I Know What You Did Last Summer

 

I know what you did last summer is a movie about four teenagers who, in the beginning, accidentally hit a man with their vehicle while driving late at night. They believe him to be dead; and try to put all thoughts of the moment from their minds. They go their different ways, as all friends do after high school, and try to move on with their lives. However, a year later, the events of that evening come back to haunt them all. Julie, one of the two main female characters, receives an anonymous letter on the day she returns home. No return address, and all the letter says is; “I know what you did last summer.” She immediately goes to find her friend Helen, the other main female character. They discuss the current state of events, and decide to go find one of the boys who had been involved that night, named Barry. He believes he knows who sent the letter, and goes with the girls to see him, leaving the girls outside and then going to threaten the other boy. However, you shortly find out that it was not that boy who was responsible for the letter. The last main character from the beginning, Ray, is not on anyone’s radar. No one knows exactly what happened to him. Shortly thereafter, however, they do find out that he was working in a shipyard since high school graduation.  As the movie plays out, the characters meet rather quick ends at the hands of the murderer, who is using a hook as his weapon. At the end of the movie, only Julie and Ray are left alive; and in one of the last scenes they believe they have killed the villain.

 

One of the main topics in horror films that was focused on in the Carol Clover article that we discussed in class was the weapon. The common theme among these weapons is that they all require close contact between the murderer and the victim. It is no different in this film. The weapon of choice is a fishing hook. The irony of this weapon choice is that at the beginning of the movie, the four main characters are on the beach, talking about a horror story told around those parts, and while none of them can agree on all of the details, they do all agree that the weapon in this horror story is a fishing hook. We discussed in class how the weapon is often a phallic representative, and Julie actually states this when they are telling the story. She says that is why the weapon is always the same, no matter what the background of the story is. It is supposed to be a story to scare girls out of having premarital sex, and so the hook is a phallic symbol to somehow get this point across.

A second topic from the Clover article that is discussed is the murderer himself(or herself). In this film, the murderer turns out to be the man that they believed they had killed the year before. However, you don’t find this out until the end of the movie when he says to Julie that when you believe you have left someone for dead you need to make sure he is actually dead. The article focuses on the murderer being a “psychosexual” killer. In this movie, I’m not so sure that is the case. For most of the movie, the characters believe that the man they hit was someone named David Egan. The year before the accident, Egan was in an accident with his fiancée; she died, he survived. Their accident happened on the same day of the accident with the four teenagers. So they believe that maybe Egan was down there feeling guilty and mourning his dead fiancée. They contemplate that maybe he went down there, and was waiting for someone to hit him. That maybe he went down there to die. We later find out that the killer was in fact Egan’s fiancée’s father, who they soon begin to believe killed Egan because he blamed him for the crash that killed his daughter. So the “psychosexual killer” theory seems to not fit in with this scenario, because the whole thing seems to have started off as revenge for his daughter’s death, and then revenge against the four teenagers who thought they had killed him and so left him for dead.

The “terrible place” is another concept of the Clover article. In most horror films it is somewhere dark and gloomy, often very quiet, believed by some to be representative of a woman’s womb. The “terrible places” in this film all fit in nicely with that description. First there is the dock, then the gym where Barry is attacked that is dark and deserted of everyone but him and the man working at the desk. There are all of the alleys that the characters travel and run through. The department store in which Helen works; where she ends up late one night after running from the killer, after her sister has turned off all of the lights, and covered up the mannequins. A last place is the boat where Julie and Ray are fighting for their lives against the killer. All of these places are deserted; and while during the daylight hours they may all be very safe and comfortable places to be; at night when they are closed and deserted and dark, they are far scarier than one might expect.

A final concept from the Clover article is that of the “last girl.” in the article, she talks about how traditionally there is one girl left, and she often finds the strength to fight back against the killer. Clover discusses how the “last girl” is often masculinized, because the audience begins to view her as being stronger and able to fight back, which is a concept that most people do not associate with femininity which often depicts someone(girls) as being too weak to take care of themselves. In this particular movie, the last girl is Julie. However, she is not alone. Ray has also survived to the end, and he ends up helping her on the boat to defeat the murderer. I don’t know if you could say that she needs Ray to come recue her, because he gets thrown off the boat, and she seems to do okay by herself while he is in the water, but towards the end of the scene she does seem to need his help because the killer is advancing on her and she just sort of freezes. So it almost appears that what the writer of the script is trying to get across with this is that girls can be strong for a while, but in the end they need a male to help bring about an actual end to a problem.

I think that when taking this film “under the microscope” so to speak, to compare it with what is talked about in the Clover article, most of everything that occurs in this film seems to fit into the stereotypical pattern of a horror film. The small differences which, once examined a little more closely, appear to not be all that small, only serve to make the movie different from every other horror film of its time. They make it stand out. And when taking into consideration the fact that this movie came out in the late 90s’, the differences fit in with the changed that were beginning to occur in society at this time with women and the things they were believed to be capable of. All in all, I truly enjoyed this movie and the ideas that it represented.