I Know What You Did Last Summer, horror sequels and the challenge of nostalgia and newness

The studios know what you did last summer. Or, more accurately, they know what you watched last summer, the summer before that and the summer 28 years ago.

In the perpetual pursuit of bums-on-seats, Hollywood loves to churn out that which has come before. Reboots, remakes, revivals – and requels.

In a requel – a portmanteau of reboot and sequel - it’s not enough to just do a new take on an old movie, you have to incorporate the original continuity, and, if you can sign them, bring back the stars.

There’s a difficult balance of nostalgia and freshness, almost impossible to pull off. The term requel has sometimes being credited to a 2018 YouTube video, but it was the 2022 Scream movie (titled just Scream but the fifth entry in the franchise) that popularised it when one of the characters described it as such. Yeah, yeah, Scream is self-aware, cute.

That’s the harbour in which I Know What You Did Last Summer is swimming.

Sharing the exact title as the 1997 original, an adaptation of a 1973 novel by Lois Duncan, the 2025 version introduces a new generation of characters, played by the new class of Hot Young Things that have primarily made their names in young adult TV shows (Chase Sui Wonders from Generation and City on Fire, Madelyn Cline from Outer Banks and Sarah Pidgeon from The Wilds).

The film follows a group of five young people who are involved in the accidental death of a stranger, and vows to never tell anyone what happened. One year later, one of them receives an ominous threat – “I know what you did last summer” – and soon the bodies start piling up, killed off in gruesome ways by someone dressed in a fisherman’s slicker, wielding a hook.

If you’ve seen the Jennifer Love Hewitt movie, you know that’s the MO of the original film’s killer, and the new movie is directly tied into what happened 28 years earlier, with Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. both returning to reprise their roles as Julie James and Ray Bronson.

It’s the weaving of the old and the new that makes I Know What You Did Last Summer potentially appealing to at least three generations – the younger Gen X-ers and geriatric Millennials who scared themselves silly three decades ago and the Gen Z-ers the 2025 movie is supposed to bring in.

It’s not always successful – the film is not very frightening although there are cheap jump scares that elicit some gasps, but then you feel stupid for feeling anything at all. But you also have to remember that the 1997 movie wasn’t particularly terrifying either.

What’s more interesting about the endeavour is if nostalgia and newness can be held together in the same hand. Can you draw on callbacks, such as Hewitt’s “What are you waiting for” line, but also pepper your script with Gen Z slang without alienating half your audience?

Does anyone under the age of 25 understand the significance of Brandy’s appearance in the mid-credits?

The film is directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and she actually did manage to pull off that balance with her previous movie, Do Revenge, a fun, pop-coloured homage to 1980s and 1990s teen movies. But that was an original story she co-wrote with Celeste Ballard, so it wasn’t beholden to a bunch of existing lore or characters to service.

Scream did this too, bringing back Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette to help out the new generation when Ghostface strikes again, but was the film better for it? Only in the moment, when you get a little ping of excitement at a familiar face, but if you stop to think about it, the story didn’t need it.

The Final Destination series released the sixth instalment earlier this year after a 14-year break and it kept the concept – if you cheat death it will still come for you – but didn’t bring anyone back, largely because this is a franchise in which it kills every previous character. Merciless.

So, it successfully transposed a pretty cool idea onto a new story with a new cast, kept the continuity but didn’t saddle anyone with homework.

The folly is trying to give equal(ish) attention to the original class and the freshmen. At some point, you can’t care about both. When Halloween came lumbering back with a new trilogy in 2018, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode was still the main attraction.

Or take, for example, the 2021 Candyman sequel directed by Nia DaCosta which still exists in the same universe as the original films but with a clear focus on the new characters, and had something fresh to say about racial politics in the current era.

Sure, it was fun to see Hewitt and Prinze Jr roam around their old hunting grounds, and clock the references to Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe’s long-dead characters, but it also takes you out of the movie as your mind wanders back to memories from long ago.

Still on the Gellar train, there’s a Buffy requel coming up in which she is expected to battle demons again, but have the story swing behind a new slayer. Does that incoming, younger character have any shot if the OG is still hanging around?

To I Know What You Did Last Summer’s credit, one of its characters actually said “f—k nostalgia” and the film isn’t afraid to be irreverent.

Some audiences might even cheer in the moment, but the reward is fleeting.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is in cinemas