How ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Deconstructs Cinema’s Love/Hate Relationship With Legacy Sequel Nostalgia

“Nostalgia is overrated.”

Warning: This feature has HEAVY SPOILERS for 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Pop culture has reached a dangerous inflection point where everything old is new again. It’s no longer enough to franchise out IP and reboot beloved classics, but the past decade has been rich in legacy sequels that are largely dependent on the power of nostalgia. There are so many hollow legacy sequels that coast on inauthentic sentimentality that cinema has reached a point where these franchise extensions feel inevitable, rather than exciting. Legacy horror sequels like Exorcist: Believer, Halloween Ends, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) hit diminishing returns. A project like a new I Know What You Did Last Summer almost seems set up to fail by this metric, yet Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s movie becomes a powerful commentary on the benefits and dangers of nostalgia. A narrative tug-of-war takes over the film and transforms it into a surprisingly insightful meditation on legacy sequels and fan service with a meta angle that would make Kevin Williamson proud.

A legacy sequel’s premise and how it handles its new characters versus legacy figures is often a helpful way to determine the project’s sincerity. Countless legacy sequels make its new characters related to the OG crew or bend over backwards to connect dots that will always feel implausible. 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer copies the template of the original when five friends’ recklessness leads to a car crash and manslaughter. However, even at this point there are clever attempts to subvert the nature of this opening tragedy. Numerous fake-outs take place that tease fans of the original movie who are expecting the exact same events to go down. Early on, I Know What You Did Last Summer establishes that it will zig when the audience expects it to zag. 

Similarly, it would be so easy to make Danica Richards (Madelyn Cline) or Ava Brooks (Chase Sui Wonders) the daughter of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie James and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Ray Bronson. It’d be ridiculous, but lazier legacy sequels have conditioned such an expectation. I Know What You Did Last Summer shows surprising restraint in this department. It doesn’t succumb to these pitfalls and instead adopts a very progressive approach to legacy sequels. Julie, Ray, and none of the original cast are even mentioned within the film’s first half-hour. If anything, it seems to actively be against the idea of hollow nostalgia and force-feeding fan service through some expository prologue.

Once the bodies start to mount around Danica and Ava, the legacy characters and references to the original begin, but in a manner that still feels natural to the story and these characters. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer honors the original cast in clever ways, like a true crime podcast that touches on the 1997 Southport massacre, Barry Cox’s headstone, and Etsy murder merch that gets the face of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Helen Shivers on one of the characters who is attacked by the killer in the same place where Gellar’s Helen was killed. It’s an inspired way for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer to riff on the original and even have Helen relive her murder, so to speak. It’s a smart device that plays by the film’s rules.

Curiously, I Know What You Did Last Summer slowly becomes more gratuitous and succumbs to the very shortcomings that it did such a good job avoiding up until this point. The legacy sequel shifts from a movie that trusts its audience to literally splicing in scenes from the original so that there’s no possible confusion. There are even tongue-in-cheek gags about the sequel that wink at fans instead of a more subtle approach. Julie and Ray are eventually incorporated into this story, but in a manner that makes sense and continues to reflect restraint. However, the legacy sequel reaches a point where Sarah Michelle Gellar actually makes an extended cameo during a completely unnecessary dream sequence in a film that doesn’t have any other dream sequences. I Know What You Did Last Summer already featured its Helen Shivers fan service, and gracefully at that. This is just putting a tiara on a tiara here. Only one of these moments is necessary.

This pattern continues as the film reaches its endgame and I Know What You Did Last Summer even resorts to Julie James screaming “What are you waiting for?!” – her most iconic line from the original movie – as it waits for the audience to cheer. It’s a moment that’s a complete 180 from the version of this film that barely features Julie or any references to 1997. Julie and Ray transform from passive, ancillary characters into legacy figures who are forced to repeat the past. This culminates in a truly outrageous post-credit scene where Brandy Norwood’s Karla Wilson from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer appears and Julie recruits her for what’s basically the Slasher Initiative. You’re practically expecting the duo to perform some voodoo witchcraft and resurrect Ryan Phillipe’s corpse so Zombie Barry will be along for the ride in the sequel.

The schism that occurs in I Know What You Did Last Summer between a legacy sequel with restraint that chastises nostalgia and one that’s overly-indulgent in fan service and lost in the past is jarring, but part of the film’s point. Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Ray Bronson is revealed to be the film’s killer, but his motive stems from his fear and anger over his past being erased. Southport hasn’t just moved on from its ‘90s slasher spree, but it’s actively buried it and scrubbed it from the records. It’s hard not to draw parallels between Ray’s 1997 Southport tragedy being forgotten and I Know What You Did Last Summer being discarded as a viable horror franchise and deemed disposable by a direct-to-video sequel, a forgotten 2021 Amazon Prime Video series, and numerous unproduced sequels and reboots that were stuck in development hell. Ray is driven by nostalgia and a desire to make people remember his past – a narrative that’s applicable to Ray the character, but also Freddie Prinze Jr. the actor. The reason that the movie’s heavy-handed nostalgia doesn’t kick in until the murders start is because this is when Ray’s actions start to control the story. His desire for relevancy and for 1997’s massacre to be remembered – even if it needs to be forced upon the world – takes over.

This idea shares some similarities with the message from 2022’s Scream – one of the more successful legacy sequels – but I Know What You Did Last Summer ultimately takes it in a very different direction. Both propulsive characters are motivated through a disappointment over how the past is being treated and a compulsion to “fix this” and prove the opposition wrong. It’s interesting that these are both legacy sequels that have the same name as their original and use the reflexivity of this to say something deeper about their films’ characters.

Last Summer’s final act devolves into messy fan service that’s triggered through Ray’s domination over the narrative. However, Ray is ultimately foiled by Julie, a character who actively pushes the message that “nostalgia is overrated,” has moved away from Southport, and channeled her trauma into helping others. Julie has repressed her past to some extent, but still manages to turn it into productive output for not just herself, but her students. Julie doesn’t let her past control her; she controls it. Alternatively, Ray is stuck in the past, living in the same place, and so desperate to rekindle nostalgia and become relevant again that he latches onto Stevie Ward’s (Sarah Pigeon) trauma and turns it into an opportunity to make this his story. Ray uses his past to inform Stevie’s playbook in the present and, when the dust settles, he’s the mastermind who has co-opted this next-gen character to be his minion and an arbiter of the past. Admittedly, Ray is dead when the film ends, but his accomplice is still at large and carrying on his legacy. It wouldn’t even be that surprising if Stevie were literally haunted by Ray in any future sequels.

I Know What You Did Last Summer sets up dueling paths for its future. Its two new heroes, Danica and Ava both survive and make a murder pact to take out Stevie before she gets them. However, this also appears to be in conflict with the fan service post-credit scene that sets up Karla and Julie as the sequel’s head murderistas. In all likelihood, any potential sequel will feature both generations of killers overlapping as everyone works together, while fan service and nostalgia cooperates with new characters and ideas to create something original. One would presume that such a sequel will continue to be a gonzo expansion of this universe that has its cake and eats it too between these two sets of characters. There’s likely to be new revelations and even more gratuitous returns to the past. 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer is deeply flawed, but this legacy sequel revival acts as a proof of concept that such a reflexive approach to nostalgia and fan service can work. There just needs to be a method to the madness.

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