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I Know What You Did Last Summer is a horror film first released in 1997. It stars Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Anne Heche. The screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson based on a popular novel written for teenagers by Lois Duncan.
A group of teenagers go on a road trip in their car and accidentally run over a fisherman. They dispose of the body, thinking he is dead, only to receive a letter the next year stating, "I know what you did last summer". They are then -- some say predictably -- killed off one by one by a man who looks creepily like the one they mowed down.
Some accredit the popularity of the film to its characters and their subversive attitudes towards what is going on, arguing that plotwise it is fairly atypical of teen-slasher films. The prevailing view, however, is that it owed its success to the physical appeal of its young actors, all of whom were fresh faces at the time of its release.
Gellar and Hewitt have jokingly referred to this film as I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer, a reference to the fact that both wore push-up bras in order to give themselves exaggerated breasts. Only recently have the women admitted that their breasts are smaller than they appear to be in this film.
After the film's release, Prinze and Hewitt emerged as the two most popular young stars in the country. Prinze went on to do a string of romantic comedies aimed at the teenage market. Hewitt's career initially foundered in the late 1990s after a poorly reviewed television biography of Audrey Hepburn and an ill-fated 1999 television series.
Gellar and Prinze would later marry. Gellar denied her interest in Prinze began when they met on the set of this film. Prinze was romantically involved with another woman at the time. On the David Letterman Show, Prinze joked about his first date with Gellar. According to him, their first date was the occasion during which he felt that he could have sex with her. Letterman retorted that if that was what a first date was, he didn't think he'd ever been on a date.
The film was followed by a sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
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