“I Know What You Did Last Summer” arrives late in the requel universe That film genre that combines sequels and reboots together

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a requel (a mix of sequel and reboot) released this week that continues the story almost twenty years after the second film in the saga I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, released in 1998, excluding the questionable, Y2K-style fest that was the third installment I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. Already in 1997, the original I Know What You Did followed in the wake of the meta-horror film Scream. While the directors were different—Jim Gillespie for one and the much more acclaimed Wes Craven for the other—the screenwriter was the same. Kevin Williamson was making his debut when, in the mid-90s, he created the immortal Ghostface, launching within a couple of years two of the longest-running and most iconic horror franchises in the world, both of which, in their own way, primarily reflected on themselves and their internal mechanisms, breaking the rules of the genre they belonged to. Scream did it first, did it better, and did it by offering a new direction in the self-analysis not only of horror phenomena but of an entire film industry and its transformations.

I Know What You Did Last Summer mostly reaffirmed the patterns of a horror dimension in which slasher had very specific rules. But, just as happened with Scream, Ghostface had already reappeared with its sequel-reboot in 2022, once again showing how the I Know What You Did saga is lagging behind, especially considering director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s version—who also co-wrote the script with Sam Lansky—aims to operate through a meta-reflective and meta-analytical vision. Which is ironic, considering that Jennifer Love Hewitt herself, returning as Julie James nearly thirty years later alongside Freddie Prinze Jr., delivers the line: “Nostalgia is overrated.” Despite the statement from one of the ultimate final girls, I Know What You Did in fact relies entirely on the memory of what the original saga once was. Or even more: on the memory that has been erased and that the “fisherman” can bring back to life. Not coincidentally, one of the main themes in the setting of the new I Know What You Did is the cleansing of Southport and how its massacre now seems like a distant memory.

Thus, the return of a new chapter, which aims to reactivate that memory, seems to serve as a reintroduction for those who first watched or became passionate about Julie’s story and her friends in the nineties, as well as for new viewers who were just born—or about to be—in 1997, much like the cast of the 2025 film. There’s just one problem troubling the plans for the new I Know What You Did. Compared with the recent Scream entries and their ability to embed themselves perfectly within the peak of requel-mania, maintaining the ironic and meta-textual tone of the original line, the same self-awareness fails to stick in I Know What You Did, paradoxically turning its revision and reinterpretation of horror classics into something already outdated. The film feels done and redone, seen and overseen, despite its direct ties to the originals. But the blending with the present doesn’t result in anything more than yet another “fisherman” product—one that does not truly reflect on the actual changes in horror (as it aims to), in cinema, or more narrowly, within the saga itself. And so, I Know What You Did ends up confirming itself as forever second-best. It was that in 1997 after the release of Scream, and it remains so now with its requel.