Show Creator Haley Z. Boston on “Writing Weird” with ‘Something Very Bad is Going to Happen’

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen is the new Netflix horror series that follows a bride and groom in the week leading up to their doomed wedding. With the hook right in the title, the show sets up five days of sheer terror inside the mundane events of wedding prep. 

Created by 32-year-old Haley Z. Boston and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer, the eight-episode show is being hailed as the Duffer Brothers’ hotly anticipated follow up to Stranger Things. The show is a slow-burn psychological thriller that keeps viewers guessing about what kind of story they’re watching until deep into the season.

Whip-smart and a natural observer, Boston grew up in the Pacific Northwest, far from Hollywood. “My parents are both doctors, and that’s what I thought I would do,” she says.

Movies eventually changed that trajectory. One of the first films to leave a strong impression was I Am Legend, which she saw at age eleven. “It was so scary, and actually turned me off from horror,” she laughs.

A few years later, another film changed her mind about what cinema could be. “When I was 14, I was at water polo boot camp, and I saw Kill Bill Vol. 1. And I was like, a movie can be this?”

With her mind blown, she quickly fell down a rabbit hole of screenwriting and genre. Quentin Tarantino’s scripts became early inspirations, along with Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for The Social Network and Diablo Cody’s Juno. “I started reading scripts and thinking, this is interesting. I don’t know how you make a living doing this, but it’s interesting.”

Boston eventually attended Northwestern University to study film, where professors encouraged her writing. After graduating, she followed a traditional Hollywood path: moving to Los Angeles and working as an assistant at a talent agency. Within a few years, she was represented and landed her first television writing job at age 24 on Netflix’s surreal horror series Brand New Cherry Flavor. After that, she wrote for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Prime Video’s Hunters. 

The seed for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen came from an emotional theme. “I wanted to explore the fear of commitment,” Boston says.

She was also inspired by the Apple TV+ series Servant and its ability to sustain mystery over multiple episodes. “It keeps you guessing on what it is: Is she crazy? Is he crazy? Is it supernatural? Is it a cult? That’s what I wanted to do with this show.”

In Boston’s series, the genre itself becomes part of the suspense. The audience isn’t told exactly what kind of horror story they’re watching until after the midpoint. “I’m basically saying, I’m not going to tell you what the very bad thing is at all and you have to kind of play along.”

But before she wrote a single page, Boston knew one thing. “I had to come up with the ending first,” she says.

From there, the project simmered in her mind for nearly a year before she began drafting the pilot. “I was just thinking about it all the time and writing notes to myself, writing emails to myself. It was like a year of doing that before I actually started writing.”

While the series centers on a looming wedding, much of its tension comes from the bride Rachel (Camila Morrone), meeting her fiancé’s family for the first time. Boston drew from the universal fear of stepping into an unfamiliar family dynamic. “I wanted to capture the feeling of meeting your significant other’s family for the first time,” she says.

Rachel’s first glimpse at the Cunningham family is deliberately heightened and disorienting.

“When we meet them, we’re always in Rachel’s POV, and they’re very strange,” Boston says. “She’s seeing danger everywhere, so she’s sort of reading into this dynamic.”

The Cunninghams’ eccentricities, from taxidermy of the family pets to the legend of a serial killer called The Sorry Man, really begin to ramp up Rachel’s anxiety. Over time, the characters reveal themselves as more human but with big secrets. “You get to know the family a bit better, and you realize why everyone is the way they are. Then they become more like a normal, dysfunctional family.”

At the center of that dynamic is Victoria, the formidable matriarch played by a chillingly rigid Jennifer Jason Leigh. Boston approached the character not as a villain but as a mother whose love has warped into something controlling. “She just loves her son so much, and she wants to protect him,” Boston says. “And that’s harmful to him.”

Early versions of the pilot were dramatically different from what appears in the final show.

“In the first draft of the pilot, they don’t meet the family at all,” Boston says. “It’s just a road trip.” Eventually, the series evolved into a more structured format built around the days leading up to the wedding which creates an effective ticking clock, upping the tension. 

Boston credits fellow writer Kate Trefry, who worked on Stranger Things, with helping refine the structure. “She helped me figure out how to structure the season in a way that would still maintain what the show was but give it something people can hang a hat on.”

The lesson became one of Boston’s biggest takeaways as a writer. “If you want to do weird in your art, you still have to give the audience something that’s familiar for them to grasp onto,” she says. In this case, it’s simply the wedding schedule itself: dress fittings, rehearsal dinners, and other rituals leading up to the ceremony.

“It can be very simple,” she says. “Like, this is the day we’re doing the dress fitting. Then you can mess with it and make it weird and crazy.”

After Boston wrote the pilot, she pitched the series to Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of Stranger Things, who came aboard as executive producers through their Upside Down Pictures banner. Boston had been a fan of their work long before meeting them. “I watched the whole first season in one sitting with my older brother and his friends,” she says. “I even dressed up as Joyce for Halloween.”

Working with the Duffers provided both creative support and mentorship. “They really wanted to support me and my vision,” Boston says. “They used their influence to protect me from having someone else come in.”

The brothers also gave her advice that shaped her approach as a first-time showrunner. “The biggest thing they taught me was how to stay true to your vision,” she says. “There are so many collaborators in television, and that’s wonderful, but it can be easy to get lost.”

Their solution was simple: follow the internal compass that guided the project from the beginning: “You have to follow your North Star.”

Despite its dark premise, Boston approaches horror from an emotional perspective rather than a purely genre-driven one. Before layering in supernatural elements, she focused on Rachel’s psychological journey.

“I took Rachel’s emotional journey and wrote it out. I looked at the reality of someone getting married and the week leading up to her wedding. How is she feeling?”

Only after mapping that internal arc did she add the horror elements. “Once I had that figured out, I was able to add the genre elements so that the horror felt very tied to her emotional experience. You’re following this character on their path. You figure out what their arc is, and then figure out how to throw obstacles at them,” she says. 

Boston’s advice to aspiring writers is familiar but one she believes deeply. “It’s easy to follow trends and think, horror is in or whatever,” she says. “But the best things just come from you. Write what you would want to see.”

That authenticity, she says, is what ultimately leads to work that feels unique and terrifying in all the right ways.

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen is now streaming on Netflix.