Netflix's New 8-Part Series Becomes a Late-Night Sleeper Hit for Horror Fans

23 hours ago 2

Something_Very_Bad_Is_Going_to_Happen_n_S1_E3_00_30_00_22R

Published Apr 13, 2026, 11:28 AM EDT

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

Nobody put Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on their must-watch list — partly because it arrived on Netflix on March 26, which is the dead zone between Valentine's Day rom-coms and summer blockbuster season, when nobody is in the market for a slow-burn supernatural horror series about a doomed wedding. Halloween is seven months away, the vibes are wrong, and the only cursed thing most people are thinking about in late March is tax season.

But something strange has happened in the weeks since the show’s release. People started watching it, then they told others, and now it's one of the most-binged shows on the planet, with over 28 million hours viewed and a seemingly permanent spot in Netflix’s Top 10. What does this say about horror? That it doesn't need a full moon and a bowl of candy corn to find its audience, for one. It just needs to be good.

What Is 'Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen' About?

Creator and showrunner Haley Z. Boston built her eight-episode limited series around one of horror's most familiar setups: a bride who is convinced, down to her bones, that something catastrophic is going to happen at her wedding, and a generational curse that proves her right. Normally, this would be a 90-minute feature with a twist ending and a soundtrack you add to your Spotify playlist the next day. In Boston's hands, it becomes something that digs deeper under your skin with each episode.

Camila Morrone plays Rachel, a woman carrying the particular paranoia of someone raised to expect the worst and still wants to believe that love might be the exception. It's a hard thing to make sympathetic rather than exhausting, but Morrone makes it look easy. Adam DiMarco's Nicky is her fiancé, and he's charming enough that you want to tell Rachel she's being ridiculous, but just strange enough to make you doubt that. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays his mother, who spends the lead-up to the wedding performing rituals that nobody is explaining and everybody is pretending not to notice.

Camila Morrone in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

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

Haley Z. Boston also discusses Episode 4's most surprising cameo and the scene she thought she'd get more pushback on from Netflix.

Boston cut her teeth writing for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, so the vibes are very much “horror, but make it stylish as hell.” Atmosphere is as important as plot here, and what’s not shown is even more frightening than what the series allows you to witness. Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is shot like a cross between Get Out and Rosemary's Baby: suffocating, with a visual grammar all its own. It’s also propped up by a great supporting cast, including Gus Birney, Karla Crome, Jeff Wilbusch, and Zlatko Burić.

There's Real-Life Horror Behind 'Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen'

The show lives or dies on Morrone's performance as Rachel, and she is excellent, which, given that she's in virtually every scene, really makes a difference. Rachel is a fascinating kind of horror protagonist: someone who has spent her whole life bracing for catastrophe and who’s trying to push those instincts down for the man she loves. DiMarco's Nicky is the perfect counterweight. You might know the actor from The White Lotus, where he also spent a season looking slightly too clean for the chaos surrounding him, and he brings that same quality here. Nicky is nice. Too nice. And that nonthreatening naïveté is also what makes him so unsettling.

Boston has said that Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen grew out of her own thinking about marriage — the fears that come with it, the uncertainty, the question of whether the person you've chosen is really who you think they are. That's the horror underneath the supernatural trappings. It's the ordinary human terror of standing at an altar and realizing you might have gotten something very, very wrong. The show earns its comparisons to Rosemary's Baby not just visually but thematically — both are stories about a woman whose perception of reality is systematically undermined by the people who are supposed to love her most. The difference is that Boston laces her version with enough ambiguity, at least early on, that you're genuinely unsure whether Rachel's dread is a premonition or a side effect of smoking too much weed. That uncertainty is what makes Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen so disturbing.

Why 'Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen' Is Worth Watching on Netflix

Camila Morrone smiling in a wedding dress in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

28 million hours watched in its debut week. A spot in Netflix's global Top 10, peaking at number one. An 88% Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. For a show that arrived without a marketing blitz or a built-in fanbase, that’s huge. The Duffer Brothers' executive producing credit helped, surely. Anything with their name attached gets a second look from the Stranger Things audience, which is enormous and hungry for the next thing now that that show has wrapped. But the show is earning more and more eyes, weeks after its premiere, simply because it’s good. Watch it before someone spoils the ending, which is so unhinged that it might just make you rethink your own beliefs when it comes to the institution of marriage.