While the revenge slasher didn’t begin with I Know What You Did Last Summer, it did renew interest in the concept. And not just in Hollywood; film industries abroad also wanted to cash in on this get-in-get-out kind of horror format back then. Scream, as innovative and revitalizing as it is, wasn’t the easiest movie to echo or translate overseas, but Jim Gillespie and Kevin Williamson’s 1997 collaboration was prime for copycats. Anyone who’s seen enough of these familiarly plotted outings knows the ratio of copying isn’t quite 1:1, but there’s no mistaking the source of inspiration.
One of the earlier, and perhaps more recognized, I Know What You Did Last Summer “ripoffs” is from a region that wasn’t exactly known for its slashers. At least not yet. Prior to South Korea’s cinematic renaissance, which began in the late 1990s, the government put limits on content and artistic expression. Even the removal of dictator Park Chung Hee didn’t completely fix the problem of censorship; a succeeding leader eased up on the restrictions, but only as a way to distract citizens from other issues. Nevertheless, this period generated a flux of lurid media, some of which were horror.
Once constraints on filmmaking were more mitigated, Korean horror acted on its creative independence by trying out new styles. This led to a short run of homegrown slashers in 2000, starting with Harpy, Nightmare and Bloody Beach. No less than two of these three movies operated on revenge-driven murders like I Know What You Did Last Summer, however, it was the nail in this rapidly cooling trend’s coffin, The Record, that is the most blatant with its imitation.
Image: One of the killer’s targets in The Record (2000) needs to turn around…
South Korea has a habit of saving horror releases for the summer, and in 2000, the season was marked with a slasher spree. The last of this surge, Kim Ki-hun’s The Record, delivered ideas lifted from I Know What You Did Last Summer, but unless Koreans had already seen that film, they might not have been aware of any emulation. Nevertheless, horror is a genre that’s especially prone to eating its own, so to speak. South Korean horror, on the other hand, wasn’t packed to the brim with slashers like in American horror. This fact likely helped The Record stand out and appear fresh, if not a little confusing, for domestic audiences.
Mimicry aside, The Record—whose native title translates to “If you get caught, you die”—tolerably handles its distillation of I Know What You Did Last Summer. There’s simply not a lot of room for asides or cool-downs once the inciting incident does happen and the threat surfaces. The sillier, school-set first act promises nothing too foreboding up until the brutal “prank” that sends the class outcast to an early grave. Maybe the strangest part about murdering poor Sung-wook (Lee Yeong-ho) was the motivation behind the killer joke; Sung-wook’s classmates were fed up with his allergies, of all things. Even still, they didn’t mean to stab him to death during a faked home invasion and snuff film. But, they did mean to light his corpse on fire upon making their “take this to the grave” pact. What the characters and viewers alike didn’t expect was the blazing Sung-wook to spring to life and jump off a nearby cliff.
A year goes by, and it seems as if the heinous crime had little impact on the main characters. They’re too concerned with college entrance exams. It’s only once Sung-wook’s sister (Uhm Ji-won) comes sniffing around about her missing brother that the perpetrators care. From there the movie spins into a blatant slasher routine that’s redeemed by its quick pacing and cheap thrills. The outcome is another positive; The Record makes good on its false ending and turns in an even better, more exciting conclusion. The requisite “no one can survive”-type epilogue reinstates the home video motif from before, along with sudden commentary about the opportunistic boom of Korean slashers.
The Record was both a box-office and critical failure in its homeland, and with the exceptions of future star Han Chae-young and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon (Oldboy, Stoker, Last Night in Soho, The Running Man), it didn’t amount to many big career breaks. And funnily enough, some Koreans found the movie to be too Westernized. So it’s no wonder this slasher craze was short-lived.
Image: The cast of Kucch to Hai (2003).
Although the directors of 2003’s Kucch to Hai (translation: “There is something”) played down the remakeness of their movie, they did admit to aping scenes from I Know What You Did Last Summer. However, Anil V. Kumar and Anurag Basu definitely saw the sequel too, because the opening of this Bollywood musical and whodunit is straight up taken from Danny Cannon’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Kucch to Hai opens on star Esha Deol waking up from her nightmare about a close call in church.
For the most part, Kucch to Hai does its own thing. And to an outsider of Bollywood cinema, that thing may be seen as bizarre; the combination of musicals and horror isn’t unheard of, but no one in the West is mixing these genres like Bollywood. After the cold open, though, the story’s horror aspect is sporadic and a tad underfed. There’s mention of a returning professor (Rishi Kapoor) who is rumored to have killed his wife, and an unlucky dorm resident pays dearly for his bad timing. Yet the impelling accident often found in these revenge stories doesn’t even occur here until an hour into the movie. Before then, a handful of vibrant, upbeat and oft-catchy filmi sequences pad the beginning. The tones indeed clash with a bang, but not as much as expected. The more valid complaint is how fleeting the horror parts are compared to the music numbers. Of course, the major appeal in movies like Kucch to Hai is the flashy performances, not the killing.
For the horror heads possibly losing their patience, the characters do eventually commit their consequential hit-and-run, then go their separate ways before later reuniting for an ill-fated destination wedding. Drops of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer trickle in again as the wedding party is, at long last, picked off at a snowy, mountainside resort. Those who have seen Kucch to Hai might find that the culprit’s unmasking is more sad than satisfying, on account of how tragic it all ended, and that opinion rings truer as the movie follows with an awkward “and they lived happily ever after” sort of add-on.
Kucch to Hai is a mostly entertaining, as well as immersive, method of learning how other film industries, particularly those not in the West, interpret Hollywood. The select pinching from the I Know franchise, and even a bit from 1998’s Urban Legend, is really only a fraction of an otherwise original production. It’s a stylish spectacle, like so many Bollywood slashers, that has to be seen to be believed.
Image: The hazing is out of control in Scream Week (2016).
The bloodline of slashers courses through 2016’s Scream Week (originally Sneekweek), a Dutch stab at not only I Know What You Did Last Summer, but also that movie’s own genre sires: Terror Train and The House on Sorority Row. In this murder-mystery, which was billed as a horror-comedy, a fraternity hazing ritual ends with a dead pledge. The parties involved naturally lie about the cause of his accidental death so they can escape a harsher punishment. Two years later, the characters then get their comeuppance as they vacation in Sneek.
Martijn Heijne’s movie is a latecomer, as far as I Know-esque movies go, but slasher gluttons can never get their fill, even if the meal is as average as Scream Week. There are no great surprises to be found in this “Nederslasher”; it’s Sorority Row—either version—mixed with I (Still) Know What You Did Last Summer all the way. That said, the humor, solid production values, and decent body count keep this ship from sinking. And after far too much party footage and too little horror in the first half, it would seem like Scream Week is destined to go down.
Scream Week offers a straightforward story yet also runs the risk of wearing out its welcome before anything of note happens. As mentioned above, the supplementary party scenes mar, not enhance, the total experience. Trimming down that nearly two-hours runtime to something reasonable—for this breed of movie—would have been beneficial for everyone. However, if looking past the bloated length and jagged pacing is still feasible, and no one’s already tapped out at this point, the last leg of Scream Week is quite fun. By no means does it reinvent the slasher genre; pretty much everything here has been done before and better. It’s just now that the movie is finally acting on its slasher element, and that awakening is a joy to watch.
The sea of slashers is extensive if international waters are included. There is always that new movie waiting to be discovered, and in certain cases, the search is worthwhile. They may not be as comforting or familiar as the “slashics” and go-tos, but universal tropes, like masked killers and revenge plots, can make the transition easier.
Image: Marly van der Velden just got nailed in Scream Week (2016).