Ranking Every ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Movie

A blind spot in my horror knowledge, until recently I’d never seen the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer or any of its sequels. Based on the 1973 novel by Lois Duncan, the original film has a continuing legacy as the definitive slasher film of the nineties after Scream, leading to an immediate sequel the next year, another long-gestating sequel which became a straight-to-DVD instalment almost a decade later, and most recently getting the legacy sequel treatment in 2025.

I’ve now watched all four and offer a ranking below, the franchise being an interesting mix of a continuing formula and new additions with each entry. The sensibilities change and while each film is not at the cutting edge of the genre’s shifts, the four films are fascinating as prime examples of how horror cinema has changed in each of those decades. They are films which capture and encapsulate so much of the genre at large, both the good and the bad. Because there is certainly good and there is certainly bad.

There’s also a 2021 television series, cancelled after one season, and looking at online reaction to it I thought it best not to waste my time on that one. It’s not included in the ranking.

4) I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

I don’t know how much I’m going to write about this movie because I just want to move on with my life and forget all about it. I’m usually someone who believes in subjective opinions about films, I don’t make grand proclamations about how everyone should acknowledge something sucks, but I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is objectively abysmal and one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

It’s a straight-to-video cash-grab sequel with production values, writing, and acting worse than you’ll find in an average student film. The C-grade film I made in my media A-Level class is better than this. I’m shocked it was deemed suitable for release at all. Director Sylvain White has since gone on to direct some great TV shows, like Fargo and The Americans, but this is a film so bad I could have sworn it didn’t have a director at all. The editor tries to make something, anything, out of the materials he’s been given but ends up making it exponentially worse.

The ‘film’ recreates the plot of the original but transplants proceedings to dry, arid, bland Colorado. The landlocked mountainous state should have demanded a new killer but no, the Fisherman is back, hook in hand, but this time he’s an undead, teleporting ghost with no personal connection to anyone or anything. The teens all have unclear relationships with each other. It turns out one of them is the son of the sheriff, brother to another cop, and cousin to a different character, and I didn’t figure out this important information until a good hour in.

If I’m being generous then there’s the germ of an interesting idea. The guilt-creating inciting incident from the previous year in this version is a prank that goes wrong, the teens making the town believe the Fisherman is chasing them. Seeing the impact on the wider community would have been interesting, a fear of the Fisherman that begins as a lie but becomes true, the ghostly killer being like a tulpa willed or feared into being. But no, that’d be too good for this film, where nobody outside of the main cast seems to exist.

The film is also so disgustingly mid-noughties. The soundtrack is awful and the protagonist (don’t expect me to remember the names of these ‘characters’) receives the ‘I know what you did last summer’ message by text but the message was clearly edited in afterwards using ’03 Word Art. It’s a terrible movie that makes Jaws: The Revenge look like a masterwork.

3) I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

The 2025 legacy sequel starts poorly and by the end I think I straight up hated it. It’s a clumsy script, with the opening scene revealing that the lead character is back home for the first time in a while, is chasing after her high school boyfriend, her best friend is engaged, and her mother has died, with all this exposition regurgitated to herself in the mirror. It gets worse from there.

The biggest issue is that all the characters we’re supposed to root for are insufferable. They are uber-rich idiots with ‘woe is me’ attitudes living in insane mansions. It’s like the inverse of the original, instead of one rich prick and everyone else likable it’s flipped to only one bearable character. There’s no exploration of the traumatic toll on the characters: Madelyn Cline’s fiancé is the first to die and after one brief scene of mourning she’s back to being the comedic relief moron.

There’s no real drama with the main cast. Only one character is really culpable in the opening death, the one walking on the road, so there’s no reason for any group guilt or punishment. And they don’t even cover it up themselves. The town, the politicians, are the ones trying to silence everything, a very Jaws plot to keep the tourism industry running. But this takes all the drama away from the leads, who don’t have a secret to keep. They tell multiple people what happened without much of a push.

Not just a reboot, the film is a legacy sequel, very much in the style of Halloween (2018), including just naming the film the same as the original. How much of a sequel it is was clearly changing during production. Julie returns and says she “survived this once before” indicating it is only the first film that is canon or she’d say ‘twice’, and yet the mid credits scene connects to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer so it can’t even sort its own lore out. It even has a scene where Julie says “nostalgia’s overrated” and ten seconds later is shouting her catchphrase from the first film. Pick a lane!

It was clearly written so the OG cast could easily be removed from the script if they didn’t sign on. While it’s great to see Jennifer Love Hewitt onscreen again, Julie does nothing. She could be cut and nothing would change. I want to see Julie and Ray onscreen together again but their brief scenes are shot in awkward shot/reverse shots that make it look like they aren’t actually together, filming their dialogue separately. In a huge misstep, Ray is revealed to be a second killer. If the second film is canon, as the mid credits scene proves, then I hate this for Ray. It makes no sense for such a heroic character to fall. He barely even has his own motivation: he’s just helping someone out by killing a bunch of people.

The final scene ends things on a sour note. Madelyn Cline is somehow alive, the two friends relaxing on the beach like nothing has happened, a baffling happy ending. Then they reveal in dialogue that the killer survived too! Any closure is instantly erased purely for sequel setup. And then it ends on the worst line of the movie: “All of this could have been avoided if men went to therapy”. The main killer and instigator of everything was a crazy woman! What the fuck are they talking about?! It’s a dreadful, dreadful film and the writer/director should be thankful I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer exists for this reboot to hide behind in the ranking because any other franchise this’d be rock bottom.

2) I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

I had never seen the original before and 29 years later I’d say it holds up decently well. It’s very nineties but in a charming way most of the time, although the music is probably the most poorly aged aspect, beginning with a terrible Isley Brothers cover and ending with a terrible Deep Purple cover. Written by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson it doesn’t so much as deconstruct the genre like that film but rather adds another film to the canon of slasher cinema without shaking too much up. An early scene of characters reciting an urban legend around a camp fire, each recounting the story in a different way, is a fun indication of the meta places Williamson’s other franchise will tread.

The biggest twist that surprised me is that while it’s a slasher film it features a killer who doesn’t immediately kill. The small main cast might be the best thing about the film. There are no characters who are merely fodder for the hook. They are all important so the film can’t kill them off for a while. Instead, we get to know them, like them. The Fisherman wants to torment them as much as kill them, personifying the trauma they feel. It gives the film a little more substance than usual slasher faire.

It’s a solid premise, the teens accidentally killing someone the previous year and now facing the consequences for it. I guess I’m used to modern storytelling where everything is a mystery because  I was surprised we actually find out what they did immediately. We get an extended 25-minute prologue, whereas if the story was being adapted for the first time today I imagine it’d be kept a secret, the film told non-linearly before a reveal late on.

It’s interesting to catch up with everyone a year later, see how their lives are different and not the successes they hoped. One year doesn’t quite feel like enough time. Ten would be more interesting, to see them truly older, truly changed and still haunted, but then the title wouldn’t work. The characters are better than a lot of slasher films. I love the Friday the 13^th films but I couldn’t tell you character names from most of those films. The core cast of nineties heartthrobs are great. This is the film that finally got me to acknowledge that Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar are different people. And I don’t think Jennifer Love Hewitt gets enough praise for her performance here. She holds the film together. She’s stunning, sure, but it’s also an excellent horror performance.

I did not guess the killer reveal. Although probably because it gets somewhat contrived. There’s a chain of killings and it’s revealed the teens actually ran over a killer rather than the victim they thought they did, who then survived. Honestly, it hurts the film. The metaphor, that the killer represents their own guilt at what happened, tearing them apart, is ruined. It turns out they did nothing wrong because the person they hit survived and was a bad guy anyway. The killer, Ben the Fisherman, is also apparently seeking justice yet kills some random innocent people not involved. It’s messier than it should be; an attempt to have its cake and eat it too.

The kill sequences themselves are decent, strangely bloodless, but it’s the preceding chases that are stronger. Sarah Michelle Gellar being hunted is a really tense sequence and by the time she’s murdered I was devastated. The final set piece on the boat is also handled well. Limiting the killings forces the filmmakers to get creative and ultimately it better serves the film. I do think it bungles the very end because Julie and Ray still refuse to tell the cops why the Fisherman wants them dead, learning nothing about needing to come clean and not keep secrets, further muddying the themes. But overall, it’s a fun, charming slasher film deserving of a legacy.

1) I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)

Technically it’d be two summers ago but who’s counting. Yes, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is my favourite of the franchise because it is the most successful at accomplishing what it wants to do. It doesn’t mess up its themes because there are none. The sensibilities have changed: it is now a sillier, gorier slasher film, having fun killing off characters every few minutes, just looking to be a good time. And it is just that. It’s the most fun you can have with this franchise and that is all it is setting out to be.

There are a couple of smaller plot elements executed in clumsy fashion, like the brief introduction of voodoo for some reason, but there’s little danger of the film getting as contrived as its predecessor. It keeps it simple and it’s probably better for it. There’s no real mystery, it’s obvious that Ben survived and it the killer again, out for revenge. Now he has a hook for a hand rather than carrying it, which is another example of the most well-known final form of a killer appearing in the sequel rather than the original, like Jason not getting the hockey mask until Friday the 13^th part III.

There is enough of a story and character hook to justify the sequel, Julie now having genuine trauma about something that happened a year prior. No matter where she goes, it follows. Including the Caribbean. Rather than a whole town, it becomes a contained location slasher film. It’s like The Shining but at a Bahamas beach resort – I’m sure if Jack Torrance had some sand and sea it would have turned out alright in the end. It’s a very fun, unique location for this kind of film, setting it apart not just from the other films in the franchise but others in the genre, too.

The cast is excellent. It’s a who’s who of brilliant character actors filling up every supporting role. John Hawkes, Jack Black, Bill Cobbs, Mark Boone Jr, and my favourite, Jeffrey Combs, being a total delight as the crotchety hotel manager. And with the sequel being much more brutal than the original, they all get killed off in entertaining ways. The core cast is also strong. Jennifer Love Hewitt delivers another great performance, even if the new sensibilities force her to become a more generic scream queen (literally, she screams every few minutes) and the script has her bounce between depressed and ecstatic within seconds. Somehow, she makes it work. Freddy Prince Jr is also great, with him being an unquestionable hero for the first and only time in the franchise, which is what he’s best at playing.

There are times when the film’s silliness devolves into straight stupidity, like when a character called Will is revealed to be killer Ben’s son because his name is literally Willis Benson (Will is Ben’s son) but the film survives whatever the script throws at it. In fact, it thrives. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer toes the line incredibly well because it is knowing without becoming the least bit insufferable. It gets away with it because it is so much fun and fun is all it is trying to be. It was a joy to watch and is the highlight of the franchise.