I Know What You Did Last Summer is back with original stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. reprising their roles nearly three decades later. The belated sequel hits theaters on July 18th, but in the meantime we just got our first look in images published by PEOPLE on Tuesday. Hewitt and Prinze fall right back into their roles as Julie James and Ray Bronson, alongside series newcomers Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, Jonah Hauer-King, and Tyriq Withers. Hewitt praised the young ensemble in an accompanying interview, happy to pass the torch to them in person, and happy to revisit the story that helped launch her career.
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“I’ll be super honest, I had total anxiety for 48 hours before [filming] because I was like, ‘Can I do this? Am I going to pull this off?’ It’s a lot of pressure,” Hewitt said. She found it “very nerve-racking” at 46 years old to go back to a role she first played at 18, but said that the “phenomenal” younger cast members eased the transition.
“It’s for them to make it their own and for me to stand by like a proud mom and say, ‘It’s yours now, take it and run and enjoy,’” she explained. As for her reunion with Prinze, “It felt like a high school reunion. It felt like that moment where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart is beating really fast because I have not seen this person in 150 years and now we’re back, here we are.’ We just had to jump right back into Julie and Ray, but when we did it felt like we had never left, honestly.”
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I Know What You Did Last Summer is a slasher based on a 1973 novel by Lois Duncan. The movie was a hit, prompting a sequel the following year with Hewitt and Prinze returning, followed by a direct-to-video sequel released in 2006 with all-new characters. This year’s new movie is considered a direct sequel to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, disregarding the third movie. It is co-written an directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.
“It is not a serious movie. It is a really fun, popcorn summer event,” Robinson told PEOPLE bluntly. She added that while it is “balls-to-the-wall fun,” the horror elements of the story are “ratcheted up to a hundred in this — it’s much more brutal. There’s definitely more methodology to every kill in this movie, unlike the first, which is kind of just him stalking them and going after them. There’s not a lot of gore or blood or violence in the first one. There certainly is in this one.”
Hewitt agreed that the new movie is “terrifying,” though she added that she is not generally a horror fan herself, for what it’s worth. The franchise has always balanced scary with campy, and it makes sense that nostalgia would raise the bar even higher. I Know What You Did Last Summer hits theaters on July 18th. In the meantime, the original is streaming now on Netflix.
