Does Sarah Michelle Gellar return in ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’?

This article contains major spoilers for I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Sometimes, they come back. Kind of.

Despite persistent denials over the past year — including I Know What You Did Last Summer director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson telling Entertainment Weekly that she “tried relentlessly” to convince Sarah Michelle Gellar to return as Helen Shivers — guess who has one of the best scenes of the film? Miss Croaker Queen 1996, of course.

But this is not a Marvel movie — our girl Helen does not snap back into existence. Here’s how she reappears from beyond the veil.

In the original film, Shivers is chased and slain by the hook-wielding killer known as the Fisherman. We even see her corpse chilling on ice later in the movie.

Gellar herself reminded Robinson of this fact when the director first approached her to reprise her role. Robinson previously explained to EW, “I tried to pitch some crazy s— 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.'”

However, as fans of both the original and its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer know, each film typically includes a dream-like sequence where what happens “lives outside of the canon.” And that, my friends, is what we call a loophole.

When Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and Danica (Madelyn Cline) become convinced that the local pastor may be the killer, they run to the police station and lay out their allegations in an anxious frenzy.

The crooked cops call Grant Spencer, Southport’s biggest property developer and unofficial town boss, who tells them to hold the women for a while because they are causing too much commotion. A cop then locks them in a holding room, where they remain for hours.

We then see Danica opening the once locked door and walking through red curtains and into the Croaker Queen Beauty Pageant, where Helen sees her boyfriend, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), get murdered by the fisherman in the 1997 original.

On stage, with her back turned, stands Helen Shivers in her full beauty queen attire, staring down at Danica’s fiancé’s dead body splayed on ice. When she turns to face Danica, she explains that she’s “not real.”

After a brief, devious conversation, we see Helen suddenly start to decay rapidly into a skeletal ghoul. Then, Danica wakes up back in that locked room with Ava.

So technically, Robinson and Gellar didn’t lie. The two are best friends, so they locked in and kept the appearance hidden, even after Gellar accidentally leaked photos from the set.

Oh, and did we mention her husband is also in the movie? The signs were there all along.

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I Know What You Did Last Summer is now playing in theaters.