‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Is a Worse Version of Another 1990s Horror Movie

One of the most well-remembered horror movies of the 1990s is I Know What You Did Last Summer. The movie is just a lesser version of a horror classic that came out the year before. That doesn’t necessarily make I Know What Did Last Summer a lousy movie, but it does mean it doesn’t deserve respect as a work of art. Sadly, the making of I Know What You Did Last Summer was a lot worse than the film itself.

‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ is nothing compared to 1 horror film by the same writer

Many hit movies combine the old and the new for mass appeal. I Know What You Did Last Summer fuses a 1980s whodunit slasher plot that would have been familiar by the film’s release in 1997 with some of the dialogue that passed for being “hip” in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It’s fine but it’s nothing compared to a previous film written by Kevin Williamson: Scream.

Scream is also a whodunit teen horror film that combines a 1980s storyline with the sensibilities of 1990s youth. The difference is that Scream is actually funny and scary and has a clever twist. Meanwhile, I Know What You Did Last Summer has a nice title and a collection of rock songs that nobody remembers.

The film could have done so much for horror

Unless you are nostalgic for the year 1997, there is no reason to seek out I Know What You Did Last Summer. Just watch a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to get your Sarah Michelle Gellar fix. Heck, the Scooby-Doo movies are scarier than I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The worst part of the film is that it could have helped restart the slasher trend after Scream‘s success. Instead, it made it clear that Scream was a fluke. While the 1980s gave us several slasher classics, the late 1990s gave us a lot of disposable horror.

Making ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ was an emotional nightmare

One of the stars of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Freddie Prinze Jr., revealed that shooting the film was a nightmare. During a 2023 TooFab podcast, the actor said that I Know What You Did Last Summer director Jim Gillespie hated his guts.

“I’ll give the man this, I think his name is Jim, he made no bones about it,” Prinze Jr. said. “There was no passive aggressiveness — which I hate — he was very direct in the fact that, ‘I don’t want you in this movie.’ So when that’s your first job and you hear those words, it just wrecks you, man. It just wrecks you.” Prinze Jr. said Gillespie told him “don’t leave your mouth open [because] you look stupid when you do that.”

Prinze Jr. almost quite the film because he couldn’t get along with Gillespie. “It was a struggle to finish work every day,” the star recalled. “I was in pain every single day on that movie. However, it prepared me for this business in a way. I’m forever grateful to Jim for being such an asshole because I’ve never met one like that since … no other director I’ve met felt crossing those lines would be OK. I’ve been prepared for every lesser A-hole in the business.”

I Know What You Did Last Summer was bad in more ways than one.