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I
wasn't what you'd call a "normal" teenager — if there is such a
thing. See, most teens watch a movie like
I Know What You Did Last Summer eagerly awaiting the bloody kills, rooting
for the bad guy to gruesomely dispatch his sinful adolescent targets.
Me?
I cried when they died.
When
asked how I liked the movie, only three words could escape my lips:
"They killed Buffy!"
Oh,
right — spoiler alert. Helen Shivers, the character played by Sarah Michelle
Gellar, expires before the credits roll, and so does Ryan Philippe. That leaves
just Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. to tussle with sinister
fisherman Ben Willis in the last act, a poor bit of planning if you ask me.
Gellar and Philippe are by far better actors than either Hewitt or Prinze Jr.,
and their characters are a shade more interesting, too. Helen's the former
beauty queen who tried to make it in New York and ended up back at her family's
general store, while Barry is the star athlete who is now coping with
alcoholism and excessive douche baggage. Never mind that I can now totally
relate with both of these characters — if I end up gutted next to a giant stack
of tires, you heard it here first — because I didn't know that at the time.
But
I Know What You Did Last Summer is a
much better movie than most give it credit for, mostly thanks to Kevin
Williamson's screenplay. These are real teen characters who would be
interesting even if there wasn't a sicko with a fish hook after them. Helen and
Barry would have fit right in on Dawson's
Creek — and, okay, so would Ray and Julie, but in a hate-watch kind of way
— and the guilt they're grappling with is more nuanced and complex than the
moral complications of most teen horror flicks. Yes, the killer's shenanigans —
like stuffing a dead man covered in crabs in Julie's trunk, then miraculously
removing any trace of said body or crustaceans within a window of 60 seconds —
are totally implausible and ridiculous. But what do you want from a movie called
I Know What You Did Last Summer? A
second note that says: ...And I'm Totally
Fine With It! Let's Hit The Beach?
So
when Helen Shivers met her bitter end against a heap of rubber just inches away
from the safety of a 4th of July parade, I wasn't upset just because she was Buffy. I was upset because I was relating to her formerly self-absorbed,
now-humbled Croaker Queen character. (And because I'd read the YA book by Lois
Duncan, and dammit, all four of them survived in the book! But both the killer
and victim were different, too.) See, for a brief shining moment at the tail
end of the 20th century, teen horror had a golden age, unparalleled before or
since, when such films were actually clever and well-written (by Kevin
Williamson, mostly); they had believable protagonists who didn't all deserve to get butchered. (But then some did anyway.) It
just so happened I was at the perfect age to be the target demographic for
these films, and I devoured them the way teens in horror movies guzzle booze
and engage in sex.
Promiscuously
— like a total slut.
And
so teen horror, more than any other genre, is what made me who I am today.
(Sorry.)
But
let's back up a little, because I wasn't always a horror fan. I used to be
terrified of movies — not just horror movies, but yes, pretty much all movies. And TV. And music videos.
And rides like Captain EO at Disneyland. Anything visual, really. Maybe I
should've been blind. It started with Batman
and E.T., and possibly ended with Jurassic Park. (Read more about that in "The Reel
Me.") It wasn't until I was 15 that I was even allowed to
watch an R-rated movie, so there wasn't much to be scared of the interim. I
heard the buzz around junior high when
Scream was released, but never caught it in theaters. It sounded terrifying. Finally, when it was
released on home video (VHS!), I decided I was brave enough to give it a try.
Scream was essentially the first horror movie I ever saw, so
all that meta-parody was lost on me. Of course I knew who Jason Voorhees and
Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers were, but I wasn't yet familiar with all the
tropes Scream was sending up. So for
me, it worked as a genuinely scary movie. Now maybe I'm messed up for life,
given that my first slasher flick was actually a half-parody of slasher flicks,
so the bar is forever raised to a level of clever that simply can't be
sustained. Whatever. I like my horror like I like everything else — smart, with
strong, savvy characters you can actually feel for. I didn't know at the time
how atypical it was for the genre.
Let's
not forget that Scream pulled a mini-Psycho on the audience by killing off a
major star in the opening sequence. Many went into it assuming Drew Barrymore
was the main character (by the time I saw it, I knew better). The effect of her
gruesome demise was to make the audience actually feel — surprised, sad, and kind of betrayed that she was gutted and
hung from the tree in her family's yard, to be discovered by her parents. It's
not a "fun" sequence; it's pretty horrifying, made worse by the fact
that Casey Becker isn't some dumb blonde bimbo who's just asking for it walking
around topless in the woods. She's a smart, relatable high school girl (even if
she looks 30). Her death is brutal. How many other horror movies lately can you
say that about?
This
was about the time that Joss Whedon's Buffy
The Vampire Slayer debuted, too, which also blurred the line between horror
and comedy (and did both exceptionally well). Buffy wasn't truly scary very often, but it was awesome, and it
accomplished what Scream did in terms
of finding the humanity and stakes amidst the body count. Both Scream and Buffy take place in a heightened reality where characters are aware
of cliches even as they're living them. You might think such entertainments
would come off feeling less realistic, but it's actually the dummies who
populate most other horror movies we have a hard time relating to. Smart people
who know what we know about the horror genre? That's the new stupid.
Sidney
Prescott, Randy Meeks, Gale Weathers, Helen Shivers... these characters are as
iconic to me as Charles Foster Kane and Scarlett O'Hara are to others. I can't
help it! I'm a slave to the 90's, a product of my generation. The first
"screenplay" I ever wrote was a parody of Scream, starring myself a Randy and my friends as various other
characters. (I still think it was funnier than the "official" Scream parody, Scary Movie.) I can recite any line of Scream and I Know What You
Did Last Summer by heart, the way some some people quote Shakespeare. If I
came of age in Elizabethan England, maybe I'd be one of them instead. Instead,
I'm a Scream baby.
The
golden age of meta teen horror didn't just die off after those first two
movies, either. Scream 2 managed to
pull off the impossible — it took everything that Scream did right and pushed it even further. By making Scream a movie-within-a-movie (Stab) in that brilliant opening
sequence, it managed to comment on horror in a fresh and even more meta way. And it had Sarah Michelle
Gellar as ill-fated sorority girl Cici Cooper in the film's best kill — by this
time, I'd learned to manage my expectations and not cry every time Buffy died
in a horror movie, especially since they'd shown her thrown off a balcony in
the trailer.
Kevin
Williamson also scored with Halloween:
H2O, which brought Jamie Lee Curtis back to breathe life into a dormant
franchise. (It worked, but just for this one entry.) And then there was The Faculty, his script about aliens
taking over a high school. All of these movies consisted of clever quips and
sexy cast members (many from my favorite WB shows of the era). There were
imitators, of course, as well — like Urban
Legend, a so-so copycat of the early Williamson films. (You can tell he
didn't write it.) By 1999, the genre had circled back on itself, with not only
the Halloween sequel (featuring a
cameo from Curtis' mom, Janet Leigh) but also Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot
remake of the granddaddy of it all, the first slasher flick ever — Psycho.
And
then the inevitable happened. Horror movies got dumb again. At first, they were
dumb dressed up as smart, and then they were plain ol' stupid.
What
happened? The same thing that happens to every trend. Too many people catch on,
so the trendsetters abandon it for something else. Too many Xeroxes of a sharp
original. People try to imitate it faster, cheaper, and with less skill. And
Kevin Williamson can only do so much.
The Blair Witch Project happened, and found footage was born. The Sixth Sense happened, and suddenly
every movie needed a crazy twist ending.
The Ring happened, and they fucking killed Buffy again. New trends in
horror were born, and Scream and its
ilk were strangled. Scream 3, written
by Ehren Kruger, had some clever set pieces, competent direction by Wes Craven,
and a hilarious role for Parker Posey, but the Williamson spark was sadly
absent. I Still Know What You Did Last
Summer carried on Jaws: The Revenge's
godawful tradition of villains following their victims to the Bahamas.
Meanwhile, Joss Whedon moved into sci-fi TV territory, while Kevin Williamson
went on to write... a vampire show, of all things. I guess it's hard to keep
spinning the same genre year after year.
It's
rare, these days, that I go see a horror movie in theaters. What would I see? Paranormal Activity 8? Saw XXV? Or one of those fucking Exorcist rip-offs that seem to come out
twice a year? The last two horror films I saw in theaters were Scream 4 and The Cabin In The Woods, of course, because there still just isn't
any substitute for the masters. (Okay, neo-masters. You can stop rolling in
your grave now, Mr. Hitchcock.) They weren't perfect, but they scratched a
certain 90's horror nostalgia itch.
Alas,
meta isn't what it used to be — and it's true, we always glorify the treasures
of your youth far above their deserved elevation. Maybe if I'd been older and a
little wiser, Scream wouldn't have
thrilled me so. Even back then, I knew I
Know What You Did Last Summer kinda falls apart at the end. (The unmasking
of the killer always makes the final
showdown less frightening.)
Yet
I still watch them, and they're still just as good. Because unlike teenagers
who drink and have sex, a good movie never dies.
Or
if it does, it comes back for the sequel.
so what would horror have to be to bring back that same feeling we all felt in the 90s with Kevin Williamson and Joss Whedon?
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