Most characters don’t make it out alive in horror movies. Some survive until the final reel if they’re lucky, while others become bodies on the slab before the titles have even run! They are sacrifices for us bloodthirsty fans, but there’s more to them than that. They have wants never met. Stories never properly finished. In Always the Final Kill, Never the Final Girl, Matt Konopka digs up these poor souls lost under the shadow of heroes to give them the proper attention they deserve.
If there’s one character who deserved to be a slasher queen instead of just a killer scream, you’d struggle like a worm on a hook to find a stronger candidate than I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER’s Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar).
The debut feature from director Jim Gillespie, in which a killer stalks a group of teens one year after they cover up an accidental murder, IKWYDLS was adapted by Kevin Williamson from the YA novel by author Lois Duncan. The follow up to Williamson’s SCREAM, audiences slit the throat of IKWYDLS for going back to predictable slasher tropes just a year after reinventing the formula entirely. To be fair, that’s because he had written the script before SCREAM, but that doesn’t render the reaction any less valid.
Nothing makes those tropes more apparent than IKWYDLS’s treatment of Helen.
The beauty queen of Southport, North Carolina, Helen is an icon of a woman who wears her confidence as proudly as her Croaker Pageant crown. Equipped with the sharpest tongue in Southport, Helen is a free spirit who takes no shit and gives it back twice as nasty. She has dreams of moving to New York with her rich kid boyfriend, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), where she hopes to become an actress and eventually pop out a few babies like a Pez dispenser.
Helen’s only mistake is finding herself in a slasher film with best friend Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), a wannabe lawyer with virginal qualities. Five minutes into IKWYDLS, you can already see where this is going. The sexually active, beautiful blonde friend never makes it out alive in this scenario. Thus is Helen’s fate, and thus is Williamson unfortunately leaning all the way into the predictable nature of the sub-genre. Helen’s one more in a long line of victims of the sexist trope that women who embrace sex deserve to die, but there’s more to her than carnal appetites and a pretty smile.
Before their lives are drowned in a seaside nightmare, Helen proves time and again that she isn’t just the pampered, stuck-up beauty queen that the rest of the town—and the audience—thinks she is. She stands up to hot-headed Barry when he picks on hopelessly in love with Julie dork, Max (Johnny Galecki). She’s the one brave enough to volunteer to check the (supposed) dead guy’s wallet. And she later reveals that she’s a film nerd, referencing Murder, She Wrote and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. “Angela Lansbury always had a plan”. So does Helen. If you didn’t know your slasher tropes, you might even think she, with her quick wit and resourcefulness, could be the Final Girl in this lurid tale.
IKWYDLS is presented as Julie’s story, but you could argue it’s just as much Helen’s, if not more so. The film dives deeper into the depths of Helen’s world than any of the others. Each is affected by the accident, but hers is the life that changes the most. Both Ray and Barry are living the same life, sans girlfriends. Meanwhile boring old Julie is, what, getting bad grades at law school? Yawn. It’s like that scene where Barry flips out about Ray only getting a letter. Helen’s life has been completely sunk, whereas her friends aren’t so changed that some depression meds couldn’t help. New York didn’t work out. Acting didn’t work out. Everything Helen ever wanted has transformed from a dream to a distant memory lost at sea.
Tragedy guts Helen’s character to a degree that none of the others face. She might appear as your average beauty queen looking down her nose at everyone else, but a quick glance at her home life reveals how erroneous that assumption is. Helen’s “twit with a wit” sister, Elsa (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), has zero compassion for her. A lifetime of cruelty from Elsa has likely chipped away at the armor of Helen’s confidence in herself. The one and only scene with Helen’s father says everything we need to know about his neglect as he watches TV, beer in hand, completely ignoring her…as well as the stalker that follows her inside. Probably not a coincidence that Barry is also an alcoholic. You could chalk it up to bad taste in men. I say Helen sees her father in Barry, a desperate attempt to find the attention from him she so badly craves, discovering only more abuse instead. Is it any wonder that Helen wants to be a beauty queen, an actress, a star? She’s searching for the love, manufactured as it may be, from adoring fans that she could never get at home.
Give me Helen over Julie any day. Nothing against Love Hewitt, but her character is the ice to Helen’s fire. The scene that always tears my heart apart is when Helen proclaims that maybe the man they hit wanted to die. Her melancholic tone implies Helen might just want that, too. And what’s Julie’s response to this and Helen’s admission that she misses her? The cold, dead stare of a shark’s eyes. Julie’s an abysmal friend and an even worse “hero”. Let’s not forget either that Helen (rightly) doesn’t want to go to the parade where she meets her doom. It’s Julie who forces her to go. Helen just wants one last chance to prove herself to the friend who doesn’t deserve her.
Helen deserved better, dammit.
Few deaths in slashers are as emotionally eviscerating as Helen’s, but it isn’t her actual demise that kills me. It’s the mocking nature of it. Helen spends the entirety of IKWYDLS attempting to reclaim who she once was. The killer takes her hair, Barry, her crown, everything she used to be. After putting up one of the greatest fights in 90s slasherdom and escaping the killer multiple times, Helen finds herself running through an alley towards the 4th of July parade. It isn’t just safety that she’s running towards, though. The fireworks in the sky are a symbol of the life under the spotlight she always dreamed of. The parade itself, a reminder of the queen she was just a year ago, hopes of a life filled with the glamour and love she’s always needed still in grasp. Yet the Fisherman gets her, just inches from the memories of the person she so desperately wants to be again.
You’d have to be a Julie to not at least feel some sympathy for Helen.
Am I saying IKWYDLS would be a better movie if Helen, the sexually active beauty queen with a heart of gold had been our Final Girl instead of falling into the same old traps of being punished for her sexuality? Is Julie an annoying barnacle of a human? Yes! It’s a goddamn crime that Gellar has never gotten to be the survivor outside of “Buffy”. It’s also a travesty that to this day, women like Helen still so rarely get to see themselves be the hero, shoved off the plank by the Julies of the world.
Helen should’ve gotten one more summer in this franchise. She’ll always be my Croaker Queen that croaked too early.
Preferred pronouns: He/him
Tags: Always the Final Kill Never the Final Girl, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Johnny Galecki, Ryan Philippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Slashers
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