What are we really rebooting, anyway? Is it I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) or is it Scream (2022)? It’s both, of course, but the end product is a hollowed out version of either option, because those are different things. The original Scream (1996), after all, was written by Kevin Williamson, who also wrote the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, and so, the franchises are intrinsically intertwined, and that the new entry here reflects the new legacy reboots of Scream, is just time playing out in flat circles.
If Scream is a send-up of movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, ideally then, I Know What You Did Last Summer gets to be more specifically the movie that is being sent up. That’s not the case now, as the new legacy sequels are tone-matched and not just aesthetic bedfellows of the MTVization of ‘90s horror.
For the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, Kevin Williamson adapted the 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan, who famously hated the movie — her book was a moral tale about guilt and direct consequences, and her own daughter was tragically murdered in 1989 — as the movie glorified its violence as a market-driven slasher. What Williamson brought to the story was his background in a North Carolina fishing village (the filming coincided with his other project at the time, Dawson’s Creek, 1998), and the Fisherman killer, which he drew from a backyard movie he worked on when he was younger.
The original I Know What You Did Last Summer, then, was already an unseemly adaptation of a thing it no longer represented in spirit. And so, this many years later, the new movie revisiting those themes, but bending them away from the ‘90s televisual format, loses further meaning.
The film is still anchored by a good killer concept. The Fisherman, donned in all black, with a thick rain slicker, sou’wester fishing hat, and gaff hook, remains a figure of imposing maritime dread, a darkened silhouette of anonymity that haunts teens for their dumb exploits with the iconography of trade labor costuming. This all still applies, the new costume is great, and the moments of horror, drawn away from everything else, are efficient and built around the concepts of the original film.
The plot devices are exactly the same. Except, they are thudding in their exposition now. Characters just say what’s happened, what’s happening, and why. Mostly everything is revealed through obvious dialogue that feels inhuman and disconnected from the experience of its characters. There’s a lifelessness to the storytelling now, which the reboot tries to make up for by shoehorning jokes and gags in, once again following Scream, but this is not a metatextual examination of horror with something else to say. The fleeting quips are the point, they do not mean anything else.
And so it goes. There’s a new cast, who are not very well-matched chemistry wise (again, consider that the impetus of the original is aligned with Dawson’s Creek, the actors (like Scream, were drawn from TV shows of the time), and that bridging the gap between television and horror was its purpose). Naturally, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return for major roles in the new movie, as veterans who’ve been here before, accompanying the new cast with acting and series credibility.
I Know What You Did Last Summer may have still had some ink in the well. There are moments wherein the return feels like a return to the original’s ‘90s coastal horror appeal, but whereas other recent franchise returns have found some new value in the series, by shifting I Know What You Did Last Summer towards the same market, it’s not just lost much of its original value, but also does not especially find anything new to say.