
Someone once said that I Know What You Did Last Summer walked so Scream could run — and that’s not exactly a lie. They were being worked on alongside one another by scribe Kevin Williamson, who went on to perfect his paranoid slasher formula with the Ghostface vehicle that became a classic of not just the genre but cinema in general, when it dropped in 1996 — one year before IKWYDLS. That being said, with writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s reboot of the classic summer slasher, it feels as though Scream — the requel, that is — walked so I Know What You Did could run.
The new I Know What You Did treads a similar trail to the original, of course, as all self-respecting reboots do. Years after the 1997 tragedy that slaughtered Helen Shivers and Barry Cox, a night of fireworks and fun goes wrong for a group of five best friends from Southport who become embroiled in an innocent death. A year after they make a pact to keep their involvement secret, they realize there’s no erasing the past when someone starts hunting them — someone who resembles the original 1997 murderer, slicker and hook and all.