Replication is the name of the game when it comes to horror. It’s so hard to scare people…genuinely scare them, that if an idea works once, its creators have little choice but to try it again. That’s how you get a movie landscape dominated by sequels, reboots, and remakes like Halloween Kills, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Even with the knowledge that horror franchises are self-perpetuating machines, however, there’s one horror imprint whose continued existence is rather surprising. I won’t spoil this nearly 50-year-old book (that we bizarrely had to read in my middle school) but suffice it to say, what follows isn’t the same supernatural thriller that the movie’s direction takes. The person who knows what the kids did last summer is not a vengeful shade but rather a flesh and blood person. Contrast this with the 1997 film, in which a group of teens (featuring an absolute murderer’s row of young talent like Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillippe) accidentally kills a fisherman. That dead fisherman, adorned in a rain poncho and a hook-hand, then returns from the grave to wreak vengeance. For those keeping score, that gives us three different I Know What You Did Last Summer “universes” that all operate under different rules of the supernatural. With that in mind, why continue to bring this franchise back from the dead again and again across multiple generations? Couldn’t an I Know What You Did Last Summer-like story be told without that particular name? To that I say….probably not! The real secret of the success of I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is in its name itself. Though the story may subtly change throughout the years and its teenangers get updated to resemble its respective era’s young people, that truly awesome name is the glue that holds the whole thing together. We tend to underrate titles when it comes to assessing how effective any given work of art is. In a cultural landscape where many people don’t read beyond the headline, we really shouldn’t. Names are important and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is the platonic ideal for a horror/thriller project. The sensations that it induces – those of guilt, foreboding, and unease – is immediately identifiable to young people who traditionally spend their summers doing a whole host of things they wouldn’t want strangers to know about. If I received a note in the mail tomorrow that read “I know what you did last summer,” I would immediately be on edge, despite having done nothing objectionable last summer (that I can recall). Far be it from me to discourage storytellers to shy away from depicting teenagers as the hormonal little monsters they are, but there’s a balance to be struck. In one baffling instance, Allison has the severed head of her dead friend fall onto her windshield like hail. She then rushes home to confront her father – not about the trauma she just witnessed mind you, but instead the trauma of having to see him engage in consensual sex with his girlfriend in a leaked sex tape.
