and waterproof bucket hat (this is a fishing village, remember). The killer’s weapon of choice is a massive hook, echoing the urban myth told at the beginning. There’s also something a bit fishy about the person they killed.
IKWYDL received mixed reviews when it came out, mostly because people said it wasn’t as good as Scream. But what is? The script however, is just as sparkling, and the characters are brilliantly and authentically played by the four actors who were key members of the late 90s brat-pack.
There are other reasons why I like this film: the great use of light (torches, spotlights, gym strip lighting, car headlights); the memorable scenes (a particularly good one features Julie wading through an ice store like a kid in a ball pit, stumbling across bodies every so often). Then there was the fact that it was set in a place called Southport, and my grandparents were from a place called Southport. This made me think there was, perhaps, a British equivalent fisherman killer, roaming around in a bobbling Regatta fleece, carrying a Mac-in-a-Sac and a Tupperware box full of maggots.
Sure, this film is very, very 90s. You can’t get much more 90s than the sartorial co-stars here: dungarees, hairbands, crop-tops and pumps. Or the Kula Shaker song Hush, which leads an excellent soundtrack mixing contemporary hits with rockabilly and blues classics (My Baby’s Got the Strangest Ways, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?) and original, eerie string compositions from John Debney. Other elements have stood the test of time.
The line about aspiring writer Ray: “We can’t all sit in a [New York] Village coffee house and ramble esoterically on a laptop”, could have come straight from Lena Dunham’s Girls. And Julie is ahead of fourth-wave feminism by a decade: “The hook is really a phallic symbol, ultimately castrated.”
It’s a shame that, as with Cruel Intentions, IKWYD’s legacy has been tarnished by two godawful sequels. It also inspired a large chunk of the first Scary Movie parody, which is brilliant, but which itself has spawned approximately 5,000 godawful sequels. But, hey, sometimes cool parents have horrible kids.
If you’re after a fun, genuinely scary example of 90s slasher film tropes – slow-walking murderer, brutal killings in carnivals or parties – which may also have been the original source for the “soon” internet meme, and you’re willing to make a trade-off: smart lines for a plot which tails off slightly towards the end, then you could do worse than IKWYDL. Oh, and Ryan Phillippe spends a lot of time in a towel.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Directed by: Jim Gillespie
Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anne Heche, Ryan Phillippe, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Johnny Galecki, Freddie Prinze Jr., Deborah Hobart
Screenplay by: Kevin Williamson
Production Design by: Gary Wissner
Cinematography by: Denis Crossan
Film Editing by: Steve Mirkovich
Costume Design by: Catherine Adair
Set Decoration by: James Edward Ferrell Jr.
Art Direction by: John J. Rutchland
Music by: John Debney
MPAA Rating: R for strong horror violence and language.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: October 17, 1997
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