“I know what you did last summer” series on Amazon – Media

Lipstick messages on mirrors are all-purpose weapons. In romantic comedies like to leave a telephone number or a kiss on their lips, in horror films they have developed into ominous harbingers of the inevitable catastrophe. The mere fact that the perpetrator manages to get into his victim’s bedroom unnoticed and smear the mirror triggers nervous glances over the shoulder.

One of the younger classics of this mirror poetry is the title: “I know what you did last summer” reads the protagonist in the series of the same name, a new edition of the Splatter film from 1997. Here, too, a group of young people is hit and missed after a traffic accident at night , here too someone dies, here too an unknown person follows the group a year later and tries to kill them.

The teenagers have so many problems that the knife killer is actually no longer needed

But that’s where the matches end, because this update takes all sorts of liberties, especially when it comes to communication between its characters. This is far more complex and closely meshed than the analog messages on mirrors, slips of paper and other surfaces. Of course, the young people are always online and self-confidently display their multidimensional identities and secrets – an approach that tries to turn the rather sterile figure knitting pattern of the teen slasher era into real people.

Finally, it’s not just white heterosexual youngsters who have problems again. In comparison, the old clique of 1997 around Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. like a senior club – after 24 years it is almost like that. Insta, Tik Tok and Only-Fans-Porno-Channel follow the teenagers of the series after death, and one wonders if there is any need for a knife-wielding slicer here to make their life hell. They are actually quite good at that themselves.

Unfortunately, the showrunner of the series, Sara Goodman, doesn’t seem to be able to answer that question properly either, at least not in the four episodes that were pre-made available for viewing by Amazon. By then, the plot has already been inflated with such outrageous, intricate secrets, double Lottchen and confused names that it threatens to disintegrate into its individual parts. An update quickly turns into a cannibalization – both the tried and tested narrative patterns of the film from the nineties, as well as the supposedly real worries and needs of today’s young people.

This is a shame because Goodman is obviously trying to translate what is actually the central moral dilemma into the present. In doing so, however, she gets lost in too many details that overlay the actual conflict – to the point where it is no longer clear what exactly the killer actually means when he ominously “I know what you did last summer spelled “.

I know what you did last summer, eight episodes, four of them since October 15. on Amazon Prime, then a new one every week.