‘Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’ Creator Explains the Finale’s Twist Ending and Rachel’s Fate

Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen finale.

Netflix’s new horror show, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, doesn’t pull any punches as far as its title is concerned. Despite the seemingly happy premise of young couple Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky’s (Adam DiMarco) impending nuptials, the series created by Haley Z. Boston (Brand New Cherry Flavor) and executive produced by the Duffer Brothers shows its sinister hand from the very beginning. Of course, we don’t know how things will go awry by the time their wedding day dawns, but it does in spectacularly bloody fashion, with a generational curse unleashed upon the members of Nicky’s family — and even Rachel herself — leaving almost no character spared before the finale.

Ahead of the show’s premiere, Collider had the opportunity to sit down with Boston for a conversation about the show’s biggest and most surprising twists — including the deeper meaning behind Rachel’s death and rebirth, whether she considered changing any of the characters’ fates (especially Nicky’s), Episode 4’s most surprising cameo from an icon of Netflix horror, which graphic scene she thought she’d get more pushback on from Netflix (and why she used a new tattoo to defend a different creative choice), and more.

COLLIDER: How early did you have the ending of this show in your head? Was it there before you even started writing anything down at all?

HALEY Z. BOSTON: Yeah. When I came up with the idea for the show, it was like, “Okay, what if when you marry the wrong person, you spontaneously bleed to death at the altar?” That was the first thought. I was picturing a bride bleeding to death. That then turned into this idea that was very big. It was a global thing. It was like The Leftovers. As I was going down that path, I was like, “But what was the origin?” So then I was thinking about a very small story about the wedding that started it all. Obviously, that’s not where this story ends up going, but once I was locked into that more intimate story, then I figured, “Okay, what if I just told the story of one wedding where everyone bleeds to death?”

I was thinking about the idea of going to a wedding, and I feel like at a wedding, you can’t help but think about yourself and your own relationship. Maybe if you’ve been married, you think about your own wedding and your vows, and maybe you wonder if you stuck to them. I think it brings up a lot for the guests at a wedding. So then the idea became, “Okay, what if everyone who didn’t marry the right person bleeds to death at the wedding?” Then the story evolved into what it is, and I had to build, obviously, some mythology about why people are bleeding to death. But yeah, that’s where it started.

I was just really looking to explore my own fear of commitment. It sort of came from the idea of: How can you know? Everyone always says, “You just know. When you meet the right person, you just know.” I was in a relationship at that time, and I was like, “Do I know? How do you know?” I know that that’s true, because my parents have a wonderful marriage and they’re still in love. I was like, “I know that true love exists, so now I have to figure out how to know for sure.”

“… it made sense to do a wedding video.”

Image via Netflix

Episode 4 was such a great narrative swerve while still tying into the overall mythology. The story jumps back, and we see what happened to Rachel’s mother, Alexandra, played by Victoria Pedretti, who I know fans of Netflix horror are going to immediately reaction to. I thought it was a really interesting creative choice, too, to shoot the episode through a found-footage approach for a majority of the runtime. When did you come up with the idea of approaching Episode 4 that way?

BOSTON: I wanted to tell Rachel’s origin story, and I’m not a big fan of flashbacks. I don’t remember exactly when this idea came, but it made sense to do a wedding video. I wanted to mirror the pilot’s road trip, but yeah, it took a lot of drafts of the script to figure out what the structure of that episode would be. Actually, what we shot, the draft we shot, had that footage in our cut through Rachel watching it. The concern was, are we going to be able to leave Rachel for that long? She’s been leading our show. So it was shot intercut with Rachel watching the tape, and then when we were in the edit, it just felt like you wanted to be with Rachel then.

The whole Jude and Jules storyline was also spread out throughout the episode, and we played around with it in the edit, and we were like, “Let’s make Jude the teaser.” Now, we’re jumping back and seeing what Rachel’s seeing. If we can connect the tape to Rachel and have Alexandra look into the camera and say, “Hi, Rachel,” that, I think, feels jarring. You’re like, “Oh, fuck, this is her mom.” And Victoria and Logan’s performances are just so good that we’re able to get away with it, because that story works as its own little mini-short film within the show. But it was a real trial and error, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work. I remember watching the first cut of it and being like, “Ooh, this doesn’t work,” and then we figured it out. Our DP, Bobby Shore, he wanted to shoot on real vintage cameras, which was very cool that Netflix let us do that. I’m really happy with it and how that turned out.

Continuing along the throughline of what you were and weren’t allowed to do, that episode specifically culminates in really terrifying and gruesome fashion, where you really have the first sense of what this curse is going to be like. Even in the first episode, that scene where Rachel finds the dead fox in the bathroom… there are just so many moments of really visceral horror. Did you ever get any notes to pull back at all, or was it more, “Let’s just see how far we can push this and whether there’s ever going to be any roadblocks”?

BOSTON: Yeah, there was some pushback specifically about the birth scene. It was funny because I was in the edit going, “I wish we had a close-up.” Netflix has been so supportive of the freak shit in the show, but I think, for them, it was like, “That’s real. It’s different when someone’s bleeding from the eyes and, obviously, that doesn’t actually happen, but someone cutting a baby out of this woman’s stomach…” So we did end up compromising a little bit. I wanted to stay on that shot for the whole time. We cut back to the kid and shortened it, and I wanted to enhance the gore in the effects, and I agreed not to do that.

What’s funny is I thought that there would be pushback on the semen shot in the glass. No one ever… not once. I never got a note once about the semen. The other one was the toe, and I think, in part, it’s because this show has a hard tone. It goes back and forth between being grounded and being heightened. There was some question of: is Rachel cutting her toe off too out there for this pretty grounded experience that she’s going through? And I really wanted to keep it. This was at the script stage, and me and one of the other writers got these tattoos of a severed toe, and I showed it to one of my Netflix execs, and I was like, “We got to keep it in. It’s tattooed on my body.” It was like, “Wow, that’s the most creative way anyone’s ever fought a note.”

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The series is executive produced by The Duffer Brothers.

In terms of the finale itself, it’s both the wedding and the curse climaxing in this absolutely blood-soaked way. Did you ever go back and forth over who would survive versus who wouldn’t? Were there versions of this story where different family members made it through than the ones who succumbed to the curse?

BOSTON: Yes, absolutely. That was a big, big point of discussion. Frankly, should Nicky die? Should Rachel die? That went back and forth. What was important to me was that I thought of everything from Rachel’s arc and Rachel’s emotional journey, and she ultimately goes from having doubt to having faith. She gets up there, she takes this leap of faith, and she says yes, and realizes that the opposite of doubt is not certainty; it’s faith. That’s a beautiful arc for her. If that was the end, then that would be the happy ending. Of course, Nicky ruins it, so then, the argument seems like Rachel’s clinging onto this belief, and it slowly leaves her. I really wanted her to force her to make another choice and be active in that moment.

So she says no, and she chooses herself. At that point, it’s like, well, are both Nicky and Rachel not going to die then? Is she just going to watch all these people die? I thought it was important for one final betrayal. Nicky just makes it worse. I love Nicky, and I hope that people understand him and his side, and I hope it’s not all negative. He’s just growing at a different pace than she is. Once we had that double wedding, which we called the upside-down wedding, covered in blood, that was the image that I really wanted to get to, Rachel being forced to marry him while this room is covered in blood. Ultimately, the red herring at the beginning of the show, that the family’s going to kill her, comes true at the end, because they do sentence her to death there.

I wanted Rachel’s horror arc to mirror her emotional arc, so she chooses herself, and then she dies and is reborn. It’s like a breakup. You leave that family behind, that person behind, and she’s free. For her, that’s where, “Okay, Rachel’s going to die,” came from. I wanted Nicky to stay alive and be confronted with what he did. Ultimately, the idea of dying if you don’t believe the person is your soulmate is about the death of the self, the soul. If you are in a relationship with the wrong person, you’re going to lose yourself.

Jules and Nell, that was a later decision. We were in the writers’ room like, “Well, obviously Victoria and Boris should repair after this fight, and they should live.” But that felt too obvious to me. I thought it would be more interesting for Jules and Nell to make it at the end. I ended up rewriting their story a little bit to make that feel earned, but their relationship is very honest. That was ultimately the takeaway — that Rachel and Nicky couldn’t do that, and Jules and Nell could.

‘Something Very Bad’ Creator Haley Z. Boston Explains Rachel’s New Destiny in the Finale

“… ultimately, it’s about giving her a second chance.”

Image via Netflix

Rachel waking up in the snow does feel very much like a rebirth. There’s symbolism in her taking the truck and leaving, obviously in symmetry with the beginning of the show and that first drive to the house, but it also feels like she’s taking on the role of Zlatko’s character — someone whose job it is to now guard the curse that’s still out there.

BOSTON: Yes, definitely. That’s her destiny. She becomes the overseer of this curse. It just felt like it was a way to bring her back to life and give her a second chance. For the Witness, he saw that as a punishment for himself, but Rachel has this new… for someone who fears death and is very anxious and wrapped up in it to becoming immortal, there’s this relief for her, but ultimately, it’s about giving her a second chance.

Previously, you’ve said that you really wanted to avoid doing something that’s often common in the horror genre, which is posing questions that are never really answered. Is there anything in the show that you purposefully kept more open-ended or open to interpretation?

BOSTON: Yeah. With the ending, I wanted you to understand what happened. Emotionally, it’s a little open-ended in terms of how you feel about Rachel or Nicky or any of them. I like the idea of giving Rachel a complicated moral dilemma in this episode where… I mean, the whole season, she has a complicated moral dilemma, but she’s navigating it in a way that I think is understandable. And then, of course, by choosing herself, she does condemn all these people to death.

But we talked about this in the writers’ room. “Okay, but why does Rachel have to sacrifice herself for this family?” I wasn’t sure how it would play, and I’m still not. I guess we’ll see what reactions are. But I feel like Rachel… it makes sense, what she did, but I like that you might watch her make that decision and walk out of that house and maybe feel complicated about that. I was thinking about the “Good for Her” cinematic universe, and that’s often a woman making a morally questionable decision. At the end of Midsommar, are we rooting for her, that she sentenced her boyfriend to death? She seems happy about it. So the concept of “Good for Her” made me feel better about making that narrative choice, but it definitely was a debate, and I do hope people have conflicting feelings about it.

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