Jennifer Love Hewitt Says Her Kids Have Watched I Know What You Did Last Summer: ‘They’re Horror People’ (Exclusive)

Prior to confirming her return in the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot on Friday, Dec. 13, Jennifer Love Hewitt had a special moment revisiting the classic slasher with her family.

The actress, 45, tells PEOPLE she recently watched the 1997 film — in which she plays final girl Julie James — at a movie theater with her two eldest kids: daughter Autumn, 11, and son Atticus, 9.

“They’re horror people, so they wanted to see it,” Hewitt says. “It was so crazy seeing myself at 18. I look so much like my daughter, it’s crazy.”

Their verdict? “They loved it,” she says. “They were like, ‘Mommy, this is so crazy. This is so cool.’ It was fun to go back and remember things that happened during that movie and share it with them. It’s such a surreal moment to sit with your kids and watch yourself as a kid.”

Hewitt says her youngest child, her 3-year-old son Aidan, meanwhile, has seen her 2004 film Garfield: The Movie, “which he likes.”

The I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot is set to hit theaters summer 2025, and along with Hewitt, it features a star-studded young cast that includes Madelyn Cline, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, Jonah Hauer-King, Lola Tung, Chase Sui Wonders and Sarah Pidgeon.

“My daughter wants me to be in it so she can meet the young girls who are now starring in the movie, because she’s moved on from me,” Hewitt says. “I’m not the most exciting. She was like, ‘I want to meet the other girls.’ So yeah, I have to do it for my kids now.”

As for her advice for her young peers in the reboot, Hewitt says it’s “just to have fun.”

“It’s so fun to be in a horror movie,” she says. “It’s such a different acting process than any other thing ’cause you can be big and crazy and fun. I hope for those girls that they’ll be 45 one day, and their kids will also sit in a theater and watch it with them and think that they’re cool and that they will have felt as awesome to be a part of a franchise as I do. I think they’re going to smash it.”

Hewitt’s I Know What You Did Last Summer casting news capped an already monumental 2024, which saw the star release her new book, Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical, and new Lifetime Christmas movie The Holiday Junkie (which also stars her husband of 11 years Brian Hallisay). She also filmed season 8 of 9-1-1 (which returns to ABC on March 6).

“When I sat down with my vision board for 2024, this is what I wanted,” she says. “I wanted all of these things to happen. I’m able to be a mom and able to be this person that people have known me as for a long time, but shifting it into a way that they both come together. So I’m feeling very excited and super grateful.”