The Urgent Need To Revive Helen Shivers
And some ideas on how to do it.
Elton John lost his vision. Cher is shading Barbra. Cole Escola rode a giant pink flamingo. Yet still, the only thing I can wrap my head around at this present moment is a cryptic Instagram post from Sarah Michelle Gellar from the set of the I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel, currently being shot in Australia. “Scooby Doo 3 coming soon….” she cheekily captioned the post, blithely unaware of the match she lit on a gasoline-guzzling fandom.
When I reshared it to my story with the text “Now wait a goddamn minute,” she DM’d me to say she’s merely there to visit Freddie Prinze Jr., her husband of 22 years, whom she met on set of the original film in 1997, and who, along with Jennifer Love Hewitt (question mark), is reprising his role for this sequel. And while I’m tempted to believe her, I’m still holding out hope that this is a mislead and that Gellar will make her way into the highly-anticipated sequel. I’m doubtful, but I’m a hopeful.
Gellar has been blunt, despite fan demands for her to reprise her role as Helen Shivers.
“I am dead,” she iconically responded when asked about the possibility of her returning for the film. This fails to recognize that Sarah Michelle Gellar has a history when it comes to playing a character who dies and later comes back to life. But taking her words at face value, it’s true, Helen Shivers did die after narrowly escaping the back of a police car with the killer, Ben Willis, chasing her, then somehow evading his attacks at her sister’s bridal shop before leaping out of a building into an alley where she was nearly out of his path… until she makes the costly mistake of looking back, at which point Willis appears, pushes her into a stack of tires and repeatedly slashes her with his hook.
The entire chase — nearly nine minutes in length! — is regarded by many as one of the best in horror history and one of the saddest horror movie deaths, right up there with Nancy Thompson in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 or Rachel in the opening of Halloween 5.
Many, myself among them, were incensed at the wrong final girl making it to the end of the film (sorry, no disrespect Julie James, but you’ll never be Helen Shivers). It’s not just wrong, however; it lacks logic. And I know, we’re talking about a teen horror flick from the 90s — not exactly a paragon of logic — but go with me for a beat. How would Ben Willis have managed to get to Helen from the top floor of the store? If he too jumped out of the building, surely she would have heard him? And if he somehow managed to outpace her by going around through the entry to the alley, he’d have had to contend with the parade crowd. Make it make sense!
The death is reminiscent of another Kevin Williamson creation: Tatum Riley in Scream. The difference there, however, is that you have enough other well-rounded-out characters in the Scream-averse to make her death feel sad but permissible, as opposed to Helen Shivers, the most developed character (likely a combination of writing and Gellar’s flair), without whom the franchise buckles. As writer Chad Collins argues:
“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 the 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.”
But with all that said, Helen Shivers is canonically dead, and referenced as such as in the very inferior sequel. But perhaps in the same vein as Glinda announcing the Wicked Witch of the West is dead at the top of the Wicked movie, if you get my drift…? Here are some options.
1. Bring her back from the dead.
The most obvious. Grab a shovel, cast a little spelly-spell and have Helen live. Is supernatural the best route for the franchise? Perhaps not. But there’s precedent if we choose to acknowledge 2006’s I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer in which the ghost of Ben Willis is the killer.
2. Introduce a twin sister.
In the same way that SMG has played a character brought back from the dead, she’s also played a character with a mysterious twin sister (see: Ringer). Helen and Elsa might be dead, but what about their long lost sister… Vivian? Perhaps too campy a conceit given the franchise, but we’re merely spitballing here, so there are no bad ideas.
3. Pull a Laurie Strode.
In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode is revealed to have died prior to the film's events. When Curtis returned in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), it was revealed that Laurie faked her death in a car accident as a way of escaping her murderous brother. She is then thrown off a building to her death in Halloween: Resurrection (2002). However, when a reboot was announced in 2018, Jamie Lee Curtis signed on to play Laurie, a very much alive Laurie, in a timeline that ignores all previous sequels. In other words, Helen can just be alive, having either faked her death in the original film or just ignoring that timeline altogether.
I posed all three ideas to my friend and self-described “resident horror hottie” Christopher Schaap. Christopher was most into idea three, but pushed back at Laurie Strode offering the precedent in all Halloween sequels that acknowledge the first film as canon. In order to retcon Helen’s death, this would need to do something perhaps never done in a horror sequel: mid-movie change the trajectory of a plot retroactively. “How cool!” he said at his own suggestion. I agree!
That’s three solid (in my humble opinion) options. Am I biased, as the world’s preeminent Sarah Michelle Gellar historian? Yes. Obviously. But I also can remove my stan brain to recognize the spade that is Helen Shivers’s necessity to the DNA of I Know What You Did Last Summer. If Joe Biden can pardon his son, Hunter, then surely Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Sam Lansky can find a way to bring the franchise’s crown jewel, our Croaker Queen herself, back where she belongs: alive and kicking.
Still bummed Ringer didn't get more of a chance.