Over 25 years after Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillippe starred in the teen horror mystery I Know What You Did Last Summer, it’s coming back for a new show from Amazon Prime. The binge-able series brings the story into the modern era as a group of childhood friends become the center of an incident that haunts them a year later. But there are some changes to the stories this time around, as well as a wild connection to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead.
I Know What You Did Last Summer was crafted by showrunner and executive producer Sara Goodman, who seriously brings the gory scares and intrigue throughout the series’ eight episodes. CinemaBlend spoke to Goodman about her influences when putting together the shocking horror elements in the show, and as she shared, she actually has a previous connection to Evil Dead. As she told us:
This will date me, but when I was a kid, my father was one of the dentists who financed Sam Raimi’s movies. So, Evil Dead actually premiered in my living room when I was a very little girl and I’m sure that is ingrained in my brain somehow.
Sam Raimi is a horror great, and one who had his start in 1981 when he released his film Evil Dead. That would go on to become an all-time great franchise getting ready to have its fifth installment in 2022 along with the series Ash vs Evil Dead airing from 2015 to 2018. The filmmaker also famously made the Spider-Man films and is currently finishing up work on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
As a kid, Sara Goodman got a front row seat to seeing Evil Dead prior to the film’s release and it clearly had an effect on her aspirations as an adult. With I Know What You Did Last Summer, the writer crafts some thrilling kills as the teens witness death around them following a tragic accident. Goodman clarified this connection, and how dentistry was even involved.
My dad was a dentist and Sam Raimi lived across the street from my cousins and Sam was trying to raise money to make Evil Dead and my father was that dentist who gave him money.
Sam Raimi did, in fact, get his financing for Evil Dead from four dentists after hosting a dinner party. Raimi and Bruce Campbell (who memorably plays Ash in the franchise) bought briefcases and thrift store suits and went around Detroit pitching the movie to locals in their early ‘20s and it paid off, because it paid! The 1981 movie’s budget was reportedly $375,000 and performed above expectations at the box office, grossing about eight times as much of its budget, making its investors quite happy.
Sara Goodman has an unbelievably random connection between I Know What You Did Last Summer, but it's pretty amazing too. Her father’s investment in Evil Dead indirectly influenced her over the years to contribute to the horror genre on her own. The Amazon series premieres on October 15 and will release new episodes on Fridays.
