Gillespie: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

I Know What You Did Last Summer was Kevin Williamson’s second major contribution to the slasher revival of the 90s, and it shares some key features with Scream, while still managing to carve out its own niche and style at the same time. Like Scream, it’s about a group of teenagers whose lives feel too overdetermined by information for them to really confront horror in a direct or effective way, except that where the teenagers of Scream were oversaturated with all the genre tropes they’d processed and internalised, here it’s more their position in the late twilight of American folklore that debilitates them – they’re enslaved to urban legends more than genre tropes, or the way urban legends have become indistinguishable from genre tropes. So when their untimely disposal of a dead body brings one of the most notorious figures of urban legend to life, the horror feels too infinitesimally networked to be meaningfully computed or conceptualised – after all, you can only trace urban legends back to a friend of a friend of a friend, just as you can only trace genre conventions back to a film influenced by another film influenced by another film in turn. As with Scream, that vast swathe of information is translated into something like hyper-atmosphere, micro-climates of mood and place that fold back around any kind of informational excursion that the teenagers embark upon, fractalling every space until it feels airbrushed, pixellated, straining to break through the limits of analog lushness. Set in Southport, North Carolina, it feels more like a gateway to the Outer Banks - a narrow isthmus between swampland and open ocean, a sandbar that contracts as the killer’s circumference narrows, elongating evening light across dark waters. And this is very much a circumferent, circumambient killer – from the extraordinary opening shot, Gillespie employs spiralling, oceanic pans to evoke a mobile, shifting, omniscient gaze that makes the final revelation of the killer’s identity almost anticlimactic. Almost, since there’s not really the same interest in the killer’s personality as in Scream – like the serial killers of yesteryear, the Hook is pretty much blank, a placeholder for all the places between places that remain just below our perceptual threshold.