Rushed into production after the surprise success of 1996’s Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer has forever lived, and suffered, in the same bracket. Sure it’s another slasher with another cast of unblemished faces and sure it’s also written by Kevin Williamson but it’s always been a far simpler, straighter, sillier film. Scream was trying to reinvent the wheel while I Know What You Did Last Summer was just trying to keep it going.
As a franchise, it then quickly became the very thing Williamson was poking fun at in the first place with a rubbishy Bahamas-set sequel (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer!) and, at the time, an inevitable, tossed off, straight-to-video follow-up (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer!). People quickly gave up caring what anyone had been up to during any summer on record and as the subgenre died, it wisely followed. But as Hollywood continues to fixate on millennial nostalgia, history is repeating itself as a revival of Scream (with two new films both hitting bigger than expected and a third on the way) is now being followed by a return for the fisherman, still thrashing away in the shadow of Ghostface, grunting dumbly while his predecessor delivers a self-satisfied lecture on the state of genre film-making (like Scream, there was also a limp TV resurrection that’s best ignored).
