The Kids Must Die

The anti-teen slasher and I Know What You Did Last Summer

Slashers are known for the enthusiasm with which they decapitate, disembowel, and defenestrate unsuspecting teens. Even by those standards, though, the original I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is unusually emphatic in its giggling assault on the young and all they stand for—sex, dreams, hopes, high spirits, and, in particular, the supplanting of their elders.

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The film begins on July 4, 1996 in the seaside town of Southport, North Carolina. High school seniors have just graduated, and four of them—nerdy academic star Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), her working class boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr), her homecoming queen best friend Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and Helen’s wealthy boyfriend Barry (Ryan Philippe) go to the beach to celebrate. They discuss their future plans (Helen wants to be an actor; Julie and Ray want to stay together) and split off to have sex. On the drive back to town they accidentally hit a man, and terrified of what this will mean for their lives, they decide to throw his body in the ocean…though just before he sinks, he turns out to not have been quite dead.

The film then skips a year; Julie returns home from school and receives a frightening note from someone who says…well, what the title tells you. And then the stalker stuff happens (featuring in this case someone in a rain slicker with a giant fishhook, to go with the seaside theme.)

Even before vengeance shows up in the form of the fishhook, though, the teens are already paying for the murder—and/or for their blithe belief in their own innocence and possibilities. Haunted by guilt, Julie has almost flunked out of college and her relationship with her mother is badly strained. Helen’s acting career in New York collapsed before it started; she’s now working at the family store under the supervision of her emotionally abusive sister Elsa (Bridgette Wilson). Ray is not a pro football player, but a fisherman, and he and Julie have broken up. Barry remains a callous wealthy twerp—but Helen has realized he is that, and has dumped him, to his at least mild dismay.

The dead end of hope here is again figured as a kind of punishment. But punishment for what? Ostensibly for the murder…but on the beach the teens tell each other ghost stories, and Julie points out that the famous insane hook killer urban legend can be read as a warning against premarital sex. “I know what you did last summer” could mean, “I know that you sinned,” but it could also mean, “I know that you sinned,” as it were.

Eventually (spoilers for a thirty year old movie) we learn that the guy they thought they killed is an aging psychopath named Ben Willis (Muse Watson), who didn’t drown after all, and is now hunting them for revenge. His miraculous resurrection is never explained very satisfactorily, in part because (as per the slasher formula) he’s less a person than a myth of blood and punishment.

The punishment in slashers like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes is often aimed at the upper class; feral hillbillies in these films rise up out of the dirt to fillet their exploiters, consuming the consumers. I Know What flirts with those themes—Ben is working class, and the kids mostly aren’t. But Ray’s dad was a fisherman, and Ray himself follows in his footsteps; Helen’s dad owns a store, but she’s downwardly mobile and is working as a service grunt for a boss from hell.

So Ben isn’t after the kids because they’re wealthy—nor because they’re women, since not all of them are (though there is an obligatory Psycho shower reference.) Instead, the film functions as an allegory about youth attempting to supplant the older generation (by living their lives and/or by murdering some old guy), and that older generation refusing to die. Barry’s wealth is especially relevant not because it’s wealth per se, but because young people aren’t entitled to that wealth.

Similarly, Helen’s beauty and dreams of success mean she must be punished, disabused, immiserated, because young people aren’t entitled to build careers on their looks and hopes and youth. Ray the fisherman and Julie, who wants to succeed via intellectual effort, are allowed to survive—though not without trauma. You can’t be allowed to just grow up. You need to be hurt first.

Viewers aren’t actually (or at least not entirely) on the side of the killer, of course, which means that the film is (at least in part) critiquing the hatred of teens for an audience which is probably made up of a lot of teens. Audiences do, in slashers, cheer on the kills and the retribution. But they also root for the teens to escape that retribution. You want the characters (or at least some of them) to get to have sex and success and joy and dreams without getting gutted on a hook. Sarah Michelle Gellar, in particular, gives Helen’s hopes, reversals, and disappointments unusual depth for a slasher. Her death cuts short a life that had real weight and a real future. Until it doesn’t.

I Know What isn’t making a big social statement; it’s a cheerful 90 minute exercise in suspense and screaming and looking at some pretty people on screen. But even cheerful genre exercises have a hook, and here that hook resentment of young people, and (as the hook swings back) young people’s awareness of, and resentment of that resentment.

Those dynamics remain painfully relevant some 30 years after the film was released. People talk a lot about MAGA’s hatred of women and Black people and immigrants, and those are all very real. But it;s notable that Republicans have devoted a lot of energy to gutting schools and targeting college students and college protestors—a group of mostly young people which Democrats also target.

Those in power want to stay in power. But of all the people who challenge that power, the young are the ones who we know, for sure, will eventually, at some point, inherit the earth. The guilty act in I Know What may not be murder and it may not even be sex. Instead, the teens sin by the act of being teens and wanting to make their own place in the world. Ben is that reverse Oedipal ogre father who wants to live by feasting on his young. Maybe the kids will find a way to put a stake through the heart of that impulse at some point. But it hasn’t been drowned yet.