Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer series looks frighteningly lame I Know What You Did Last Summer
In 1997, screenwriter Kevin Williamson followed the immense success of his Scream screenplay with an adaptation of Lois Duncan’s YA novel I Know What You Did Last Summer.
While the film version strayed quite far from the source material, which wasn’t a slasher story at all, it was a box office hit, leading to two sequels and making movie stars out of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar in the process.
Now, Amazon is reviving the long-dormant franchise in the form of a TV series, and it’s dropped a brand new teaser trailer to give us an idea of what to expect. You can check that teaser out below, so what are you waiting for, huh? What are you waiting for?!
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Analysis: it looks rough, but could it surprise us?
From the trailer above, it’s clear that the show’s creators have gone for a vibe similar to that of HBO’s award-winning series Euphoria. Unfortunately, it looks as though they’ve landed squarely in “we’ve got Euphoria at home” territory.
Sure, it’s a relatively short teaser, but it offers more than enough time for us to get a handle on the show’s innate cheapness and instantly-unlikeable roster of vacuous teen characters.
It’s also lacking in the original film’s iconography. Mention the title I Know What You Did Last Summer to the average horror fan and they’ll immediately picture a hook-wielding killer in a fisherman’s rain slicker. None of that is present here.
In fact, there isn’t a whole lot in this teaser that would give the impression that this is supposed to be scary – the teaser is heavy on teens drunkenly making out with each other, but light on anything resembling horror.
That said, it’s possible that the show will stick closer to the original novel than the films ever did. Author Lois Duncan wasn’t happy about her book being turned into a Scream-style slasher, so maybe the show aims to rectify that by making it more of a suspense story where none of the main characters actually die.
The novel didn’t feature a killer fisherman – in fact, it was set in a nondescript, unnamed town rather than a fishing village, so in that sense, the show is already closer to the book than the 1997 film version.
Could the show actually turn out to be decent? We won’t know for sure until it drops on Amazon Prime Video on October 15. In the meantime, let’s hope the show’s full trailer is more exciting than this teaser.
In 1997, screenwriter Kevin Williamson followed the immense success of his Scream screenplay with an adaptation of Lois Duncan’s YA novel I Know What You Did Last Summer. While the film version strayed quite far from the source material, which wasn’t a slasher story at all, it was a box…
