Spoilers below for the first four episodes of Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer

Nostalgia is king, and the new I Know What You Did Last Summer series on Amazon is the latest example to prove that. Years after the original film, which is based on a novel itself, a new group of teens are embroiled in a bevy of secrets that finds them targeted by a slasher.

The series premise is as follows:

One year after the fatal car accident that haunted their graduation night, a group of teenagers find themselves bound together by a dark secret and stalked by a brutal killer. As they try to piece together who’s after them, they reveal the dark side of their seemingly perfect town—and themselves. Everyone is hiding something, and uncovering the wrong secret could be deadly.

Shadow and Act spoke to showrunner Sara Goodman and series stars Madison Iseman, Brianne Tju, Ezekiel Goodman, Ashley Moore and Sebastian Amoruso on pulling inspiration from the iconic film, how they conceived the characters, and of course, some spoiler talk about the pilot’s shocking twist and the kill count that continues to get higher and higher after the first four episodes.

For Goodman, while she wanted traces of the original film and source material in the new series, it was also important that the series could stand alone as well.

“I definitely wanted it to be its own thing,” Goodman explained to us. “I feel like if you look at the novel from 1973, the movie was its own thing, took the premise and made its own thing. So, I felt like 20 years later, it was time for a new thing, especially on streaming platform where we have eight hours to do it, but I also wanted to always show love and respect for the original book and the movie, which I loved. So, there’s little shoutouts.”

The pilot delivers a huge twist — the lead characters, twin sisters Lennon and Alison, are both involved in the car accident. One hit the other while driving. But the show reveals that they inadvertently switched places and the one that everyone thinks is dead….isn’t — she’s acting as if she’s her twin.

Goodman says she thought about waiting to reveal this twist in later episodes, but ultimately decided to do so in the pilot.

“I did think about holding the twist, and what I decided was I wanted everyone to know that no one was trustworthy in the show,” she explained. “So, I felt like ultimately, you could do a horror twist at the end, or you could do a psychological twist at the end of that first episode to really set the tone and not know what twist was coming next. I wanted you to know there were also psychological games being played, not just horror.”

Iseman, the actress who plays both Lennon and Alison, also said when she first read the script, she wondered why the twist was happening so early.

She admitted, “My first initial thought was, ‘Why wouldn’t you save this for the series end?’ Because it was just such a twist. But then I completely changed my tune because I was like, ‘No, this is so amazing because now the audience is in on the biggest secret, when no one else knows.’ It’s viewing the show through a completely different perspective, which I just think adds a whole [other] layer of like what the heck is going on, and trying to understand these people and these characters and the decisions they’re making. And you really can’t trust anyone.”

Also, one of the characters, Amoruso’s Johnny, becomes the first of the core characters to die in episode 2. He (as well as Tju with her character, the resident mean-girl Margot) sought for horror tropes to be upended.

“She [Margot] wants to love and be loved like many of us do,” said Tju. “I think that’s the beautiful thing about her…we’ve kind of stripped away the typical horror movie trope and made her something much more complex.”

On Johnny, Amoruso said, “There is a similar kind of archetype jock character in that [the original film] played of course [by] Ryan Phillippe. I mean, they’re incredible, but I remember Sara saying that it wasn’t really the same. I think his character was a little bit impetuous, very privileged. I think Johnny is the exact opposite of him. I think that even though it’s a similar kind of almost of a stock trope, it’s not.”

Other cast members and Goodman tease what is coming down the line.

“[When viewers] see how each character starts to let down certain parts of themselves, and I feel like it will really surprise you,” said Moore. “Even certain directions they choose to go will catch you off guard, and maybe you wouldn’t expect it. I think the audience is really going to have a ball with that.

Goodman added, “I hope they’ll keep being surprised by who dies. I hope they’ll be surprised by how they die, but I also, I think they’ll be surprised by what the characters do as the stress builds. I think they’ll be surprised by who they end up caring about and who they end up not caring so much about. I think they’ll be surprised by the ending, for sure.”

The first four episodes of I Know What You Did Last Summer are on Amazon now. The other episodes will drop weekly on Fridays.

Watch the full interviews below:

Ashley-Moore

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