[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for the first seven episodes of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.”]
In each episode of Haley Z. Boston’s Netflix limited series, “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” the title card drops at the funniest possible moment. We won’t detail them here — the eight-episode series just dropped on the streamer, after all — but we guarantee that each appearance of that blood-red declaration will be met with some serious chuckles.
And some shivers, because that title isn’t a misdirect. Bad things happen — a lot of bad things — over the course of the Duffer brothers-produced show. Some of them, like a wedding that ends with a river of blood snaking its way through the reception, aren’t a surprise (that’s how the series opens, until flashing back to “five days before I do”). Others? Well, you’ll see.
Boston, who serves as showrunner, creator, writer, and executive producer of the series has been ruminating on its terrors and delights for awhile now. The former “Brand New Cherry Flavor” writer first thought it up over five years ago, but as she tells IndieWire ahead, she’s really been thinking about this whole thing for her entire life.
So, what is this “whole thing”? The series follows the giddily engaged Rachel (a riveting Camila Morrone) and Nicky (a disarmingly happy-go-lucky Adam DiMarco) as they prepare for their imminent nuptials. Lone wolf Rachel doesn’t seem too put out by having their wedding at Nicky’s (very wealthy) family’s summer house, until they start making their way there, and everything starts to feel as foreboding as that title would indicate.
What’s up with Nicky’s way-too-involved family? What’s up with Rachel’s very-much-not-there family? What’s the deal with the decor? Why won’t anyone give her a straight answer? What does it mean to be cursed? And is there anything more scary than committing to the wrong person?
Ahead, Boston tells IndieWire all about creating her moody, scary, and often quite funny limited series, from the big stuff (like her many inspirations) to the minutiae that makes it feel so lived-in (from family portraits to ill-fated foxes). She also unpacks myriad casting choices, that house, and some spoiler-y treats for those who have finished the series (or just can’t wait to).
(And, stay tuned for an upcoming deeper dive into the show’s finale episode, as Boston unpacks who lives, who dies, and how much blood it really took to make good on the promise that something very bad happens.)
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: So, hey, what do you think about marriage?
Haley Z. Boston: [Laughs] That’s huge. OK, so I have so many thoughts. My parents have a great marriage and they’re real partners to each other, and they’ve been in love since they were 20. It’s crazy. I had always felt a pressure from that, and I felt a bit envious of my friends who didn’t grow up with that, which is ironic maybe, but because their standards were normal and my standard is so big, I’m dating people and being like, “Well, this is never going to work because you’re not as emotionally mature as my parents.”
Which, I guess, is ultimately a good thing, but it has caused me to do a lot of thinking about what it means to be with the right person and watching a lot of people I know stay in relationships because it’s so hard to leave them. I have a lot of critical thinking when it comes to that, and I often wish I didn’t. But I made the show to deal with that and deal with my fear of committing to the wrong person.
You lay out many different possible paths early on, and then the series goes in very different directions. What kind of bible and roadmap did you have for the series, both for yourself and your writers and directors?
The show changed quite a bit from what [you see]. The very early original version that I pitched, it had less — I’m trying to figure out how to talk about it without spoiling anything — it had less of a really clear genre element, and it was a little more amorphous. “The Leftovers” was a comp in that there were a lot of things that didn’t get answered, and as I was developing it and sort of being challenged to give it more, I was like, “Well, Damon Lindelof did it.” And I was told, “Well, you’re not Damon Lindelof, so you’ve got to prove yourself first. You’ve got to follow the rules before you can break them.” [Laughs]
Then it turned into, OK, how do I get to where I want to go with the show and keep it interesting for eight episodes? So it became a midpoint thing, where Rachel believes that the horror is coming from an outside threat [and then] she finds out it’s coming from within.
It was in the first week of the writers’ room, trying to figure out how to pitch the whole show to Netflix and get a green light, I wrote out Rachel’s emotional journey. It was as simple as being like, so she gets to his house and this is what she’s feeling. She meets the family and she feels dread and she’s doubting the relationship. I just wrote it out in prose form: here’s what Rachel’s experiencing and [how] her arc goes from doubt to faith. Once I had that emotional story mapped out and knew how I wanted her story to end from an emotional character standpoint, then it became a question of putting the horror into it.
You’ve programmed a series at the Paris with some of your different influences, but one I think is missing is “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which I saw a lot of in the pilot episode. Frozen custard!
[Laughs] “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”! Yeah, that is a one-to-one there, you’ve exposed me.
How do you balance those overt influences with simply mining a feeling or a vibe from another movie or show?
Sometimes, I think it does feel like I’m pulling from things a bit directly. In other cases, it’s just the things that I’m interested in. Like I love “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” taking a regular dynamic and just putting one twist on it and seeing how it changes everyone’s perspectives. In a non-supernatural way, “The Celebration” does that, where the reveal of a secret causes everyone in this family to question their reality. That concept was very interesting to me. I also just love a movie where everything is real except for one supernatural element.
You also take all these influences and use them for major misdirection. The first two episodes, for instance, your audience is probably going to think the story is going in one direction, and then it’s like, “Ah-ha, that’s not what this is at all!”
I’m always kind of like, “OK, how do we take your expectations and fuck with them?” That’s the joy of watching anything. I take inspiration from what Zach Cregger is doing; “Barbarian” does that so well and so does “Weapons.” I loved “Weapons” and I saw that movie with just so much joy because the horror is so fresh and the way that he designs the scares, and then it’s also funny and the character stuff is so well-drawn. I saw that movie after I finished making the show, but that’s the kind of thing that I am also striving for.
On a smaller scale, you’re grafting meaning onto objects, too. I’m thinking about these symbols of luck: rabbit’s feet and lucky pennies, holding your breath in tunnels, broken mirrors, “something borrowed, something blue” stuff. If you’re already feeling like, “Oh, something very bad is going to happen,” you’re not registering these things as nefarious, but the show sets such a mood that even small things instantly become foreboding.
That’s testament to the benefit of making something that has been sitting within you for a long time. I came up with the idea for this show in 2020, so it had been four years by the time I started the writers’ room. I like to write prose to figure out who my characters are. After I wrote the pilot, I wrote a sort of novella version of the show and it helped me understand the characters better. So it’s like a richness of the world that I think you lose if you are making things quickly. I never just write a script and then it’s ready to go. It’s something that’s been within me for a while. There are a lot of Easter eggs in the show. For me, it’s just trying to infuse a character’s entire being into the world.
We also approach a lot of this from Rachel’s headspace. She enters this world and thinks, “This family is weird,” so we think the family is weird. Everything about this family is weird! The stuffed dogs are so weird! That family portrait is so weird! Every time I saw that empty chair in the painting, I just laughed.
That’s my biggest fear.
There’s an empty chair and someone’s going to paint you into it?
That’s what it feels like. That’s the whole thing of, if you are afraid of commitment, then getting married feels like ritual sacrifice, even if that’s not what it is.
The family house is also weird. I could never quite get a handle on where everything was, which I am sure is very much by design. How did you envision the house when you were first thinking about this and writing this versus what we see on screen?
I definitely had the house from “The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo,” the [David] Fincher version, [in mind] — like a big multi-story estate, basically. When I started talking to Weronika Tofilska, the lead director, she had a different idea for it and wanted to lean more into mid-century. That came from the fact that we’ve seen the big manor before. I agreed and wanted to do something more unique.
A lot of it came down to what we had practically. We found the exterior of that house and then thought it was so cool and different that then we built the set to kind of match it. We talked a lot about wanting to be in control of the comfort or discomfort based on where we are in the show and where Rachel is emotionally, so it made sense to have more control over that.
The house is very strange and it’s got touches of things you would find in a rich person’s house, and then it also has this log cabin feel to it. We came up with this backstory that the family money comes from Victoria’s side, and it’s a lumber company, so there’s posters on the wall for the lumber company and Boris wears a hat for the company in Episode 6.
Another homage that I always forget to mention, but every time I watch the pilot, I remember it, is that the house number is 11376, which is the day that “Carrie” came out.
Jules and Nelly’s bathroom did catch my eye, half of it is like a log cabin bathroom, and then half of it is this sort of weirdly outdated ’70s tract home. What’s happening in that bathroom specifically?
I know. I know, there’s a whole backstory about this part of the house was an add-on. What I can tell you is that it was all intentional, but do I remember exactly why? No. [Laughs]
You also get to do an episode with some incredible flashbacks that helps us understand Rachel’s family, and you’ve got what is, in my mind, perfect casting for both her mom and dad.
I agree. Camila Morrone is fantastic performer, and she was not really a horror fan and has never worked in that genre. I thought that was really cool for this show, and I had her watch like 40 horror movies before we started. But Victoria Pedretti is someone who does have a lot of horror acumen. So it was a bit of a Easter egg where we’re kind of, again, playing with expectation. We didn’t choose someone like that to play the lead, but here she is in the fabric of the show. And same with Ted Levine, who’s a horror icon.
Victoria and Logan are so good in Episode 4. Basically, we’re telling this story of the pilot a little bit again in that episode. The two of them had so much chemistry. It just felt very good and right. A challenge with that episode is, it’s 15 minutes of found footage and you really have to care [as we] divert from the storyline and not cut back to Rachel for 15 minutes.
Meeting Rachel’s parents and getting that backstory leads her into discovering this family curse. How did you build the parameters of that curse?
The curse is the thing that wasn’t part of the show when I sold it. One of the writers, Kate Trefry, who’s a “Stranger Things” writer, it was her idea to bring in something like that, something you could really hang your hat on, something that feels more like an understandable horror audience thing. It’s just easy to use that as a narrative device.
So it was like, OK, now how do we approach the show as a curse narrative, which was exciting to me. A lot of that is sort of inherent to the idea of inherited trauma, and I think that ties into the tradition of marriage and the expectation that’s sort of passed down.
Nicky says in the finale that he also feels that he’s cursed by the system that raised him, which is how I feel. So if Nicky has this “curse” that is his parents’ perfect marriage and that’s affected his worldview, then Rachel has a real curse attached to her, it’s all a representation of doubt and the fear being instilled upon you by your parents.
In Rachel’s case, it would be a bunch of marriages that didn’t work out, if we’re going to be grounded about it. That’s her curse. So she’s afraid to get married because it’s never worked out. Once that seed of doubt is planted and her whole world is turned upside down, the grounded version of it is, she’s questioning her relationship. Ultimately, though, it’s all about belief. The opposite of doubt is not certainty, it’s belief. All of the rules of the curse were just created in service of that emotional story.
As I was watching new episodes, I constantly found myself going back to the first episode and rewatching the opening, with Rachel walking down the aisle, and looking for different clues about how it was going to ultimately play out. Are there certain elements in that scene, or elsewhere, that you’d like your audience to pay particular attention to as the season unfolds?
The conversation they have in the diner tells you a lot about their relationship and where it’s going. But there are also a bunch of little things in the diner, too. There’s a painting on the walls that tells the story of their drive. Victoria Pedretti voices the podcast that they listen to. In the podcast, there’s a lot of Easter eggs, just what she’s saying. There’s also a lot of fox imagery, that fox screaming. Look for that.
All episodes of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” are now streaming on Netflix.
