Sharing the exact title as the 1997 original, the 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer (hereinafter mentioned as IKWYDLS) introduces a new generation of characters (a crop of blemish-free hot young bods) and mixes them up with some old ones (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddy Prinze Jr). Director Jennifer Katyn Robinson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, clearly enjoys fusing ’90s nostalgia with a large dose of self-directed satire.
The question is: in an age of nostalgia overload, does anyone care?
The original is an adaptation of a 1973 thriller novel for young adults by Lois Duncan, who incidentally was "appalled" that her story was turned into a slasher film (as stated in a 2002 interview).
Sure, it’s an era of the requel (love child of a reboot and a sequel), a term popularised by a cast member of the 2022 version of Scream (the fifth in the series, also called Scream). But for a true requel, it’s not enough to just do a new take on an old movie; you have to incorporate the original continuity, and, if you can, bring back the stars. This balance of nostalgia and freshness is not easy to pull off. But then, no one seems to be complaining. Although it’s always nice to see Love Hewitt again—her Julie James, now a professor, is here to illuminate us on how “trauma changes the brain.” But even Julie James proclaims, “Nostalgia is overrated.”
Clearly, the 2025 IKWYDLS is inspired by the Scream revival and riding the wave, just as it did in 1997, a year after the original Scream’s release and its monumental success (Kevin Williamson wrote both the original versions).
In the years that followed, while Scream was trying to reinvent the wheel with its sequels since its release, IKWYDLS was just trying to keep it going. Sure, IKWYDLS has always been a far simpler, sillier film—at best, a footnote to its more culturally superior muse.
The 1997 version had a group of teens in an atmospheric fishing town called Southport being hunted down by a psychotic, hook-flashing fisherman, the summer after they unwittingly ran over a mysterious pedestrian and secretly dumped the body. While it wasn’t a great movie (or trying to be one), it was watchable for its mood and setting and the genuine sense of guilt that seemed to loom over these teens (though they were not convincing as victims).
At the time, the slasher-movie genre was already three decades old and everything that possibly could be done had been done. Perhaps IKWYDLS was an attempt by the slasher genre to evolve into a slightly edgy consumer product, worthy of merch maybe? What set the 1997 version apart was that it was a gory version of a glossy Hollywood youth flick, featuring ‘It-girls’ Sarah Michelle Gellar and Love Hewitt alongside Ryan Phillippe, and Freddy Prinze Jr.
For those who came in late, this is the fourth requel of IKWYDLS (if you count the cancelled single season series called IKWYDLS on Prime Video in 2021). The others were I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) and the forgettable I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006). As the century turned, people quickly gave up caring what anyone had been up to during any summer and moved on to other things. And just as we thought the subgenre had died, it was excavated.
Why even bother with a requel to a slasher that was, at best, an afterthought in its genre? Gen Z is not clamoring for nostalgia—definitely not from the 90s—or is even mildly curious. As for Generation Alpha, it doesn’t remotely know what we are talking about. But millennials, who were coming of age when IKWYDLS and Scream were released, love going back to it. May be the knowing that "everything is as is" is reassuring.
In 1997, when IKWYDLS was released, it was already 25 years too late in the slasher genre. Since the early 70s, there had been a surge of horror movies, some of them truly brilliant: The Last House on the Left (1972), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Halloween (1978), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills have Eyes (1977), When a Stranger Calls (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)…to name just a few. Several of these were served up rebooted in later years.
Scream, one of the highest-grossing films of 1996 became the most popular slasher film in the world—an honor it held, until it was surpassed by 2018's Halloween, a sequel to the 1978 Halloween (the 11th in the series). Halloween had clearly revitalised the whole franchise formula.
I rewatched the original IKWYDLS last year with my resident Gen Z, and was surprised to find that it didn’t hold up as well as I remembered: the acting seemed flat, the plot seems unnecessarily convoluted, and the characters were not likable, although their guilty faces were on point and they were the kind of people who’d go all-in on a cover up. Perhaps it’s their ridiculousness or their bad choices that make them lovable. So, we ended up watching it as an unintentional comedy.
The thing about a good bad slasher movie is that it always manages to get away with something: If you hate it and laugh, it did its job; and if you love it and poke holes in it, that’s a win too. One does not expect these movies to be elevated or redeemed in their new avatars. The people who love watching them celebrate all the “flaws” because that makes them feel superior; it is something slasher movies do on purpose.
Do we care about any of the characters? Not a bit. But that’s the best part—the movie’s format encourages us to want to see them get killed, because there’s really nothing more fun outside of that. And that is comforting.
