Helen Shivers’s (not “Shiver’s” as the misprinted sign on the family store reads) chase scene in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer is one of the superlative horror chases in the history of the genre. Whatever your feelings toward the movie as a whole might be, it is almost undeniable that the roughly 9-minute chase is a watermark for both the film and the slasher subgenre writ large. Helen’s chase scene, like Wendy’s in Prom Night or Ginny’s in Friday the 13th: Part 2, is intense, exciting, and a core reason why the movie holds up as well as it does, even several dozen re-watches later.

This, then, will be both a celebration and synopsis of Helen’s chase in I Know What You Did Last Summer. In honor of both the Fourth last month and the enduring legacy of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Helen Shivers, I thought it worthwhile to revisit the chase scene and explore why it has proven to be so successful, even 23 years later.

Helen’s seminal chase starts at the Croaker Beauty Pageant, whereupon as outgoing queen, she is required to sit uncomfortably on the stage while the competitors sing really, really bad renditions of Irene Cara’s Fame. While Helen tries to reconcile her will to live with her present desire to die, the Fisherman uppercuts Barry – her ne’er do well quasi-boyfriend – and drags him away, concealing the corpse almost comically quickly. An officer and pageant host then fail to console her, and an hour and fourteen minutes into the movie, the officer offers to escort her home. The timestamp itself is important (and, yes, I went to get the exact time, which is 01:14:11) because when Helen’s chase beings, only 26 minutes remain in the film. It’s been widely reported that Johnny Galecki’s death was added late in filming after producers feared the Fisherman didn’t seem threatening enough, and sure enough, without that, the film’s first death (Barry’s) would occur just as the movie is coming to an end. Galecki’s death aside, Barry, the officer, Elsa, and Helen all die within a twenty-minute frame, and all of it orbits around Helen’s chase. Truly, the entire segment is punctuated with unbearable suspense and heightened displays of violence, twenty minutes of horrific catharsis bookended by both a beginning and end that play things considerably safer.

Back to Helen’s ordeal, though. While driving her home, the officer notices a few roadblocks – likely there to section off the parade route – and opts to take a back alley to circumvent the impasse. Granted, the diegetic timeline here makes little sense – why would the parade and pageant coincide, and also, wasn’t there just a parade earlier that afternoon – but anyway, the officer meanders his way into the alley, and wouldn’t you know it, the Fisherman, posing as a driver with car trouble, successfully lures Officer “Mayberry-Ass Reject” (Helen’s words, not mine) from his car, hooks him in the chest, and then chases after Helen.

Helen resourcefully uses her very-very-’90s heels to shatter the back window in the cop car (unrealistic as that is), crawl out, and race down the road. Strangely, the town is almost deserted, but Helen manages to make it to her family’s store, the killer right behind her (with ample opportunity to kill her, though he strangely doesn’t). It takes Elsa way, way too long to unlock the front door, and whatever their hostility is rooted in, it seems a bit too cruel to take that long when your sister is out front literally screaming for dear life, but I digress. Really, the hostility between Helen and her sister, Elsa, makes about as much sense as anything else in the film, largely due to actress Bridgette Wilson (a former Miss Teen USA) being beautiful in her own right. A serious suspension of disbelief is necessary to believe that she would in any way feel envious of Helen, sort of like the recurrent oversight of Cinderella adaptations wherein attractive actresses are cast as the dumpy, unlikable stepsisters. It really, truly does not make a great deal of sense.

Once the door is open, Elsa scolds Helen for not using the unlocked back entrance (I have absolutely no idea what time of night this is supposed to be), Helen shuts her down and demands she lock it while she calls the police, and for the first (and last) time, Elsa takes what Helen says seriously. Well, marginally seriously, because she still takes too long to traipse back there and lock the door, by which time the Fisherman has already gotten inside.

The Fisherman’s movement here deserves a quick aside. Early in the film, it becomes clear that the Fisherman intends only to scare the central quartet, saving the actual murders for the Fourth, the anniversary of the hit-and-run. Fine, makes sense. Not a ton of sense, but enough sense in the world of the film. When chasing after Helen, though, the Fisherman had already killed two people with no qualms, so why does he choose to forgo killing her and instead choose to wander around to the other side of the building, sneak in through a door he had no reason to know was unlocked, kill Elsa, and then lie in wait again before finally striking? I like to think it’s because the filmmakers knew how wonderful Helen was and wanted to keep her around for as long as possible, but that’s likely just wishful thinking.

Back to Helen’s chase, though. Elsa, like the officer, is slashed with the hook (can we talk about how uncharacteristically restrained the violence in this movie is), and Helen – in one of maybe only two lapses of judgement she exhibits the entire movie – prematurely ends her call to the police, calls out to Elsa, and then wanders downstairs, knowing full well the Fisherman is hiding somewhere in the shadows.

Helen, always the astute observer, soon notices a covered mannequin that looks a little too real, a little too active, and stops to assess. Before she can even blink, the Fisherman lunges at her from beneath the sheet and wrestles with her briefly. Helen manages to flail and writhe until she is free and races to the back of the store. Unfortunately, the door is locked, and more unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) finds her sister’s discarded body in what I’m guessing is an employees-only bathroom.

The Fisherman is now closing in on her, so Helen uses some kind of retail-dumbwaiter to pulley herself to the third floor. The Fisherman is still in pursuit, and when she reaches the top floor, he’s close behind. Helen, no other choice available, jumps from the window, directly into a pile of trash and debris below. Helen earns major kudos here for her lack of reticence. Rather than waiting until the last possible moment, Helen crawls out, positions herself in peak form to break the fall, and leaps. Good for her.

Helen’s goodwill dissolves a bit after this because of what I like to call “Drew Barrymore in Scream” syndrome. Rather than simply run, Helen – like Barrymore’s Casey Becker – repeatedly stops to assess her surroundings and inexplicably ferret out where the killer might be. Helen, of all people, should know that on account of her fall from the third story and her proximity to the store’s back alley, she has at least a four or five-minute lead on the Fisherman. Had she simply kept moving, she likely wouldn’t have died.

This is a movie, though, and nobody’s perfect. Helen kind of limp-runs, stopping occasionally, until she reaches an alley that leads directly to the parade. In arguably one of the cruelest lifelines ever extended in a horror movie, Helen can see the crowds and the fireworks, hear the music and the chatter, and races down the alley to intersect with the procession – to intersect with her own escape from death. Just as she’s about to exit the alley, Helen turns around, sensing something or maybe hearing something (it’s never entirely clear, even after two dozen watches, why she stopped). There’s nothing behind her, but when she turns back ‘round toward the street, BAM, the Fisherman is right there. He shoves her into a little alcove of tires and sticking with his whole “fisherman as killer” theme, kills her with his hook. Helen fights back here, thrashing and hitting the Fisherman in a desperate attempt to live, but it’s all for naught.

Some nine minutes after her chase scene started, Helen Shivers is killed.

Indeed, in the quotidian horror tradition of killing considerably more interesting secondary characters while letting nondescript, trail mix protagonists live, Helen Shivers is the last of the Fisherman’s victims, with Hewitt’s Julie James (even the alliteration is nondescript and boring) surviving the ordeal and ostensibly putting an end to the Fisherman’s murder spree. The Fisherman miraculously teleports to his ship on the dock, bringing Julie aboard and giving her the requisite “I’m definitely the killer” tour of evidence (a bad decision on Julie’s end that warrants death more than Helen’s sputtering), and is purportedly killed shortly thereafter by both Julie and Ray (but mostly Ray). Julie, a formidable enough protagonist up until that point, regresses into an antiquated damsel in the climax, screaming and distracting Ray and doing absolutely nothing to stop the Fisherman (now identified as Ben Willis).

Think of how much more compelling things would have been had Helen lived, had Helen gone with Brandy in the sequel and been the face of the franchise. Actually, Helen never would have gone to Bahamas because she would have known the correct capital of Brazil and known the entire enterprise reeked of a petty though unnecessarily intricate ploy for vengeance. All things considered, though, and for as much as I riff on it, we still got Helen’s chase scene, an exciting and expertly composed sequence even all these years later. That kind of impact deserves celebration, and this piece, I guess, is my way of honoring just how much I appreciate both the movie and Helen’s role therein.

Strange as it may sound, Helen Shivers was something of an aspirational figure of mine as a kid. I thought she was one of the coolest characters I’d ever seen in the genre, and alongside Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott from the Scream franchise, I often thought of how cool it would be to just, well, be friends with the two of them. While other kids were dreaming of wizarding schools and quests to Middle Earth (The Lord of the Rings was very, very popular where I grew up) I dreamed of nothing more than facing down a maniacal killer alongside some attractive, rising ‘90s stars, chief among them Sarah Michelle Gellar as Helen Shivers.

Rest in peace, Helen. The Fourth of July, even if only in the smallest measure, belongs some to you.