Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen creator Haley Z. Boston received some sage advice from her mother about marriage—and she could not get it out of her head.
What could be worse than vowing to spend forever with the wrong person?
Well, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen creator Haley Z. Boston came up with quite a few things that register as more terrifying than saying "I do" to someone who isn't who you thought they were. But the blood-soaked horror that unfolds in the new Netflix series is inspired by a very real concern that has kept more than a few people up at night.
"When I was a kid, my mom said to me, ‘You just need to make sure you don’t marry the wrong person,’” she told Netflix's Tudum. “The show is about the fear of marrying the wrong person.”
And her own parents' marriage—"They've been together for 37 years or something," the Oregon native told the Los Angeles Times—only exacerbated her worries.
"I felt all this pressure knowing that exists," Boston explained. "It always felt like a curse. You have this great example of what a marriage is, and I always found myself weighing every little romantic tryst against this 30-year marriage—which was unhelpful."
Even attending her friends' nuptials just felt…off.
“I was 27 when I came up with the idea for the show,” she told Variety. “As I was approaching 30, so many people I knew were getting married. I was fascinated by that. It felt like we were all too young to be doing that. The idea of making that lifelong commitment and the fear associated with that made natural sense to me to explore in a horror lens."
As she told Tudum, when she heard people "say in their vows, 'I never once had a doubt,' I hear that, and I'm like, 'That's crazy. What do you mean?'"
But Boston, now 31, was engaged to the idea of turning her deep-seated fears into a Grand Guignol.
"It just felt like something I hadn't really seen before, a horror show about a fear of commitment," she told The Wrap. "It was something I was going through, so it was personal to me."
The genre, she added, "allows you to take all these internal feelings and externalize them."
Matter-of-fact show title aside, theoretically we don't know at first if Rachel (Camila Morrone) is just anxious as her wedding approaches or if the escalating eeriness signals something more nefarious at work and fiancé Nicky (Adam DiMarco) is Mr. Wrong in a big way.
Like, it's not weird that there's a painting of his family that includes an empty chair, as if it was just waiting to be filled, right? Or that her future in-laws' remote "vacation cabin"—where Rachel agreed to get married, sight unseen, having met none of these people—turns out to be a sprawling mansion?
Either way, Rachel ends up with people treating her as if she's the crazy one, though it's Nicky not believing her—starting when he dismisses her suspicion that someone took her wedding dress when it goes missing upon arrival—that really throws a wrench in the proceedings.
"I think from the moment she arrives, everything starts to feel off," Morrone, who's been dating Cole Bennett since 2024, told Glamour, discussing the deeper themes afoot in the series. "There’s a lot of gaslighting happening. She’s trying to trust herself, but she’s constantly being told that she’s wrong. And that creates a really disorienting experience. She just wants to get through it, but at the same time, she knows something isn’t right."
The actress added, "It's a very isolating experience to be in that headspace."
But it's also a relatable one, with Morrone noting that Boston "is really commenting on women and how we're perceived. How we're made to feel crazy for having feelings. How we're put in a box for expressing them."
It's fear of being put in a literal box driving Rachel's decision of whether or not to marry Nicky, with the generational family curse—marry your soulmate or die—that's hanging over her representing a bride-to-be's cold feet.
"I’m not trying to say that I know what a soulmate is holistically," Boston told The Wrap, "but the perspective I have on soulmates and what it means to marry the right person is you're choosing someone who sees you for who you are."
Grappling with how to get to the point—teased in the first minute of the show—where it's Nicky who's hesitant to make it official, Boston again thought of the high bar her mom and dad had set.
"My parents have this wonderful marriage," she explained, "and someone asked me in the writers' room, 'What would make you change your mind?' And I was like, 'If I found out my parents' marriage was not what I thought, it would completely shatter my understanding of love.'"
And regardless of the buckets of blood spilled, Boston considers her finale to be "very romantic" and "very hopeful."
"I do believe in true love," she said, "and that's why I put such a stake on marrying the right person. If you didn't believe in that, I don't know that you would take it so seriously."
So now, if nobody has any objections, check out some of TV's less terrifying weddings:
