By Bella Kovar
When have you felt the most scared? I’m sure there’s a few moments that popped into your brain. Many times, these fearful forthcomings are physical; right in front of you, with the ability to touch it and study it. But how does fear manifest when there are screens, wires, and a hazy feeling of indescribable doom between you and your monster?
Recently I sat down with 23-year-old horror filmmaker, Edie Turquet, to talk about her latest short film. Video-chatting in from her London flat with her Corgi sunbathing in the background, Edie and I talked about how ILY2 pushes boundaries in regard to indie body horror flicks, exploring how today's young women perceive sexuality with the 2010s’ Internet as a primary textbook, and emphasizing how being behind a screen is a detrimental mask in the hands of insecure and lonely people. As social platforms like Facebook and Twitter began to surface, the Internet slowly became more than just a convenient library of knowledge and an incorrigible entity of its own.
Courtesy of Mother Of Productions.
Experimental social studies happened through websites like Omegle, ask.fm, or Kik Messenger. Initially created to expand connection with friends and loved ones, these hubs deteriorated into something much darker—becoming playgrounds for predators, cyberbullies, and other illicit activities. Tumblr, another major social media website that reigned during this era, became the go-to place to make posts romanticizing depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm. These sinister corners of the web were very easy for middle schoolers and high schoolers to access, causing them to interact with mature conversations and sexually explicit content whether they were searching for it or not.
ILY2 follows an adolescent girl in 2015 who becomes engrossed in a relationship with a man she met in an online chatroom. As the messages between one another become disturbing, the protagonist is forced to confront the codependent reality of their connection as well as coming to terms with the quietly cruel nature of it. Having grown up watching 70s horror movies with her mother and always finding a pull to any genre that was considered strange, Edie decided to combine her appreciation for these morbid stories and her fascination with the era of Internet that she, I, and many others experienced as teenagers. All the pieces for ILY2 fell into place, the narrative became an exploratory body horror film which examines young women who come of age in the time of digital domination feel outside of their own bodies and have a tainted view of sexuality.
ILY2 (2026).
Edie impressed me with her intelligence, intuition, and intention—throughout our conversation, it became clear to me that she had a very particular vision for ILY2. The tie between herself and the story came forth in a handful of ways, one including her sister, Peggy Turquet, starring as the protagonist. Edie, and many other young people from the past twenty years, learned about sex through online platforms. It is not uncommon for people who had grown up in the 2010s to have been violated by a wrong click or deceived by their own curiosity. Edie explained a painfully typical occurrence of “flipping through Omegle at a sleepover to come across some guy jerking off on camera”. Edie also brought to light that more awkward and neurodivergent young women felt it was more feasible to get their first encounters of sexual attention from behind a screen rather than in person. ILY2 coalesces all of these reflections and forms an expansive commentary on the unseen effects of seeing something and saying nothing; feeling deeply and expressing silently.
One of the ways that the film builds tension is through the fact that the young protagonist feels as though she must deal with these scary occurrences alone. Isolated and feeling crazed over simple words on a screen, Edie explained to me a moment that she really wanted to convey in the film having to do with a contained sort of danger that many teenagers endure as they put more value on their privacy than their own safety. She had a mundane but haunting vision, one that she experienced, “The idea of sitting at a family dinner after you’ve been told the most horrific shit on the Internet, and you’re just trying to keep it together.”
ILY2 (2026).
When I asked Edie what she hopes audiences take away from the film, she smiled and said she’d want viewers to discuss the ending—which is up for interpretation. Discussions about the lore of the protagonist and her relationship with the man from the chatroom, whether or not the bodily turmoil she undergoes is real or a figment of the protagonist’s imagination would make Edie content, “I want people to watch it and fight over it”. She also emphasized the importance of a broader dialogue about individuals’ lasting relationships to their sexual occurrences, she hopes it proctors “a wider conversation about how our sexual experiences whether virtual or in-person affect us down the road and leave an imprint on our bodies”.
Reese Villella & Edie Turquet; Courtesy of @reesevillellla.
Follow Edie on Instagram, as well as her producer and fellow Gut Instinct writer, Reese Villella of Mother Of Productions to be the first to know where to watch ILY2 when it is up for the public!
