Years following the release of the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, the book adaptation’s author, Lois Duncan, was notably “horrified” with the “sensationalized violence” the film had.
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In his new book, Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie, author Clark Collin states that Duncan was “unaware” of the changes made to her 1973 novel before seeing the 1997 slasher film.
Duncan’s book follows four teenagers who accidentally kill a cyclist and cover up the death. The group is then taunted and blackmailed by a mysterious figure who knows what happened one year later.
Inspired by the book, the I Know What You Did Last Summer screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, made some changes to the story. The mysterious figure was changed to a “fisherman” to create the franchise’s iconic killer.
Williamson told Collin that he was also inspired by his hometown, which was a “fishing community in North Carolina.”
“I went to my dad, and he walked me around the boat, and he showed me the A-frame, and how someone would be jerked up to the top,” he explained, per the book’s excerpt obtained by Variety. “Then I wrote it, and he went, ‘Kevin, that would never happen.’ I said, ‘Yes, but it’s in the movie, Dad.'”
Williamson also said that he did a series of rewrites, which included changes to the film’s ending.
In 2010, Duncan was vocal about the changes. “It was my characters and my plot gimmick,” she said during a Q&A session with young adult author Barry Lyga. “But then it went in all directions.”
“I was quite horrified by the sensational violence,” the author continued.
The I Know What You Did Last Summer Author Experienced Horrific Tragedy in Her Personal Life
Continuing to speak out about the sensational violence the film created, Duncan reflected on her own personal life tragedy.
“Several years earlier, my own teenage daughter, Kait, had been chased down in her car and shot to death,” she said. “And I had seen, right in front of my eyes, what real violence is. To have people screaming and laughing about it did not go down well.”
Although she was “not happy” with the film, Duncan did admit she was “happy with the fact that the book had been made into a movie.”
“Because that made all my backlist suddenly very popular,” she explained. “It was like getting a rebirth, but in a very strange way.”
Her daughter, Kaitlin Arquette, was killed in 1989 while she was driving home from a friend’s house. She was shot in the head by two bullets. Duncan’s murderer, identified as Paul Apodaca, confessed to the crime in 2021, five years after Duncan’s death. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison in January 2024.
The film’s remake hit theaters on Friday.