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, land and sea. The seaside gothic is a subgenre within Gothic literature and film, which uses coastal landscapes to explore ideas regarding liminality, isolation, memory, and the return of the past and the repressed. According to Angie Spoto, author of ‘Defining the seaside gothic in British fiction’ (2022) ‘The seaside is a place where past and present collide, where ghosts walk and memories haunt. In Gothic literature, the shore is filled with ghosts, maybe because the sea is swimming with memories [...] There is something very Gothic about the seaside; the shore is an in-between space, an undefined boundary onto which the past is delivered.’ Seb Reilly, the editor of Seaside Gothic Magazine, suggests there are three criteria that define works of seaside gothic: it is led by emotion, not reason; it addresses duality; it connects to the edge.

While Duncan’s novel is set in New Mexico, near the Sabola National Forest, Williamson was inspired to relocate the story to a small coastal fishing town like the one where he grew up in North Carolina. This seaside location not only imbues the film with an unusual, maritime atmosphere, it serves to underpin the idea of a purgatorial space in which the characters manoeuvre. It’s within this liminal space the characters wrangle with isolation and guilt, frozen in time, unable to disentangle themselves from the past. It’s not the only time Williamson has set stories in locations beside bodies of water: Dawson’s Creek (1998 – 2003) and The Waterfront (2025) are both set in small towns by the sea. In her article ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’ (2017) Emily Alder describes the sea as a ‘repository of the past […] a field on which our human politics and struggles are so often enacted and thus containing shipwrecks, bodies, bones, and secrets the sea becomes a vessel of history.’ This vessel holds memory and that which is hidden, and with the turning of the tide, it is also a place where the hidden is dredged up from the depths, remembered, no longer unseen. The past within the present. As Anne Rice suggests in The Queen of the Damned (1988), ‘Real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts […]; they have to do with the menace of memory.’ The friends are haunted by the memory of their actions, carried to them on the sound of the sea, the keeper of their dark secret, and their proximity to which connotes their limited options and swelling desperation. While their guilt has forced them to the very peripheries of community and belonging, it is not only their fragile psychological state which traps them between that which they cannot move on from, and that which they fear is to come, but the physical location of the story, their small coastal hometown. The liminal spaces they wander through - both physical and emotional - ensure they are caught between the devil and the deep, dark sea, with nowhere to go.

The sea seeps into every aspect of their lives, and seaside motifs and imagery speckle the narrative: the fish-shaped floats of the 4th of July parade, the large sailfish hanging in the department store, Helen’s Croaker Queen seashell throne and crown adorned with glittering seahorses. The killer is a fisherman, intrinsically linked to the sea. Clad in a long, dark slicker and rainhat he also wields a large hook, connotative of his intentions to catch, land and gut his prey. His formidable silhouette is rooted in seaside legends and maritime ghost stories. When Helen is trapped in the back of the police car, the way she is framed behind the barred partition, and the glimpses of lobster pots stacked in the alley outside the car, convey her hold in the tightening nets cast by her tormentor.

Unlike many slasher films, which are traditionally plot driven, Williamson’s screenplay for I Know What You Did Last Summer is character driven, and the characters within the story are driven by and led by their emotions; predominantly fear, panic and guilt, which ties in with one of Reilly’s main criteria for what constitutes the seaside gothic. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, the tide of fear proves too strong, and their panic leads them to dispel with reason – aside from Julie, who is the only one who wants to report the accident to the police and is the proactive, driving force in trying to discover the killer’s identity. As a result, the friends become guilt-wracked, they are cut adrift into a space of uncertainty, floundering in paranoia and terror. The killer completely engulfs their lives, coming out of nowhere like a freak wave and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. The night Julie receives the note stating, “I know what you did last summer”, her sense of impending doom is heightened by the sounds of a brewing storm outside her house. A low wind moans and curtains billow as she sits alone in the dark. In the distance, the sound of the sea is carried to her on the salty night air.

A dark duality begins to emerge, as the quaint coastal community is rendered a place of bloody secrets, and the threat of violence lurks behind white picket fences and pretty boats bobbing in the bay. We view the town and surrounding coast through a touristic gaze, scenic and charming, however, in the dark of night, it becomes a space of menace and danger. A sense of decay – a predominant theme in works of Gothic fiction - is suggested, not only in the disintegration of the group’s friendship, but of the town itself, with its dwindling fishing industry, as Julie’s mother sighs ‘It’s been a bad season.’ Fishing is the lifeblood of the community. The townsfolk depend on the sea for sustenance and income. The duality of the sea itself, by turns life-giving and life-threatening, ripples throughout the story. The characters have grown up beside it, swam in its waters, partied on its beaches. It has swallowed their secret and then betrayed them, casting it forth from the brine back to the shore. Prior to the accident, the friends, who have recently graduated from high school, sit around a campfire in a secluded cove, the roaring surf at their backs, the fire-glow on their hopeful faces, sharing plans and dreams for a future they believe to be neatly charted before them. The moment conveys their sheltered lives, buttressed by the bay and the security they feel in their future plans. After the accident, observed only by the sea, calm gives way to storm, they become unanchored, engulfed by the abyss.

The story climaxes at sea, with Julie and Ray trapped onboard the killer’s trawler. No longer on solid ground, they are in his territory, with everything they knew fading, along with the twinkling lights of the marina, into the black of the night-sea. As Angie Spoto notes, ‘The sea contains history […] water has memory.’ The very presence of the sea in I Know What You Did Last Summer is a constant reflection of the guilt festering within the minds of the main characters – it is where they tried to conceal their transgression, a veritable undertow pulling them further away from the shore. It speaks of the emotional turmoil raging beneath the surface of each of them. As Spoto suggests: ‘The sea seems to dredge up that which we’d rather keep hidden […] the past, history, traumas, ghosts and memory [are] confined within the sea and revealed to us as an unwelcome gift that we are forced to confront.’ Ultimately, it denies Julie and Ray any sense of closure or redemption; it once again consumes the body of the killer, therefore withholding any sense of finality or closure, once again marooning them in a space of phantoms and memories. Until the sequel…

In I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), survivor Julie embarks on a holiday to the Bahamas with her friends Karla (Brandy Norwood), Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer) and Will (Matthew Settle). Shortly after they arrive, the bodies start piling up, but no one believes Julie when she insists it is the fisherman who has returned to finalise his bloody vengeance. Williamson wasn’t involved with the sequel (it was written by Trey Callaway), however the Seaside Gothic of the first film echoes throughout the follow-up, and is given a Tropical Gothic twist, with its Caribbean Island setting, hints of voodoo ritualism and the figure of Ben Willis returning, zombie-like, refusing to die, driven solely by his bloody intent to kill. In their article Tropicalizing Gothic (2016) Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos note: 'Traditionally, the tropical world has been synonymous with extravagance and excess; it resonates with sensuality and exoticism, while it is simultaneously riddled with [...] lurking dangers. In early colonial times, the tropics were seen as an empty and unknown territory, a space not yet filled by colonization and thus a realm of disorder, barbarism and savagery. It was often described as the land of the devil.' The tropical island setting not only serves as an atmospheric location for the action, but deftly conveys the isolation of the characters. A bridge between past and present, surrounded by the sea, the island conjures ideas of displacement and forgotten history, and, like the motives of certain characters and the foundations of the very ground on which they tread, much of it is submerged and ultimately unknowable.

Helen’s Croaker Queen seashell throne reappears in I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

A third instalment was released straight to DVD in 2006. I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer featured a new cast of characters menaced by a spectral fisherman in, bizarrely, landlocked Colorado. It bore no connections with the previous entries beyond featuring the ghost of Ben Willis who has become a wraith, terrorizing teens who try to cover up fatal mistakes.

Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the legacy sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) emerges as a nostalgic love letter to the original film and its sequel. The seaside Gothic of the original ripples to the fore again in the coastal setting - the same small town as the original film - and its central theme of the past returning to haunt the present. Even though things have changed in Southport, despite all the financial investment, gentrification and attempts to cover-up the town's bloody past, some things never change. The film unspools as an updated re-tread, introducing a whole new cast of characters who make a fatal error and try to cover it up, only to become haunted and consumed by it, eventually turning to survivors Julie and Ray for help. The production design also calls back to the original film with the recreation of certain set-pieces and the reappearance of various props, including Helen’s Croaker Queen seashell throne, like spectral snapshots from the past.  

In all but the landlocked third film of the I Know What You Did Last Summer series, coastal settings serve to evoke the purgatorial plight of the characters as they navigate guilt, trauma and ghosts of the past. The seaside backdrops become literal manifestations of their inability to escape the past; liminal, betwixt and between spaces where they are stranded by fear and guilt. The presence of the sea is a reminder of their misdeeds and how, in classic Gothic fashion, that which is repressed will eventually return to torment and consume. A past from which one can never escape. A place of no longer and not yet.