Is ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ on Amazon Connected to the Movies?

A Halloween classic has just arrived on Amazon Prime Video in a whole new way. The first four episodes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Prime Video’s latest teen thriller, are now available to stream. For anyone alive during the ’90s, that string of words is enough to make you think of terrifying men with hooks, hot teens, and seriously warped reactions to murder. But just how close is this new series to the 1997 horror movie of the same name? And are they connected?

This eight-episode season tells a new story with a new cast of morally problematic teenagers. But the basic outline of both the show and the movie is the same. That’s because  both I Know What You Did Last Summer the movie and the show are based on the same young adult novel by Lois Duncan. Published in 1973, the suspense thriller follows a group of four teens who accidentally run over a young boy while driving home from the mountains. After calling an ambulance, they all swear never to tell a soul about what happened. But when high school senior Julie James gets an ominous note reading “I know what you did last summer,” all of that secrecy is thrown out the window.

The rest is a story you likely already know. Julie, Ray, Barry, and Helen try to dodge the truth as a mysterious stranger continues to send them creepy notes, pictures, and newspaper clippings about the late David’s death. After the stranger shoots Barry, they learn the truth: the person stalking them is David’s vengeful brother, and he’s out for blood. It’s sort of the most dramatic way to teach kids that they should tell the truth about their mistakes.

That’s the basic premise both the movies and the Amazon series follow. A group of teenagers, typically high school seniors, accidentally murder someone while driving home from a weekend spent partying. Rather than call the cops, they try to cover up the murder. A year later the spooky notes start coming, and the terror doesn’t stop.

In the 1997 movie, David the young boy was turned into a pedestrian known as Ben Willis. This adaptation played with the novel’s original formula quite a bit. At the beginning of the movie the four friends believe that they murdered a man known as David Egan. But really they ran over Ben Willis, the father of the late Susie Willis. Susie was killed by David after he got into a drunk driving accident, and Ben made it his life mission to kill David no matter the cost. By the end of the movie it’s revealed that the group never actually killed anyone. You’d think that would stop Ben Willis from stalking them for two more movies, but no. Ben Willis is just really opposed to hit and runs.

It’s still too early to know who the killer is in this new version. Even the cast didn’t know until the end of filming. But I Know What You Did Last Summer the show introduces a pretty fun twist. The series starts with twin sisters, the outgoing and dysfunctional Lennon and the introverted Allison (both played by Madison Iseman). While pretending to be Lennon with Lennon’s friends, Allison accidentally ran over her sister. Instead of telling the truth she took the depraved way out, hiding her sister’s body in the same cave where her mother died from a mass suicide and taking over Lennon’s life. Oh yeah, there’s a death cult in this show. Also, her father (Bill Heck) is totally on board with Allison’s objectively stupid plan to spend the rest of her life pretending to be her twin sister. Just normal teen drama things.

Those two massive twists paired with the series’ much larger cast are really the biggest differences between the show and the movies. There’s also a lot more drug use and surprise nudity. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer became one of the biggest slashers of the ’90s despite its poor reviews. Right now, Prime Video’s series shares those same questionable reviews but it lacks a bit of the zing that made the first movie so appealing.

But wait, you ask: is the show and movie connected? Plot-wise, the answer looks like no, other than sharing the book as source material. However, fans of the movies should keep their eyes out for connections, anyway. As reported by SYFY Wire, showrunner Sara Goodman did put Easter eggs in throughout the series, for the movies.

“I put Easter eggs throughout season for the diehard movie fans,” Goodman said. “I don’t want to be too obvious and take people out of the show, but within scenes where it felt natural, we let our characters do their take on what those movie Easter eggs may be.”

So what are you waiting for? Head out and find those Easter eggs, right now!

Watch I Know What You Did Last Summer on Prime Video