Zack’s Newsletter: Halloween-Adjacent Edition
I know more than anyone should know about I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
Hey everyone!
Amazon just launched a new series based on the movie that was based on the book I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, so I’m using that as an excuse to share an intro I wrote to a screening of the film at NC State University in 2017. It has facts!
I am also using to try out the footnote thing for Substack, because my references age quickly.
FROM 2017:
I Know What You Did Last Summer Intro
Horror movies – particularly the subgenre known as “Slasher Flicks,” where all you need is a sharp object and some good-looking people to be dismembered by it – often engage their audience with the simple technique of “Don’t!’
Edgar Wright of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and BABY DRIVER even mocked this with a fake trailer in the anthology GRINDHOUSE entitled, simply, “Don’t!” “If you’re thinking of going into this house – Don’t!”
A lot of 1these tropes seem very silly and campy – don’t have sex! Don’t sneak off without telling your parents! Don’t smoke! Don’t party! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!
Part of coming of age is learning the consequences of your actions and the responsibilities that come with making decisions. And sweet lord, did movies, television, and books play a role in making sure that these consequences were taken to their greatest extremes.
Tonight’s cinema is a classic example of “Don’t!” Namely, don’t drink and drive, don’t leave the scene of an accident, don’t try to hide a corpse…well, you’ll see for yourself.
It’s a favorite of DVDs, basic cable, and slumber parties called I Know What You Did Last Summer, which celebrates the 20th anniversary of its release on October 17. Because it came out in the fall. Despite having “Summer” in the title.
And while it was a relatively small little slasher flick, like the party that starts off the film, it had far-ranging consequences that few might have foreseen. Not the least of which was bringing rain slickers in vogue as Halloween costumes.
(Good idea if it’s raining. Not so much literally every other type of Halloween weather)
This is a classic example of slasher flicks and “Don’t!” stories. And while it’s about the far-ranging consequences of impulsive bad decisions, the consequences of this tiny little horror movie based on a tiny little novel had all kinds of consequences of its own, that no one could have anticipated.
The film had its roots in a young adult novel from before they were called “young adult novels” and were shelved with children’s books like Paddington and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and left you traumatized if you flipped through them when you were way too young, hypothetically.
It was one of a number of thrillers by Lois Duncan, who was very good with the whole “Don’t!” type of horror. Her protagonists were often teen girls, usually good people, who got involved in escalating horror because their friends convinced them to prank a hardass English teacher…and he died from a heart attack….or because they had to go into Witness Protection…but snuck back to see their boyfriend…or because their evil cousin tried to steal their life, which wasn’t really their fault2.
The original version of this did not have a killer Gorton’s Fisherman and involved the characters being stalked in the aftermath of hitting a small child at night. The filmmakers noted they changed the story because with killing a kid, “There’s nothing redemptive about that.” KIND OF THE POINT. I drive very slowly through residential neighborhoods because of books like that.
Duncan, who passed away last fall, had a tragic and cruel twist to her own life worthy of her novels – her daughter was killed in a drive-by shooting, something she spent the rest of her life trying to understand. Her last book was nonfiction, entitled simply, “Who Killed My Daughter?” A believer in the paranormal, she wondered if she’d brought this fate on her daughter with the kinds of tales she’d told – her last book had featured a character inspired by her daughter’s personality, who was pursued by a gunman. Whatever the case, she said it was too much for her to inflict tragedy on some new teen protagonist after what had happened in real life3.
In the circumstances of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the film turned out better in many ways4.
First, it was a script by Kevin Williamson, a New Bern native who had helped revitalize the horror genre with the self-aware horror-comedy Scream the previous year. He’d written the script before Scream sold, but that film’s success helped rush I Know What You Did Last Summer into production.
The film was directed by Jim Gillespie, who was hired based on a short he’d done called Joyride, which was included on the DVD for Summe5r. The cinematography was by Denis Crossan, who’d previously directed the video for “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood6, and more recently has worked on TV’s Outlander.
It was the first of Kevin Williamson’s scripts to be filmed in his native NC – though many of the highway scenes were actually filmed in Sonoma County, California. It certainly wasn’t his last production in the state. Around the time this came out, Williamson was in production on the Wilmington-filmed TV series he’d created, Dawson’s Creek7, which in turn provided a major boost to the teen-drama genre, brought more shows such as One Tree Hill to NC subsequently – though we missed out on Williamson’s The Vampire Diaries because Georgia had better tax incentives – and launched the careers of its young stars, including Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams.
The cast of I Know What You Did Last Summer also represented a major group of young up-and-comers who are all still acting today. Jennifer Love Hewitt was already visible on TV’s Party of Five, but this film made her a “Name,” leading to subsequent lead roles in such films as Can’t Hardly Wait and such later TV shows as Ghost Whisperer…and a few others we’ll mention in a moment.
Ryan Phillipe continues to star regularly on TV series – he was just in NC a few years ago with the limited-run show Secrets and Lies, and currently stars in Shooter on the USA Network. In an interview with Good Morning America this past summer…I KNOW8….he talked about how this was a seminal film in his career, and also about getting his rental car stuck in a sand dune when he tried to drive it on the beach. Ah, tourists…
And there’s Johnny Galecki, who at the time was recurring on Roseanne as a bitter townie, a decade before he’d appear on The Big Bang Theory. There’s also Anne Heche, currently on TV’s The Brave9, as the haunted Missy Egan, during the period when she was dating Ellen DeGeneres but before she briefly thought she was in contact with a cosmic being named “Celestia.”10
The two stars for whom this film had the greatest impact, though, were Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr., who met during the filming. Several years later, they started dating, got married, had a few kids, and are still together! And also appeared in a couple of terrible live-action Scooby-Doo films, we won’t talk about those.
Strangely, this had an impact far beyond the film. Gellar was already starring in her iconic TV role as Buffy the Vampire Slayer when this film came out. When she and Prinze married, that show’s creator, Joss Whedon, contacted Marvel Comics about getting as a wedding gift for them the original art from an Avengers comic that had the Hulk going, “HULK WANT FREDDIE PRINZE JR!” (it’s a long story) Marvel, in turn, was interested in working with him. Whedon wound up doing many comics with them…and directing several Avengers movies, which shattered box-office records.
We may well owe the Avengers movies to I Know What You Did Last Summer11.
The film also helped reignite another sub-genre of film – the parody flick. A few years after this film came out, a major box-office hit was Scary Movie, an R-rated parody of horror flicks whose piecemeal plot specifically mocked this one. That film launched the career of Ana Faris, currently on TV’s Mom, whose character in part parodied Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie, complete with multiple knocks at Hewitt’s, um, assets. Hewitt loved the film and actually sent Faris a bunch of roses.
So we also have this film to thank for Scary Movie…and 2, 3, the countless knockoffs, Meet the Spartans….like I said, there were far-reaching consequences.
There were also a few sequels to this, including I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which really should have been “I know what you did two summers ago” if you want to get pedantic about it, and has Jack Black in a small role as a stoned resort guy. There was also also a straight-to-DVD sequel, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, which actually sounds more like a romantic comedy, kind of.
And there are plans for a reboot/reimagining in the next few years, because like in this movie, nothing stays gone forever. Apparently, it’ll invent an entirely new mythology that has nothing to do with the book or the first film, because you can get a lot of mileage out of post-summer blackmail and stalking12.
Ironically, this tale of terrible, terrible consequences for “Don’t!” behavior has…turned out pretty well for many people. The least of which is…people still have a good time watching it.
So sit back for winding roads, yelling at the sky, and the third or fourth most evil fisherman in all of fiction.
And remember…DON’T take your eyes off the road when you drive home afterward.
No real extra content, but Grammerly keeps veering me away from using “a lot of” these days and so I cringe when I see I used that term.
The audience seemed kind of horrified these were actual books for young people, which I found gratifying.
Eerie coincidence: They finally cracked the case a few weeks ago, further inspiring me to write this up.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/murder-lois-duncan-kaitlyn-arquette-1217608/
Duncan herself did not care for it, something I only recently found out. According to a piece on Jezebel: “The young adult author Lois Duncan famously hated the 1997 adaptation of her 1973 novel I Know What You Did Last Summer for commodifying death (her daughter had been murdered eight years before the release of the movie, so this was a particularly personal matter to her). Among her many critiques she shared in the press (in a mini-tour she underwent at the time of the movie’s release in attempt to publicize her daughter’s unsolved murder), she told the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, “There are no parents mourning, no one crying.”
https://jezebel.com/the-gross-hypocrisy-of-halloween-kills-1847862880
Oh wait, found the original interview through another review of the show: https://web.archive.org/web/20160719055942/http://www.absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/lois_duncan.htm
I googled it, but there are a lot of — DAMMIT, I mean, “many” short films by that name and I doubt anyone was going to click anyway.
The college students in the audience showed absolutely no recognition of this band and were very confused when I mentioned it.
See previous note.
I have no idea what I was referring to here. It wasn’t Matt Lauer, because that was the TODAY show. Something controversial happened on GMA in 2017? Let me google “Good Morning America 2017 Controversy”….oh, it was a completely different set of harassment accusations. Wow, showbiz sucks. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/abc-news-stars-get-swept-up-in-lawsuit-fallout
I don’t remember it either.
I realize Heche herself made fun of it by titling her memoir CALL ME CRAZY, but I feel uncomfortable that I used a bout with mental illness as a punchline of sorts there.
And Joss Whedon turned out to be a serial harasser. I remember reading that story about the wedding gift on I think it was Comic Book Resources, but damned if I can find it now in a Google.
Yep, the new Amazon series, which I don’t plan to watch.
Anyway! Hope y'all enjoyed, and may or may not do other Halloween-adjacent stuff closer to Halloween.