I Know What You Did Last Summer is a pretty trashy, by-the-numbers example of the kind of slasher revival films that dominated the horror genre a few decades ago (it’s like Scream without being clever), but it does have one standout scene: After being sufficiently terrorized by a mysterious killer with a big hook and a raincoat (who knows what they did last summer), Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character breaks down in the middle of the street and screams to the heavens: “What are you waiting for, huh? What are you waiting for?” It’s a relatively grounded expression of fear that has transcended cowering in a corner and become outright frustration. The killer is fucking with her and her friends, and she’s sick of it. She wants them to just come out and get it over with.
As noted by Twitter user @Todd_Spence, though, there’s a weird story behind that scene that Hewitt is more than happy to share—as she did with Us Weekly back in 2018:
Supposedly, that scene was directed by “a kid” who had won “a contest” to be on set that day (the movie is based on a YA novel, so it’s not unheard of that a kid would be interested in it). The way Hewitt tells it, this kid just thought it would be interesting to have her character start screaming in the street, and though the cast and crew decided to just humor him at first, they realized as they were doing it that it was “amazing.” Hewitt says she doesn’t know what ever happened to this kid, and details about this contest are nonexistent on the internet (the movie came out in 1997, so people weren’t tweeting about contests as often as they are now), but it at least makes for an interesting story. Plus, since there’s nobody to say otherwise and Hewitt doesn’t remember anything else about this kid, you could always say it was you. Free fun anecdote!