it's a knife, except when it's a hook
The reboot-sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer flopped over the weekend, bringing in $13m in Canada and the United States. I don't have any grand theories as to why it failed where the new Screams and Final Destination succeeded, except perhaps that nearly-three decades was too long to resuscitate a franchise that never drew that much heat to begin with.
You couldn't have told teenaged me shit though when the original came out in 1997. That one had me scribbling the title in fat, black Sharpie letters onto notes I'd leave in my friends' backpacks and notebooks. The prank was only funny for me, mostly because my friends were not into horror movies. A similar attempt, over the summer, calling them to ask what their favourite scary movie was also fell flat, with them mostly confused where that bit came from.
The cleverness of Scream's concept, someone taking their love of scary movies too far, made me fall in love with film. The sparks had started on trips to Orlando's theme parks, where Universal Studios and what was then called Disney-MGM Studios played into movie magic. Universal had an attraction dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock, and, after seeing Scream, I got my hands on every Hitchcock film I could at the nearby Blockbuster.
Although Scream is the smarter movie, Last Summer has a charming pretty-but-stupid quality to it. The film gives us a lingering shower scene with Ryan Philippe in peak-twink form1 before the killer nearly runs him over. He survives, spared by the killer but chastened around his physical prowess.
The killer appears to like playing mind games, but the fuckery seem uneven: for Sarah Michelle Gellar's character, a pageant queen who fails to make it out of the small town, the killer leans into her vanity by chopping off her prized locks while she sleeps. Gellar wrings as much as she can emotionally from the scene, but it's not exactly waking up to a horse's head in your bed. Part of the fun of the Last Summer series is that you never have to take it seriously.
Another scene in the first Summer has Jennifer Love Hewitt's character hearing scratching noises in her trunk, only to discover in it a body covered in live crabs. She freaks out, but when she returns with her friends, the body and crabs are gone and the trunk is back to normal. Maybe it's a hallucination, but the film plays it as real, so now we the audience have this image of the killer diligently vacuuming the trunk for crab particulate.
The film never dives too deeply into the idea of accountability, as the killer ends up not just seeking revenge for the accident that kicks off the film, but is flat-out deranged. This lets the two surviving characters off the hook, and, by the sequel, inexplicably set in the Bahamas, the plot has flattened to a generic slasher. Compare that to the Scream franchise, where a love of movies permeates each film and its characters: this ability to comment on trends keeps the series fresher.
I hear the new Last Summer plays up the role of trauma2 (if you want a hint, think the Dark Knight) which already feels exhausting post-Jamie Lee Curtis's press tour for the Halloweens. Most slasher films from the '80s usually attributed their killer's psychotic origin to some kind of schlocky, traumatic event, so the modern slashers openly discussing it just feels like old bones with a new coat of therapyspeak paint. I also just don't think a franchise that named a character Will Benson, because he's literally the son of Ben Willis, needs to try so hard.
I haven't and probably won't see the new Last Summer (nor the new Scream for that matter) but the era of the original films were my gateway into screenwriting, and more generally pop culture, including getting a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, where I read up on future releases and pored over box office grosses3. Films like Ten Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions, and Bring It On may have been seen as fluff, but their commercial success provided the foundation for industry heavyweights like Heath Ledger, Reese Witherspoon, and Kirsten Dunst.
As a closeted kid in the suburbs, I couldn't imagine myself in a romcom, even though I loved them, but I could envision myself in a slasher film. I landed into the tradition of horror films resonating with queer people; after all, the idea that the best way to hunt down your enemies is through a series of elaborate set-ups is arch and overly dramatic: there's an inherent faggotry to it.
I ended up writing both a romcom and a slasher, both terrible. Coincidentally, a few months ago, I dusted off my screenwriting skills to enter a competition, where I got high marks but still ended up short. My inspiration wasn't a romcom nor a slasher, but the other influence in my life during that time: Sex and the City. Given And Just Like That, maybe it is true that you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
[1] Also see: 54 and Cruel Intentions
[2] There's trauma (a one-time or series of negative experiences that a person is unable to process nor integrate emotionally) and there's how people colloquially use it (an experience someone deeply disliked)
[3] They published box office results in the newspaper for a while, and I'd been looking them up since the Disney Renaissance, but I think EW was when I started getting into per-theatre averages and whatnot