Kevin Williamson’s script got stuck in development until Scream made him horror’s hottest writer, at which point it was rushed into production. Less than a year after Ghostface entered our lives, I Know What You Did Last Summer became the other pillar of the late-’90s slasher revival (and Scary Movie’s other punching bag). But the two don’t have much in common beyond that, as Williamson wrote them with entirely different visions: Scream is full of snarky meta-commentary, but this one plays it straight, a sincere stab at a proper slasher.

On the Fourth of July after a big post-graduation party, four friends — Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe), and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) — share the hook-handed-killer legend around a beach bonfire. Then fate crashes into their lives, or rather they crash into it, when they hit a man on a dark coastal road. Rather than call the cops, potentially torching their futures with DUI and manslaughter charges, they dump the body in the water and swear to take it to their graves. A year passes, and nobody’s life has gone to plan: Helen’s acting dreams have fizzled, Ray’s a dead-end fisherman like his dad, and Julie drags home from college pale, hollow, and burnt out on the adult world.

And a note arrives on a plain sheet of paper. No threat, no demand, no name. Just a simple seven-word phrase: the movie’s title.

That first stretch is the film at its best: the harrowing setup, then four kids rotting from the inside before the slashing starts. (The wicked flee when no man pursueth, says Proverbs 28:1.) I haven’t read it, but I understand that guilt is the core theme of Lois Duncan’s 1973 source novel, a suspense story in which the kids run down a young boy on a bicycle. Duncan later said she was “appalled” to see it turned into a slasher. “As the mother of a murdered child,” she added, “I don’t find violent death something to squeal and giggle about.” Williamson bolts a body count onto what is at its core a morality play, diluting the movie’s soul. The film is so much better when it forgets to be a slasher and instead lets guilt and melancholy fester as if it were a bleaker and more devastating film that would fit better in the ’70s, a la Black Christmas, than the ’90s.

The film offers some real texture in how it sours small-town Americana: fireworks, bonfires, beauty queens, parades. And if you’re willing to squint a little, you’ll even see some class current underneath. Barry, the rich jock, owns the BMW that crushes the body, but it’s Ray, the working-class fisherman’s son, who’s behind the wheel and whose hands bear the heaviest burden. The film never does much with the tension, and Prinze Jr. is far too handsome for the idea that Ray has crumbled into blue-collar dreariness, but its presence suggests a flicker of curiosity about America’s soul.

Director Jim Gillespie’s career is just this film and a few little-seen genre pictures. (The biggest of them, D-Tox, was a $55 million Sylvester Stallone thriller that sat on Universal’s shelf for three years before limping into a handful of U.S. theaters as Eye See You.) Here, he and cinematographer Denis Crossan bring the polish of respectable ’90s studio work, including a deliberate color scheme heavy on blues. The night photography pops quite a bit. You can actually see what’s happening (a treat in these underlit days). And as a cherry on top, the film also features a couple bits of impressively legible underwater footage, most memorably in the opening when Barry dives into the drink after Helen’s Croaker Queen crown and we get a corpse-awakening jump scare.

The film has two proper great set pieces. One of them finds Julie hearing something shift in a trunk she believes to be empty, an echo of where they stashed last summer’s body, and popping it open to find hapless local Max (Johnny Galecki) dead and crawling with crabs. (Minutes later, it’s spotless. Where’d all the crabs go?) The second highlight is an even savvier as a piece of slasher-craft: The killer slinks through Helen’s house like Michael Myers while the film cross-cuts to her pouring a Diet Coke and her dad watching football, and she wakes with her hair hacked off and “SOON” in lipstick on her mirror, which she shatters. It’s The Godfather‘s horse head, made of a beauty queen’s own hair and tiara.

The trouble is the movie never really figures out how to tie together its teen slasher demands with its more somber imagery and subject matter. Basic slasher structure calls for a shrinking cast as one teen after another gets killed, but these four leads are the story’s whole reason for being, so the film dithers. It’s especially ridiculous when Barry survives what looks like a kill scene for no reason but plot armor. The mystery that Williamson insists on playing up is a muddle of backstory about people we never meet tangentially connected to the person they think they might have killed, and the killer does not cut quite so sharp an image as Ghostface or The Shape or other classic slasher villains. The teens’ sleuthing does turn up one oddball pleasure in Missy Egan (Anne Heche) as a red herring suspect. She lives in a ramshackle farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Heche, who had a gift for seeming slightly off, makes good use of five minutes of screen time.

The worst of it all (spoilers ahoy for the rest of this paragraph) is that the man they hit, Ben Willis (Muse Watson), didn’t even die, and is now the killer. It turns out he survived, climbed out of the water, and had murdered someone that very night: David Egan, the young man the kids thought they’d run down. It’s an idiotic twist. It lets our heroes off the hook in every sense and guts the film’s moral conflict. If they never killed anyone, and even the person they injured was a menace to society, what was all that guilt and angst for? The version of the story I want ends with all four alive, weighed down by real sin, but not ruined by it, which would make a nice coming-of-age metaphor for how most of us carry our worst moments and still trudge along through adult life.

Beyond the fitful sense of dread and sadness, what keeps the movie watchable is a cast that goes four-for-four in heartthrob appeal: Every one of the leads is the platonic ideal of late-’90s teen stardom. Phillippe is perfectly scummy as a pretty-boy d-bag. Prinze Jr. is square-jawed and affable. (He and Gellar met on this set and married in 2002. They’re still together. It’s a happier ending than the one in the movie itself.) Love Hewitt, who is outrageously beautiful, gets the most famous moment, screaming “What are you waiting for?!” in the middle of the street, a broad, dramatic swing that makes more sense once you learn, per the actress, that it was dreamed up by a kid who’d won a contest to come on set and “create a moment for the movie.” Gellar comes out best among the leads: the ostensible mean girl gets the hair scene and a chase in the climax, and thus feels more like the true lead than Love Hewitt’s nominal final girl.

The franchise has kept on knowing and growing ever since. Love Hewitt and Prinze Jr. returned for 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which ships The Fisherman off to a Bahamas resort. The direct-to-video I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer started over from scratch in 2006, and a one-season Amazon reboot series followed in 2021. Last year’s “requel” (a la 5cream) from Do Revenge director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, brought Love Hewitt and Prinze Jr. back yet again, with a Gellar cameo to boot. It underwhelmed critics and audiences, though I confess I’d watch another one, if it ever gets made.

As for the original, it is both an enduring relic of its time and a disappointment. It generates some images, ideas, and moods, but the script is clumsy, the mystery is a dud, the ending is self-sabotaging, and the slasher craft is rickety. In spite of all that, I have some unearned affection for it, born of my fondness for its specific strengths: that festering first stretch, the rotting American summer vibes, that Vogue Magazine cast. But even those get washed away by the film’s many flaws. At some point, the list of things a movie is bad at grows long enough that you have to admit it isn’t quite good. Close, though. I know what it could have been.