57 pages • 1 hour read
Lois DuncanI Know What You Did Last Summer
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: American Wars
The novel’s original version was set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which was changed to the Iraq War for modern audiences. In the Q&A at the end of the book, Duncan states,
[…] No matter where we are in history, we’re probably going to have a war, and all you have to do is change the name of the war and you’ve got the same story. I see very few differences between then and now—these are unpopular wars that many people feel we should not be or should not have been involved in [...]. Here it transferred automatically into another war, and that’s a pretty horrible thing to think about (206).
This is not the first work in which America’s many wars have been transposed to benefit audience sensibilities. M*A*S*H—the movie and the television show— featured the Korean War as its setting. This allowed it to express anti-war sentiments in popular fiction against the contentious Vietnam War, only one year before the first publication of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The ongoing nature of America’s involvement in wars is highlighted in both editions of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Bud/Collie, the antagonist, is a veteran of one of the many conflicts of the last 50 years, despite being a peer of the protagonist and her friends, who are getting ready to start their lives. The Korean War is unfinished, ended by an armistice rather than a treaty, and the earliest elements of the Vietnam War began before the armistice in Korea. While the Vietnam War was ongoing, the United States government staged the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion. At the time of this writing, February 2023, the United States has armed forces deployed in both Niger and Syria, complex conflicts eclipsed in the media by the Russo-Ukrainian War. The latter war is even more complex, with partisan protests on the sides of intervention, nonintervention, and increased support for the Ukrainian government regularly making the news.
Cultural Context: Movie and Television Adaptations
In 1997, Kevin Williamson adapted I Know What You Did Last Summer into a screenplay. Williamson wrote the highly successful Scream movie, released in 1996, and the teen television shows Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries. While producer Stokely Chaffin is the one who chose Duncan’s novel, which was once recommended to her by a librarian, the more famous producer of I Know What You Did Last Summer is Erik Feig. Feig went on to produce many successful young adult novel movie adaptations, including Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Divergent. The movie I Know What You Did Last Summer began the trend of adapting YA novels into blockbuster films and helped revive the 1980s style of slasher films.
The movie version diverges wildly from Duncan’s novel, drawing upon slasher films from the 1980s, such as Prom Night. Williamson included the urban legend of “The Hook,” about a man with a hook hand, and moved the location from New Mexico to North Carolina’s coast. In the movie, many of the teens die, killed by a mysterious fisherman who is revealed to be the father of the car accident victim. In the novel, the antagonist is the victim’s half-brother and has dual identities. These changes were shocking to Duncan, who had a history of trauma related to the real-life murder of her daughter in 1989.
The movie’s success led to two sequels: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006). In 2021, a television adaptation aired on Amazon Prime Video. Its screenplay, written by Sara Goodman, does include teens killing someone in a car accident. However, it diverges even more wildly from the novel than the original screenplay, including changing the characters’ names, changing the location to Oahu, and adding twins who switch identities. One of the twins is killed in the accident, and the other becomes the protagonist.
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