Warning: spoilers below!
And we thought Buffy was slain.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played murdered pageant winner Helen Shivers in the 1997 teen horror flick “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” actually has a surprise cameo appearance in the new sequel, in theaters Friday.
So, did Helen make a miraculous recovery, soap-opera style, even after being clearly shown as a corpse on ice at the bottom of the killer’s boat in the original movie?
Nope. Helen, who was fatally stabbed by the Fisherman in an alley as a scream-muffling parade passed by, is very much six feet under.
Gellar, 48, comes back thanks to somebody’s traumatized imagination.
During a nightmare sequence, college girl Danica Richards (Madelyn Cline), the seaside town of Southport, North Carolina’s reigning Croaker Queen, comes face to face with her foremother.
“You’re the girl from the picture!” Danica, who just got a nasty head injury from the Fisherman before falling unconscious, says to Helen.
“I mean, I do have a name,” Helen’s ghost, with the Fisherman’s hook in hand, dryly replies.
“Helen Shivers!” chirps Danica. The “Buffy the Vampire” star snaps back, “And don’t you forget it.”
Gellar’s one-off scene won’t have anyone shielding their eyes in terror. The bit is played mostly for laughs.
“I was Southport’s Croaker Queen way back in, well, I shouldn’t date myself,” she says.
“Nineteen ninety-six,” Danica quickly adds.
“Careful, sweetheart. I have the hook.”
Helen ultimately imparts a chilling warning to Danica, whose group of friends is being chased by yet another bloodthirsty maniac in a spooky black raincoat.
“You’re gonna die, Danica,” she says. “Stay in the dream as long as you can.”
Gellar’s part in the new “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which also features her former co-stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., had been denied for months. Sort of.
“I tried, OK? I harassed her! But she is dead,” writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson told People back in April. “I tried to pitch some crazy s–t too. I was like, ‘What if it’s like you weren’t dead and you’re actually alive, but in hiding?’ And Sarah’s like, ‘I was on ice. I was the most dead a person could be. You can see my frozen body.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but what if?’ And she said, ‘I am dead. I am Sarah Dead Gellar.’”
Robinson wasn’t lying. Gellar’s Helen is dead.
But it turns out not having a pulse didn’t disqualify her from donning her old Croaker Queen crown one last time.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
