God Bless the Youth of America
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Kevin Williamson's 'neo-slasher' teenager
FILM: I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997
WHERE TO WATCH: The ‘Southport Community Theatre,’ at 111 North Howe Street, South Carolina. Steer clear of the balcony.
“They said, ‘All teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me’
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me”
- My Chemical Romance
Ah, to be a teenager in the ‘90s. Rocking a pair of low-rise jeans, a rhinestone-studded arm cuff, and an unironic daisy-chain thumb ring at my seaside high school graduation, nary an iPhone in sight. To run my hands through the globs of hardened gel propelling my boyfriend’s frosted tips far, far away from the gravitational pull of his forehead… to drink straight from the bottle on a moonlit beach… recount folklore around a campfire… mow down a pedestrian on a drunken joy ride along the coast, shove him in my trunk, toss his body off the pier, and make a four-way pact with my pals to never speak of it again…
So begins the “last summer of immature, adolescent decadence” for the characters in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer.
I Know was writer Kevin Williamson’s neo-slasher follow-up to Scream (1996). The film is a much more straightforward slasher approach than Scream (Williamson reportedly wrote I Know first), but the films share a vital quality, something that defines the work of their creator: both movies take teenagers dead seriously.
First, the plot. I Know centers on four characters, each of whom fulfill quintessential slasher film archetypes: Helen Shivers is a bombshell blonde fresh off a beauty pageant win; Barry Cox is Helen’s aggressive jock boyfriend; and nice guy Ray Bronson is the dutiful counterpart to final girl Julie James, the scholarly brunette.
The foursome is celebrating high school graduation with some good ‘ol fashioned reckless driving when Barry drops a bottle of liquor onto driver Ray’s lap, distracting him from the road. “Watch out!” Barry screams from the sunroof as the car rams into a body crossing the otherwise empty roadway. Worried that a pesky manslaughter charge will destroy their bright futures, the group agrees — with hesitancy on Julie’s part — to get rid of the body by dumping it into the harbor. An academic year goes by. Though every character but Barry is plagued with varying levels of guilt, the teens think they have gotten away with it. That is, until someone begins to send the characters a message that says — you guessed it! — “I know what you did last summer!”
Like so many teenage horror victims before them, the young people in I Know face brutal repercussions for the transgressions of their youth. Barry, the least likable, will go first, via a hook to the abdomen. His girlfriend Helen meets a similar fate amidst a pile of discarded tires. And so on. There are other deaths — side characters and bystanders — there are near misses, and then there is the film’s final reveal (calling it a “twist” might be too generous): the pedestrian they hit with the car didn’t die. That means the kids never killed anyone in the first place. Oops!
Poor, guilty Julie would probably find this revelation much more satisfying if all of her friends were alive to hear it.
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I Know What You Did Last Summer is among the first of the “neo-slashers” — a sub-genre that emerged from a swamp of ‘80s and early ‘90s low-budget, high-profit serial killer films, all favoring re-invention over innovation and playing to varying degrees of self-seriousness on the slasher formula established by Halloween. (I’m working off of what I think is a succinct definition of the term by the writers at Horror Homeroom).
Not only is I Know entrenched in a cultural moment, it’s also deeply entrenched in its own genre; part commentary, part homage. It’s one of those movies — and there are plenty in horror — where it’s unclear how seriously we should take the plot. As always, you are free to turn off your brain and enjoy the ride.
Many entries in the slumber-party rotation of horror films from my childhood were of the neo-slasher variety — Final Destination, House of Wax, Wrong Turn, and I Know What You Did Last Summer among them. Becoming a teenager, these horror movies promised, would be thrilling, sexy, and absolutely fucking terrifying.
Similarly, any teenage horror character at the turn of the millennium had to be familiar with the horror films of their adolescence. Our beloved young horror victims could no longer stumble around mindlessly in the wake of a masked killer without precedent. These kids had to at some point acknowledge the deja-vu.
In the late ‘90s/early 2000s, a genre notorious for self indulgence was bumping up against the products of its own design — a media-saturated generation fluent in irony with a penchant for navel-gazing.
Enter Kevin Williamson.
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Williamson — also the voice behind Dawson’s Creek — is one of those screenwriters, like Amy Sherman-Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, or Diablo Cody, whose dialogue is instantly recognizable and carefully constructed, even when it’s layered over by the choices of studio executives. (“That, I think, is something all writers should strive to do, is make the script the star of the movie,” Williamson once told A.frame.)
Where so many films feature characters written by people who appear to have never met a teenager (lookin’ at you, Rob Zombie), Williamson’s adolescent victims feel possible. They speak in quippy, relevant pop culture references and innuendo — not as unbelievably clever as Rory Gilmore, not as hyperbolically vapid as Paris Hilton in 2005’s House of Wax.
“‘Is this really how kids talk?’ That was the question,” writes Frederick James about Dawson’s Creek. “It’s a question that missed the beauty in the point: that however kids talked, the show refused to talk down to them.”
Williamson’s teenagers are sex-obsessed, sure, but they are also concerned with broader realities. They aspire to go to law school and become respected artists; they feel guilt and shame; they look out for each other (when they’re not offing each other). The boys are caught between their desire to see boobs and their understanding that such a desire is, like, so cliche. The girls are products of the third wave and will be part of the fourth, contemporaries of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ally McBeal, sometimes accepting of and at other times quick to invert their role as stereotypes.
“Hey, it’s all about the hair. Don’t you forget that,” I Know’s Helen Shivers tells Julie. “Especially when you become some big hotshot lawyer. Those professional women types think it’s all about brains and ability and completely ignore the ‘do.’”
It isn’t just the dialogue that’s self-aware in Williamson’s “neo-slashers” and those it inspired.
In Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the like, the bad guys are superhuman. They are folkloric, like the hook-handed man the protagonists swap stories about in I Know What You Did Last Summer. These boogeymen might have had reasons to kill originally, but those reasons blur over time. Eventually, their vengeance is distilled into the driving force of their lives. They kill because they are killers.
In Williamson’s plots — and those of many of his contemporaries — the killers are not boogeymen, but actual people. And not just people, but young people! (Note: Williamson did not write I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer). Williamson’s teenagers are frequently direct and indirect murderers. In I Know, Barry Cox is the reason for the initial car crash and the person who convinces his friends to hide the body. He also has reason to believe the car crash victim is alive, but chooses to leave his body in the water anyway.
The Scream protagonists are ‘90s kids in upper-middle class suburbia and their dialogue is peppered with the appropriate film references. Both of the teenage murderers are well versed in the cinematic psychopaths who precede them, referencing Norman Bates and Hannibal Lector as they go in for their final kill.
Last century’s slashers feature teenagers who are the unwitting victims of cultural brutality. In the 2000s, teenagers are the products of that brutality. They’ve watched too many movies, and, for better or worse, they’ve taken notes.
“Scream shows us is that the post-1990s generation—the media generation—lives in a world in which ‘reality’ has profoundly changed,” writes Dawn Keetley, “in which the boundaries between what happens in real life and what happens in the mediated world are increasingly blurred.”
BILLY
Maybe your movie-freaked mind lost its reality button?
RANDY
You're absolutely right. I'm the first to admit it. If this were a scary movie, I'd be the prime suspect.
STU
And what would be your motive?
RANDY
It's the millennium — motives are incidental.
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Historically, horror is obsessed with killing teenagers. Maybe audiences want to watch them be punished for their youth and sexuality by the dictates of some “deeply ingrained puritanical moralism.” Maybe we just want to watch them. Maybe it’s some other third thing, that teenagers are the most likely victims of cinematic brutality because they are old enough to act on their own free will but young enough to walk directly into trouble without seeing the red flags.
Not the youth of the new millennium. We’re pretty sure we invented the term red flag. If anyone is going to do us in, it’s each other.
Neo-slasher teenagers are dead set on determining their own fate. They don’t sin out of pure negligence or sexual desire. In I Know, the teens make the decision to cover up a horrific crime. In Jennifer’s Body, not only is Megan Fox’s character a cannibalizing murderer, but the people who made her into such a creature are also 20-somethings, hell bent on becoming famous. In Scream, the teenage killers kill each other.
I would wager that we are in the midst of yet another slasher revival — complete with Scream reboots and an I Know What You Did Last Summer T.V. show — another opportunity to twist the knife in a genre that loves to see teenagers murdered and murdering. Like all writers before them, new writers will have to consider the impact of the last 25 years on this generation of American youth.
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022), a take on a campy slasher that seems to draw inspiration from Scream, does this well. Thanks to writer Sarah DeLappe and help from Kristen Roupenian of ‘Cat Person’ acclaim, the dialogue has the same believable witty edge as Scream and I Know. DeLappe shares Williamson’s ability to wrap up the sincerity and absurdity of the culture — the right now — into a few snarky lines delivered by a young person just before she’s pushed off a balcony. '
Everyone seems to know too much and nothing at all.
“The culture of young people has shifted a lot because of the amount of media that we grow up with,” Bodies, Bodies, Bodies star Amanda Stenberg told Complex, “the amount of self-branding and self-awareness that is almost forced upon us from a very young age.”
[SPOILER] Bodies features no murderer — no indiscriminate evil. Instead, the young people kill each other off one-by-one, each time thinking they are protecting themselves from what they know must be true, has to be true, based on what they’ve seen in the movies.
New slasher writers should take note: Gen Z isn’t going to hide in the closet when they hear a bump in the night. They’re going to burn down the whole house and everyone in it.
Come to think of it, it’s kind of like that Spiderman meme.
Recommended Reads:
The Posthuman Monster of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) by Dawn Keetly
Slasher Movie Tropes: Why Horny Teens Die and Final Girls Stay Alive by Corey Callahan
Amandla, Amandla, Amandla: The Bodies Bodies Bodies star is already living in the future (Amandla Stenberg in conversation with Hunter Schafer)