Another new month has begun and a new wave of fresh content has arrived on every streaming service, including plenty of horror titles for those eager to get scared in the summer. To that end one of the best summer-themed slasher franchises has arrived in full on HBO Max with the WB streamer adding the trilogy of I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. The original movie in the series following the revival of the slasher by Scream, with writer Kevin Williamson scripting the 1997 feature film to boot.
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The original film told the tale of a group of teens that accidentally runover and kill a fisherman one summer, disposing of his body to hide the evidence and preserve their future. Naturally, there man didn’t die and returns the next year to torment and taunt the cast which included staples of the era Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Bridgette Wilson. Earning over $125 million at the global box office on a $17 million budget, the film secured itself a place in slasher franchise history, but only spawned the two sequels, the last of which went direct to video.
“My point was not to make Scream,” director Jim Gillespie told Digital Spy on the film’s 20th Anniversary. “Kevin wrote it, Kevin didn’t write this as Scream 2. There were a couple of lines that were very Kevin-esque, but he wasn’t trying to that whole post-modern thing ‘cos he’d just done it with Scream. We deliberately were not going for that sort of thing…It was meant to be kind of a stand-alone revisit of those classic ’80s horror films. It worked! The movie was number one three weeks in a row. It just clicked with the audience. The title clicked and everything just seemed to work. Third week was Halloween weekend and it was number one in its third week. I couldn’t believe it stuck there for three weeks.”
Though the series has been dormant on the big screen for over 15 years, it was revived last year for Amazon Prime Video as a TV show. Like the feature film though it was met with critical disdain, and was cancelled by the streamer after just one season.
