I Know What You Did Last Summer Director Defends That Shocking Twist: ‘People Might Not Like It’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, in theaters now.

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson is aware her new I Know What You Did Last Summer film’s twist will be divisive among die-hard fans of the horror franchise.

One of the film’s killers is revealed to be Ray Bronson, the character Freddie Prinze Jr. has played since the 1997 original slasher.

Frustrated that the town of Southport, N.C. has erased the ’97 massacre from the history books to promote tourism and development, Ray reminds everyone of the fisherman’s murder spree by helping his employee Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) get revenge on her friends. (She and her former pals caused a deadly car accident, much like the inciting incident of the O.G. movie.)

“Do I think people might not like it? Sure,” Robinson, who co-wrote the new sequel with Sam Lansky, tells PEOPLE of Ray’s shocking twist. “But I think for me, it was always about if you’re going to do this, take a swing. Just take a swing. Listen, if not everybody likes it, that’s okay. Because I think we need more movies that you can argue about in the car on the ride home.”

Prinze, 49, says he and Robinson “talked a lot about reasons why” Ray snapped into a killer and “what trauma can do and how the same trauma can affect people so differently.”

“It can make you or it can break you. And what happens if it breaks you? What does that do? How do you react to situations?” he tells PEOPLE, adding of the twist, “There’s going to definitely be people that freak out. But I have to make this movie because I believe in the choices that the character’s making, not necessarily the ones that other people may see as what they want, what their wish fulfillment is. I have to see it and believe it.”

He continues, “I love what they’ve done with Ray. Jen Robinson and Sam Lansky put so much time into Ray and Julie, and they’re such a driving force in this film that people will get what they’re looking for out of these characters. You’ll get to see who Ray was, and you’ll get to see who Ray is, and you’ll get to figure out what happened in between.”

Jennifer Love Hewitt reprises her role as Julie James, who is now a psychology professor and ex-wife of Ray. They have a confrontation near the end of the movie, and when Ray is about to kill Julie, he’s shot and killed from behind with a harpoon gun fired by Ava (Chase Sui Wonders).

Hewitt, 46, admits she was at first surprised by the direction Prinze’s character goes in.

However, “I think it makes sense. If you really look at who he was in the movies, it makes sense,” she tells PEOPLE. “He was always this tortured, dark kind of kid who wasn’t really sure about how he felt about Southport and his place there and what that all meant, and he carried his own stuff, obviously from the road that night and everything.”

“So even though I was shocked at first [by the twist],” continues Hewitt, “when I went back and really looked at it and put those pieces together for myself, I think it felt like it made sense. When Julie realizes that in the movie, I tried not to play the shock of it so that even in my small part in this, people would be able to hopefully go back and be like, ‘She was not shocked by this. Why was she not shocked by it?’ You know what I mean? If you really put the pieces together, I get it.”

Robinson further adds of the plot twist and the lasting trauma of the ’97 movie, “The thought of this thing that happened to Julie and Ray pushing both of them in such different directions was really interesting to me.”

“And I did like that Harvey Dent arc of ‘you die the hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’ Because I do think that calcified trauma — especially in men who aren’t dealing with their emotions — can change you in really profound ways that you don’t even realize,” says Robinson.

“To me, that was always the thing that was interesting. I went to Sony and I was like, ‘I want to do it, but I only want to do it if I can do this.’ They said yes. I went to Freddie and kind of pitched him why I felt the character would end up here, and then I pitched him the movie, and he was in, and we were off to the races.”

Prinze says he is “proud of the work I did” in the new film.

He says, “I’ve never been stalked by a slasher, but to get to apply my own personal trauma to [the character] and make it as real as I could so that it genuinely hurt… I went home in a bad mood because I was trying to bring as much vulnerability as I could to this character. I was really excited for that.”

“I’m really proud of the work that Love and I got to do on screen,” says Prinze. “I think it’s the best work we’ve done in all three of the movies that we did together — and I don’t think it’s close.” Adds Hewitt, “Freddie is really great in this movie. It was fun to watch.”

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