SLJ EDITORIAL LETTER; JAN 1998
Author Upset over Movie
I have just seen the film based upon my book I Know What You Did Last Summer (Little, Brown, 1973) and strongly suggest the impressionable young people not be encouraged to see it. I had no input about the script and was not allowed to read it until after the movie was in production.
In my book, four teenagers are driving home at night from a party in the mountains, come around the bend, and hit a little boy on a bicycle. They report the accident, and leave the scene before help arrives. That's the only death in the story, and it's accidental. A year later they start receiving notes saying, "I know what you did last summer." The story is about the importance of taking responsibility for your actions. In the flim, the person they hit is an adult, and after they injure him the kids deliberately murder him. The screen writer moved the location from the moutains of New Mexico to a seaside village on the East coast so one character after another could be decapitated with boat hooks. One character (who wasn't in my book) gets shoved into a vat of boiling water in which he's been cooking lobsters. In another scene my heroine opens the trunk of her car, and finds a body with crabs surging out of it's gaping and swarming all over its face. Most of the action takes place on a fishing boat (there was no boat in my story) where the heroine frantically tries to hide in an ice bin to escape the "hook monster" (who didn't exist in my book). She digs into the ice and finds head of her two best friends. As a mother of a teenage girl who had her brains blown out--Kait's murder is described in my nonfiction book, Who Killed My Daughter? (Delacorte, 1992) and at Kait's website atAuthor
Souther Shores, NC
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