For #31DaysOfHorror this year, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the way that horror functions as folklore. This was most apparent in the Urban Legends franchise, of course, which has its characters enrolled in a folklore class in the first movie and has its characters making horror movies based on folktales in the second installment. (Please don’t make me talk about the third one ever again). Horror films frequently feature characters in familiar situations, often taking elements from other horror movies, telling deceptively simple stories that reflect the morals and ethics of the society that produced them.

Minutes into I Know What You Did Last Summer, while sitting around a campfire on the beach— reminiscent of the opening of The Fog, another horror movie about a coastal fishing town that’s very concerned with folklore and storytelling— the characters discuss the urban legend of the man with the hook for a hand terrorizing two teenagers making out in a car on lover’s lane. They bicker over making sure to tell the story “right,” or, as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character Ray puts it, “the way it really happened.”

“It’s a fictional story created to warn young girls of the dangers of having premarital sex,” scoffs Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character Julie.

He snaps right back at her, mansplaining a decade before the word came into usage, “Well, actually, honey — and you know how terrified I am of your IQ — it’s an urban legend. American folklore. And they all usually originate from some sort of real-life incident.”

The scene on the beach is dream-like and strange. There’s a beautiful longer take of Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar, six months into playing Buffy on TV) twirling along the surf holding a sparkler in one hand— it is, after all, the Fourth of July — and her just-acquired beauty pageant crown in the other. She’s Lady Liberty, gorgeous and freewheeling, unable to see that disaster lurks just around the corner.

When she reaches her relaxing, drunken boyfriend Barry (Ryan Phillippe), she tosses the sparkler over her shoulder, where it sputters out in the sand as she plans their future together. Their relationship, we imagine, is not long for this world.

Moments later — after Julie and Ray have snuck off to have sex behind a boulder — the foursome piles into Barry’s car to head home. Barry is drunk, belligerently so, and he relinquishes his keys after much protest and sticks his head up through the sunroof to feel the wind in his hair and to soak up his “last summer of adolescent decadence.” He drops his bottle of liquor in Ray’s lap. Ray takes his eyes off the road. Barry shouts. They swerve. They hit someone, hard, who flies up into the air and tumbles onto the shoulder. The car comes screeching to a stop.

In the next few chaotic moments, the four friends hash out a plan: they’ll dump the body in the ocean, where it will take weeks for him to wash up on shore… if he’s ever found at all. They’ll clean up the car and claim total ignorance, and they can go on and live their lives, not having to answer for the fact that they killed someone.

They carry the body to the ocean, but just before they can dump him in, the man wakes up and grabs Helen’s crown, clutching it in his fist as he sinks to the bottom of the sea. Barry leaps into the water and retrieves it, and they believe they’re safe.