Editorials
Twenty Years Later, Let’s Revisit ‘I Still Know What You Did Last Summer’
Released this week in November 1998, the Danny Cannon-directed I Still Know What You Did Last Summer arrived just after October but before the holidays truly began, a release date that sums up the movie at its core: a sugary and nutrition-free piece of leftover Halloween candy. When my mom took me to see it on opening night, I loved it. But 20 years and some taste developments later, its cracks show even more glaringly than those of its predecessor. While neither are “good” movies, necessarily, I Still Know is wildly flimsier than its ’97 parent.
So how does it hold up (or does it even), 20 years later?
While I Still Know fulfills the three rules Randy Meeks lays out in the movie’s closest contemporary, Scream 2 — bigger body count, more elaborate deaths and a near-superhuman killer — it also utilizes (and stumbles on) some other sequel rules. In some of the same ways The Strangers: Prey At Night did earlier this year, I Still Know follows up its slightly bleaker and more serious forefather by going in a slightly campier direction. This isn’t to say the movie knows it’s being campy, but it is, in spades, either to its benefit or detriment, depending what you like. Within the first 35 minutes, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has a Nightmare On Elm Street-style in-class freakout, is introduced to Jack Black’s cringe-worthy Jamaican character, and hallucinates seeing the Fisherman in a bumping nightclub. And I could write an entire book on the fact that the Fisherman programs the words “I STILL KNOW” into the lyrics on a karaoke machine. Chef’s kiss. Honestly, I’m not interested in a sequel that isn’t slightly camp. The best ones are.
Like Scream 2, I Still Know offers a much more diverse cast and also focuses on how traumatic events have affected the first film’s main survivor. In many ways, it does it better. In place of a charming and beautiful Sarah Michelle Gellar and a tempestuous and beautiful Ryan Phillippe, the movie introduces the gorgeous and magnetic late 90s duo of Brandy and Mekhi Phifer. Much as Helen and Barry suck up the screen in I Know, Julie is once again upstaged by the witticisms and coolness of Carla and (thankfully, less abusery) volatility of Tyrell.
Slasher sequels rarely get characters right — and I’m including my beloved Scream 2 in this basket — but I Still Know gives us fresh new characters and also delves further into the after-affects of the first film on the Final Girl. For all of the “survivor navigates trauma” posturing that occurred during the press tour for the newest Halloween movie, the movie didn’t actually touch upon it in any real way. Scream 2 Sidney, meanwhile, seems to have all but dealt with (or at least to have successfully shut away) any residual trauma and is enjoying college life with new friends and a new boyfriend. Julie, on the other hand, is plagued by nightmares, has become a shut-in and is dangling over failing out of school by a thread. By movie’s end, we see Julie back to a happy life back with Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) but ultimately unable to ever fully put away the horrors of what has happened to her.
The movie’s setting also lends itself to the big tonal shift between the first and second movies. While the first film took place in a coastal town in the dead of dry summer, the sequel relocates the cast to a tropical island in the middle of hurricane season. This lush, paradisiacal backdrop quickly turns into a canopy of doom for the characters and helps I Still Know set itself apart both stylistically and tonally from the first movie. In some of the same ways that Alien and Aliens are two different flavors (please excuse the comparisons of those two movies to either of these), I Know and I Still Know operate on complimentary but different planes. I Know feels claustrophobic and intimate, as if the characters are being watched from cut-out eyeholes in paintings on the walls. It feels like a horror movie. I Still Know, on the other hand, feels wide and expansive, as if the characters are being watched from the clouds above by some wrathful god. While higher in deaths, it’s shorter on scares and again, to invoke Alien/Aliens, feels like a transition from horror to thriller/action. Even Aliens’ tagline works here: “This Time It’s War.”
In her quest for survival, Julie rises from the innocuous (and boring) smart girl of the first movie to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s best version of a Julie James-Ellen Ripley. I Still Know Julie isn’t scared, she’s mad. As the terror builds to finale, Julie brandishes an axe, hisses through a “tough face”, and ultimately finishes the Fisherman by pelting him with bullets, grunting “JUST. FUCKING. DIE.” No Sigourney or even a Laurie in Halloween: H20, but definitely the most interesting and powerful that character ever was.
The movie is ultimately not successful, due to too many loose plot holes, coincidences, bad side-characters and completely brainless occurrences. It’s a movie that asks us to believe that Ben Willis/the Fisherman recruited his bland son to assume the name of Will Benson — get it? BEN’S SON — and enroll in Julie’s college, befriend her and her friends and pretend to like her, all so that father and son could fake a radio station giveaway to get Julie onto a remote island and kill her. This is so elaborate and unnecessary that it either ruins the movie for you or — as in my case — is part of the appeal.
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is frothy and over-the-top and mostly fun. It manages to be only just good enough to be remembered, if only for nostalgia’s sake. It’s not quite good, but it is a good-bad sequel. And sometimes, that’s just enough.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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