Buckle up and keep your eyes on the road because we’re chatting about the teen slasher thriller I Know What You Did Last Summer. From morality and justice to small town trappings, we unearth a murky past that refuses to stay buried!
REQUIRED READING
I Know What You Did Last Summer. Dir. Jim Gillespie, 1997.
EXTRA CREDIT
Behavioral Risks during the Transition from High School to College. The NIH report on tendencies and actions during the last summer before adulthood.
Generation Multiplex. Timothy Shary’s examination of youth culture at the movies.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. Jan Harold Brunvand’s seminal work on modern folklore.
LISTEN
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I think there’s a good reason why nobody was interested in Williamson’s script until Scream: it’s not very good.
The 80s weren’t nearly as good a decade for horror as the 70s were. The original Halloween is a classic, Friday the 13th and the sequels in both franchises drove the formula into the ground. James Cameron dumbing down Alien into the less scary action-movie Aliens is akin to what his script for Rambo did to First Blood. But the reason that teen-targeted horror movies (whether in the 80s or 90s) are worse is because the audience they’re targeted at have less ability to distinguish good from bad movies, relative to older audiences.