Something Bad Is Going to Happen: Netflix’s Most Unsettling New Show Is Already Dividing Couples

Following the release of the final script for her Netflix horror series, creator Haley Z. Boston began receiving feedback from people who had read it and ended their relationships. Not fictional characters, but real people in real relationships who had watched an engaged couple rip each other to pieces in a blood-soaked cabin in the woods for eight episodes before turning to the person seated next to them and apparently having a conversation that ended things. Boston’s reaction was almost joyful. “That’s the best thing I could ever hear,” she replied.
The film Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which debuted on Netflix on March 26, 2026, is based on a fear that its creator candidly describes: the fear of romantic commitment, particularly the millennial version of it, where you can love someone and still be awake at three in the morning. pondering whether you are the right person, whether they are the right person, and whether the entire endeavor is a disastrous error dressed in string quartets and flowers. Boston cast a supernatural curse on that emotion. As a result, eight episodes of slow-burning, sometimes contentious, genuinely unsettling horror have already received an 83 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and have sparked the kind of audience discussion that most streaming series would spend a second season hoping for.
As executive producers, Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of Stranger Things, are working on their first significant project since the end of that series. Although their presence probably contributed to the show’s success on Netflix, Boston is undoubtedly the creator. She has some experience creating the kind of horror that relies more on dread and mythology than jump scares because she wrote for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Brand New Cherry Flavor. That tradition is strongly present in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. The frightening moments come gradually. When the bleeding does occur, it is operatic.

It is surprisingly easy to set up. Adam DiMarco’s character Nicky Cunningham and Camila Morrone’s character Rachel Harkin are just a few days away from getting married. Rachel will meet his family for the first time when they travel to their remote cabin compound, which exudes a sense of unease from the moment you see it through a car window. She almost instantly comes to believe that they are preparing a horrible scheme. The show lets her suspicion build before pulling the rug out, revealing that the family’s strange behavior is mostly explainable — Nicky’s mother Victoria, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, has a terminal brain tumor they’ve been keeping secret. It turns out that there is no external threat at all. It’s the curse Rachel’s own bloodline has been carrying for generations, originating from an ancestor who made a bargain with Death to bring her deceased fiancé back to life, and binding every subsequent descendant to marry their true soulmate by sundown on their wedding day or bleed out and die.
The logic of the curse is sophisticated, but it might have been absurd in the hands of a less confident author. Boston handles it with caution. Within the show’s internal rules, “soulmate” doesn’t mean some cosmic predetermination — it means the person you genuinely, without lingering doubt, believe is the right one for you. That qualifier matters enormously, because the entire final episode hinges on the gap between what Rachel believes and what Nicky believes, and on whether those two things can possibly align at exactly the right moment. Nicky, stewing over the discovery that his mother was unfaithful to his father, arrives at the altar having quietly unraveled his entire belief system around marriage. He refuses to say his vows. His lineage is affected by the curse. People start bleeding from their eyes and ears in the reception hall. The set, by all accounts from Boston, was genuinely difficult to navigate by the time they finished shooting that sequence — the fake blood was sticky enough to glue shoes to the floor.
There’s a feeling, watching the finale, that the show is less interested in horror as a genre exercise and more interested in using horror to say something true about how catastrophically wrong it can go when two people are slightly out of sync on the most important question of their lives. Nicky thinks Rachel is his true love. Rachel has lost faith in him after witnessing him brush off her worries and not believe her about the curse. This is the real-life equivalent of losing a relationship; it’s the realization that the person across from you is actually a stranger disguised as someone you thought you knew. She marries someone she no longer believes in, which leads to her death. Reborn as the immortal Witness, she is destined to spend all of eternity at every wedding in Nicky’s lineage. She throws her ring out the window, packs her bag, and boards a truck with the words “Just Married” on the back. The Waterboys’ song “We Will Not Be Lovers” is playing on the radio. She makes an effort to alter it. The song resumes. She lets it run wild.
It’s possible that not everyone will enjoy the show. It was dubbed “dawdling” by Variety. Bad things take too long to happen, according to time. It is possible to defend both observations. However, it’s also the kind of show that obviously struck a chord with viewers, as evidenced by the couples it broke up, the discussions it sparked, and the Reddit threads discussing whether the conclusion was justified. This kind of conflict is more uncommon than any review score.