Day 27: I Know metformin hydrochloride 500 mg side effects What You Did Last Summer (1997)
“Yeah, Jodie Foster tried this and a skin-ripping serial killer answered the door!“
I remember the three ’90s slasher franchises that launched in the back half of the decade: Urban Legend, Scream, and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Summer and Urban Legend followed the success of Scream in an attempt by Hollywood to resurrect the slasher genre. Unfortunately, outside of the success that each of the three new series found, the slasher genre did not resuscitate. And going into the next decade, audiences would be slain by a flurry of remakes (of foreign and domestic films), instead of brand-new stories about high schoolers getting torn apart by serial killers. Now, admittedly, the ’90s also gave us Candyman and improved sequels to dead-and-buried franchises like Halloween with H2O and A Nightmare on Elm Street with New Nightmare, but the last three were not just proper throwbacks to their counter-parts of the ‘80s, but captured enough of the witty, cynical, pop culture-obsessed, ‘90s youth to be relevant and different.
Summer (adapted by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson) tells the story of four high school friends about to part ways for college. One night, the group runs over a man with their car and foolishly tries to cover up the accident. After a failed attempt at moving on with their lives, one year later (and countless therapy sessions, I’m sure.) they are further tortured by someone who knows what they did last summer.
I mentioned this in Day 3: Stephen King’s It, but I’m a huge fan of pacts between childhood friends. There’s something about an unspoken bond that I’m ultimately fascinated with, and while Summer’s pact doesn’t nearly have the ramifications of the one made in It, the characters are still fused together by “what they did last summer”. No matter what they go through in life, no matter how much they change, they will always have that one night in common. Unfortunately, for them, their past literally came back to not only haunt but kill them.
I Know What You Did Last Summer will always stick with me, because it forever ruined the trick-or-treating experience for me. For some reason, as a kid, I was obsessed with the fisherman-in-a-black-slicker-who-killed-people-with a-hook murderer from the movie and attempted to use that as a basis for my Halloween costume one year. After weeks of trying to convince my parents that this was a “brilliant idea for a costume,” they agreed to help me piece the getup together.
I’m not sure if end result came from a poor concept, my parents not realizing my vision, or if we were just dead broke and I didn’t know it. I ended up with a hodge-podge of fishing gear: yellow slicker (not black!), hand-me-down boots, a torn, mismatched hat with stupid, reflective flies hooked on the edges, but worst of all, I had a normal fishing pole instead of a massive, murderer’s hook. Honestly, I was more pissed off that I didn’t have a badass, serial killer’s fish hook and ended up walking the streets of Vancouver, WA on Halloween night carrying a retarded fishing rod. I’m still positive that the hook would have pulled the ensemble together, but alas, I’m left only with tainted memories and broken dreams.
It could have been worse; I could have been trick-or-treating with a metal coat hanger tied around my wrist. I wouldn’t put that compromise past my family.
