Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The Seaside Gothic of I Know What You Did Last Summer
With its themes of the past returning to haunt the present, emotional and psychological turmoil, the exhumation of dark secrets, and bloody revenge from beyond the grave, teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is deeply entrenched in the Gothic. Based on the YA novel by Lois Duncan, and adapted for the screen by Kevin Williamson, it tells of four teenaged friends – Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe) - who, one year after dumping a body into the murky depths of the sea to cover up their involvement in an apparently fatal car accident, find themselves stalked by a mysterious fisherman wielding a large hook. From its opening images of surf crashing upon a rugged coastline to its tautly knotted climax aboard a fishing boat, I Know What You Did Last Summer is also awash with aesthetic and thematic notions of the ‘seaside gothic’, as it contemplates the shifting boundaries between past and present, l...