Clover Knows What You Did Last Summer

In the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer a group of four teenage friends accidently hit a stranger with their car and attempted to hide his body in a nearby lake despite knowing that he was still alive. A year later they are receive threats and experience attacks based off of the crime they committed the previous summer. The movie continues as the four teenagers try to figure out who is behind the threats until one-by-one people start to die at the killer’s hand, or shall I say hook. This movie provides constant thrills for its viewers by the menacing music and the dark, ominous setting. The four main characters consist of two teenage girls, Julie and Helen and their two love interests, Ray and Barry.

Carol Clover is an American author known for her analysis of how gender is represented in horror/slasher films. She discusses different aspects of these films and how the characters, weapons, and the settings all tell the audience something. I Know What You Did Last Summer is no exception to Clover’s claims.

Most slasher films have a type of “terrible place” that either the killers hold and manipulate, or that victims go to. These terrible places are normally small, dark, abandoned areas. The viewers of this film have no knowledge on the killer until the last five minutes of the movie, but what they find out is that he has a boat where he has pictures, newspaper articles, and other information on the four victims plastered on the wall. This creepy display in a small dark room instills fear in Julie when she discovers it, but also lets her know that she is trapped on a boat with the movie’s killer. Throughout the final chase scene on the boat between Julie and the killer she hides in a number of small, dark compartments on the boat. At one point she traps herself in a long small tunnel with the killer right behind her. As she travels down this tunnel, she finds a door which leads to a large bright freezer filled with ice. When she opens the door, light shines in and she climbs into the freezer and shuts and blocks it behind her. Though she is not fully in the clear yet, this bright light at the end of a dark tunnel could be compared to the female birth canal. Even though she is still being chased, Julie does all she can from this point forward to fight him off and stand up for herself. This can be portrayed as a rebirth of her as a character. She is leaving behind her stereotypical feminized character by making bad choices, and shifts into a more masculine character by attempting to rescue herself and fighting back as hard as she could.

The victims of the killer are all beautiful, popular, teenagers. The female victims are seen as always running away from their attacker, and hiding in small unknown places, or always choosing the wrong way. When being chased in her store, Helen took an elevator upstairs to get away, while the killer walked up the stairs and was waiting for her by the time she got up there. When she presumably gets away, she runs into the killer again where he inevitably kills her in an alleyway. During the attack, Helen fights him off as best as she can. This response, rather than just complying out of fear shows that she is attempting to rescue herself. Even though she was unsuccessful, this attempt shows that she has taken on some of the killer’s abilities to fight.

(The killer hiding from and attacking Helen)

Even though Helen is not the “final girl” at the end of the film, Julie is, and shows the exact same strengths. When trapped on a boat in the middle of the river with the killer, Julie does not just give in and accept her fate either. Even though she is unfamiliar with the boat’s layout, she continues to hide and try to get away. She does fight him off as well, shifting to more masculine characteristics, in a self-rescue, physically strong type of way, but she does not entirely fit the “final girl” identity because she is not the one to beat the killer. Ray hurries out on his own boat to the boat that Julie and the killer are on and things like rope swings to prevent the killer from harming Julie. Not only does he hit him with a large iron hook, but he also manages to lift him into the air by a rope, which rips off his hand and throws him into the water. 

Julie and Ray are both saved and the killer is presumably dead.

Clover talks about the use of the weapon in slasher films and how the type and size of the weapon both portray something. Slasher films are called slasher films because that is exactly what the killers do, slash. There is no gun use, only knives or other sharp objects. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the killer uses a large hook to kill his victims. Being a fisherman himself, he uses the hook to complete the fisherman’s coat and hat that he is wearing throughout the film. This hook is always held close to his body, and the large size of it is seen as an extension of his body. This weapon, though not the typical shape, can be perceived by the audience as a phallic symbol because of how attached the killer is to it, since he used it for every murder.

Overall this slasher film, like most, has many of the characteristics that Clover discusses. This movie provided all of these while keeping the audience on the edge of their seat. Every dark corner paired with the weapon and character portrayals give the film’s viewers a lot to think about.