Horror Used to Be Trashy, And That Was the Point
Once upon a time, horror didn’t come with a thesis. It came with a mask, a sharp object, and a lot of bad decisions made by people in tank tops.
The 80s gave us Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Halloween movies, and about 200 films where teenagers forgot how to lock doors. Then came the 90s, when Scream brought self-awareness to the genre, much like a final girl bringing a knife to a party. It didn’t kill the fun - it sharpened it. Slashers got shinier, better dressed, and more sarcastic. I Know What You Did Last Summer was part of that golden window: scary enough to work, dumb enough to enjoy, and sexy enough to remember.
It wasn’t prestige. It was popcorn. And that was its strength.
The Reboots Are All Trauma, No Thrill
Then came the reboots. And the streaming series. And the “trauma is the real monster” subplots that made everything feel like a sad group therapy session wrapped in moody lighting.
The 2021 Amazon reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer attempted to delve deeper. Darker tone, “edgy” characters, layers of family dysfunction. And it bombed. Not because horror can’t be deep, but because this franchise was never meant to be.
You can’t turn I Know What You Did Last Summer into something it’s not. The original wasn’t deep. It was glossy, chaotic, and a little bit dumb in the best way. A hook-wielding killer chasing down guilty teens wasn’t meant to spark existential dread. It was meant to make you scream, laugh, and maybe think twice about summer road trips. That’s the magic. You can update the cast, the style, even the setting, but once you start taking it too seriously, you miss the point.
At Least We’re Back to Slashers, Not Sad Ghosts
Look, I’ll take an over-polished reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer over another haunted Victorian house with a cursed mirror and a whispering child named Elias.
For the past decade, horror has been obsessed with elevated grief. Ghosts aren’t just ghosts. They’re metaphors for generational trauma. Possessions are metaphors for abuse. Demons are metaphors for capitalism. And that’s fine for a while. But somewhere between Hereditary and The Conjuring 27: Haunted Dishwasher, we forgot how to have fun.
Slashers were never meant to heal us. They were intended to punish bad decisions, make us scream, and then let us go home happy. They were campfire stories in movie form. And while most of the new reboot attempts miss the tone completely, the fact that studios are finally dusting off slashers again at all means something: we’re moving away from sad ghosts and back toward stupid, sweaty fear. And that’s a win.
I Don’t Need Another Confession. I Just Want a Decent Scare
Horror doesn’t always need to be elevated. Sometimes it just needs to be fun. A good scare, a ridiculous villain, some foggy coastline, and a cast of beautiful people making bad decisions. That’s what made the '90s slashers iconic. They weren’t trying to win awards - they were just trying to make you jump and laugh and maybe sleep with the lights on.
So no, I don’t need another reminder of what you did last summer.
I need studios to remember why we watched in the first place.
