“I grew up in a loving home. My parents have a great relationship. I had safety all around me, and I needed an outlet to explore fear.”
In conversation with Haley Z. Boston, the creator and showrunner of Netflix’s new horror series “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” which is now streaming, it’s clear her stable upbringing has served her well. Boston has had a meteoric rise in the industry, and the series — which stars Camila Morrone as a bride who meets her in-laws during her wedding week and things get dark very quickly — is sure to elevate her profile. It’s scary, sexy and funny in equal measure, with mysteries that don’t drag out too long and unpredictable twists that seem primed to hook horror fans.
“The title of the show: It’s pretty cheeky, but that’s part of it,” she says. “I didn’t want you to know where the horror was coming from. Is it a person? Is it a monster? Is it supernatural? Is it all in her head? So you don’t know what the ‘something very bad’ is, and I’m hoping to really shock audiences and keep them engaged with the surprise of what the horror is.”
To Boston, the horror comes from the wedding industrial process that beckons all 30-somethings.
“I was 27 when I came up with the idea for the show,” she says. “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.”
Boston grew up in Portland, Oregon (“back when it wasn’t cool”) in a family of doctors, and grew a taste for the macabre quickly. She was a teen during the 2010s era of gritty horror remakes, drawing disparate inspiration from both classics like 1976’s “Carrie” and modern takes like 2009’s “Last House on the Left” reimagining.
“I became really inherently attracted to horror and the feeling of being afraid, and realized it’s the way I process the world,” she says.
Boston began her Hollywood journey by moving to Los Angeles and getting a job at WME.
“I did the thing everyone says to do: I lied about wanting to be an agent to get that job,” she says. “Then I made a rule to myself that, once I got the job, I would never lie about what I wanted to do. I was fortunate enough that I worked there for a year and then went and assisted a showrunner. Also, I got repped pretty young — I was 23. I met my reps at a networking event. I wanted to get staffed, and I wrote a pilot that got me the attention of Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, who ran ‘Brand New Cherry Flavor.'”
“Flavor” was a horror revenge miniseries that debuted on Netflix in 2021, and Boston cut her teeth on the show after she was given a chance by the creators.
“I wanted that job so badly,” she says. “It was such a great experience to have my first writing job be something that’s so close to the things I’m most interested in. That show has a very special place in my heart.”
From there, Boston pitched an episode for Netflix’s anthology horror series “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” and while the eponymous director was impressed by her idea, he also gave her sage advice about having your vision fit into an existing structure.
“I wrote the outline, and then I got to talk to Guillermo on the phone for five minutes,” she says. “He said, ‘You’re obviously talented, but this is too weird,’ which was a huge compliment coming from him. He was like, ‘Do this instead, and pitch me a different idea — you can go off to script.’ It was really fun and crazy to have had that conversation with him, and an interesting lesson in being able to work within a structure. This was a show that existed before I was involved in it, so it was an interesting challenge to take this other storyline and try to make it mine, and figure out how to work within the limitations of being a writer for hire.”
After staffing on Prime Video’s Al Pacino series “Hunters” and filming her debut short film, Boston’s creativity and drive led her to develop “Something Very Bad” and become a showrunner on the project before she was 30 years old. Luckily, she had Netflix royalty in her corner, when “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer boarded as exec producers. Boston says the Duffer brothers’ mentorship has been invaluable.
“Their whole message was, ‘This is your show. It’s your vision. It’s an original idea. We will help protect that. You need to protect that. Don’t let all of the noise in because you are working on this show for so long, and there are so many different creative voices coming in. You’ve got the writers, the producers and then directors come in, and the actors, and all the department heads. It’s incredible to have those different perspectives, but if you lose yourself, you lose the plot. You have to follow a North Star and remember what the show is, and take the creative ideas from others that serve that or change it in a way that you think is better or more interesting,'” she says.
“I was really struggling with a specific mythology point, and there were a lot of people who didn’t agree with me or think that that’s the direction the show should go in,” she continues. “I called the Duffers and asked, ‘What do I do? I don’t want to fuck this up. This is my first time doing this.’ They were really great: ‘Haley, you have to believe in every creative decision you make. If you don’t believe in it, don’t do it, and we’ll support you.’ That was incredible. And they pushed for me to be the sole showrunner, which was great and also incredibly challenging.”
Luckily, Boston found running “Something Very Bad” to be a thought-provoking pursuit she could excel at.
“It challenges you to put on a creative hat in a lot of different areas,” she says. “As a writer, you write the thing, and then it’s gone and in someone else’s hands. Being part of post was also so interesting. You realize how much you can do in the edit, and I’m a director as well, so I learned so much about how you can change everything: the tone, the performance. Going into the edit had me going back in time to the writing, and looking at every scene and saying, ‘OK, this is the intention of the scene. This is what we have. How do we make them match as much as possible?'”
Now 31 and releasing the show into the world, Boston is eager to see what the future holds and will be honest about her love of writing to get there.
“I’m always trying to go back to what it was like to be a writer before I was paid for it,” she says. “Back when it was just an escape for me from whatever was going on in life.”
Watch the “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” trailer below.
English (US) ·