I remember seeing I Know What You Did Last Summer in the theaters back in October of 1997. We were very underage with no adult to accompany us, so we bought tickets to In & Out and snuck into the theater. When it was released to rent on VHS, we picked it up, stuck it in the camcorder hooked up to the VCR and made ourselves a little copy. Of course that was wrong, but I was thirteen years old and stupid.
I have seen the film more times than I can count. I am able to quote it word for word, which does make me slightly pathetic but I did catch quite the vocabulary from Kevin Williamson’s need to make high school students sound much smarter than they are.
The basic gist of the movie is that four high school seniors celebrating after a local pageant win, hit a man in the middle of the road with their car. As one of them was drinking and the alcohol is all over the car, they foolishly decide to dump the body instead of taking the consequences. A year later, they start to receive messages from someone who knows what they did that night. When they begin to be chased and attacked by a man with a hook for a hand, they scramble to figure out his identity before he kills them all.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is responsible for the expanded careers of Freddy Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar. It is also responsible for my Sarah Michelle Gellar/Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession.
I had an SMG bedroom complete with posters, magazine cutouts, board games, coffee mugs, magazines, comic books, action figures, movies…you name it, and I probably had it with her face on it. I was so obsessed, in fact, that I received a call from MTV’s Fanatic to be interviewed for the possibility of meeting her on their show. I ended up losing to a girl who threw birthday parties for SMG at her school, which I was okay with because I wasn’t willing to be THAT weird. That’s a step away from collecting her used tissues and discarded hair.
I still have my I Know What You Did Last Summer soundtrack and poster and I recently took a trip to Southport with a friend to visit the shooting locations. Now, I will admit that it’s a cheesy teen horror flick but it’s just so damn fun and certain a Halloween staple.
