The Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is an absolute sensation. Created by Haley Z. Boston, starring Camila Morrone and Adam DiMarco, alongside Gus Birney, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Karla Crome, Jeff Wilbusch and Ted Levine, it’s a thrilling horror series with an incredibly unique concept, meticulously crafted with impressive detail, and exciting twists.

The show begins as Rachel (Morrone) and Nicky (DiMarco) are five days away from their wedding, taking place at Nicky’s family home. But the road trip to the secluded house has an unsettling start, including the couple finding a baby left alone in a locked car, and a creepy man peering at Rachel over a bathroom stall.

And when they arrive at Nicky’s parents’ home, Rachel meets his family for the first time, and an unsettling feeling lingers.

“I wrote out Rachel’s emotional arc first, and it’s really important to me in the genre that the horror is connected to the emotional story, or else, what are we doing?” Boston told Yahoo Canada. “So I think it really hits, because everything that she’s going through is really tied to her internal experience.”

“And that’s something I love about the genre. You can externalize what someone is going through on the inside using creepy people following you and supernatural elements.”

Something to pay attention to throughout the series is the sound design, which really elevates the show’s most horrific elements. And if you happened not to catch it the first time, it’s worth a rewatch to pay attention to all the fox references in the series.

“I had a lot of conversations with … our sound designer about always making sure that when we’re in this unsettling state with Rachel that things feel a little off, that the house has a personality to the way it sounds,” Boston said. “There are a lot of hidden fox cries throughout the season, some of them more obvious than others, but the fox ends up becoming kind of a metaphor for Rachel and her journey.”

“And then just being really in her subjective POV. … That was kind of the guideline for everyone, from the directing and the way it was shot, and you just really want to feel like you’re always aware of what she’s going through.”

‘Circling her like hyenas’

While the way the show builds tension is incredibly appealing, what also makes Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen easily slip into the spot of your next streaming obsession is that it beautifully marries horror elements with some comedic fun.

“There’s so much comedy in the show, and that’s why I kind of hate labelling it as just a horror show, because I think it’s also a relationship drama, there’s family drama, there’s a lot of comedy,” Morrone said. “It’s so dynamic, and there are so many layers to the show that I actually do think that there’s something in there for every audience member.”

Take, for example, the character Portia (Gus Birney), Nicky’s sister, who delivers some outrageous lines as someone who just says whatever comes to mind.

“The most fun character to write,” Boston said. “She’s just someone who says anything she’s thinking without ever thinking about how it might come across, and that’s absolutely the most exciting thing to write.”

“And pairing her with Rachel, those scenes, I just think are delicious, and you just go, ‘Did she really just say that?’ It was so fun.”

And then there are scenes like the moment when Rachel’s wedding dress goes missing, and Nicky’s mom, Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), presents Rachel with her wedding dress, as Portia, and Nell (Karla Crome), who’s married to Nicky’s brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch), start altering the dress for Rachel.

“There were so many characters in that room, and … they were all circling me. And then there’s a stunt with Gus, who plays Portia, with her arm in the blood. So we actually did come in, I think on a weekend, or before the show started, to rehearse that … and block it out, which was really nice, because there are so many looks that need to happen as well,” Morrone recalled.

“[Director Weronika Tofilska] was like, ‘Ooh, it’s kind of cool when you’re all, like, circling her like hyenas, and you’re all kind of walking and looking,’ and I’ve got no say in it, so it was great.”

Another element of Boston’s great storytelling is that Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen really maintains its stakes, even as the story gets increasingly more outrageous and amps up its supernatural elements. That’s particularly present in a moment when Nicky confronts his mom about the secrets she’s been keeping from him for his whole life.

“I’m happy with how that scene turned out,” DiMarco said. “Growing up, you’re like, well, my parents know everything, and they would never lie about Santa Claus or their relationship or anything. So I think that’s kind of a pivotal moment for his character where the house of cards kind of gets blown away by this gust of wind.”

“Filming that scene with Jennifer was great. She was really there for me. … When we were blocking that, I found myself kind of in the corner of the room, and when I was walking back slowly, I kind of just saw her back, and I was like, what’s going on? Why isn’t she talking? And I mentioned that to our camera operator, and he ended up using that as a POV of just slowly coming around the bed.”

Spoilers included beyond this point

‘I definitely wanted Rachel’s story to end on a triumphant note’

But of course, it all culminates in the most fantastic ending moment.

Throughout the show, Rachel discovers that her family has a generational curse: everyone in her bloodline must marry their soulmate by sundown on their wedding day or bleed to death, and if she doesn’t get married, the curse spreads to her fiancée family.

The curse also explains the character The Witness (Zlatko Burić), who, years ago, was unsure if he was marrying his soulmate, and decided not to go through with the marriage, with the curse taking hold in his fiancée bloodline, and he was forced to attend every wedding in her family for all future generations.

Rachel is given the opportunity to drink a potion that would ensure Nicky is her soulmate, but she puts her faith in their connection. Then Nicky’s the one who refuses to marry Rachel at the altar, while also saying he doesn’t believe in the curse.

But as the curse takes hold on Nicky’s bloodline, anyone not married to their soulmate starts bleeding to death, and in a desperate attempt to stop it, Nicky rushes through the ceremony to marry Rachel, resulting in Rachel dying as she’s now married to someone who is not her soulmate.

Then there’s a twist. Rachel is reborn as The Witness, forced to watch every wedding in Nicky’s family’s bloodline.

That leads to one of the best scenes in the whole show, where Rachel says her final goodbye to Nicky in a blood-stained wedding dress, as he clutches a teddy bear on his bed, and she nonchalantly asks him where her lighter is. Rachel walks to a truck with “Just Married” on the back, now wearing a suit and all her silver jewelry, her face still bloody. As she looks back at the house, she drives away with “We Will Not Be Lovers” by The Waterboys playing, and a fox with an injured leg is hobbling away from the home.

“We shot that on a green screen at like the eleventh hour at the very end of the day,” Morrone said. “I had no gas left in the tank.”

“All these days on this show were really hardcore days, just because of the emotional toll and the level of stakes that we’re playing all the time. And that one, I just remember getting in the car, and she’s just like, let’s walk through a range of emotions, and that’s what ended up in the show. And it was just, end of show, end of an experience, … another shot at life.”

“I definitely wanted Rachel’s story to end on a triumphant note,” Boston added in a separate interview. “Her arc, because she’s so full of doubt, and then she ultimately ends up believing in Nicky and taking the leap of faith, and that’s what it is to make a huge commitment, you never know if it’s going to work out. … And so Rachel does everything right and then she gets betrayed, and it was really important that she decides not to sacrifice herself, and that she chooses herself.”

“Ultimately, it’s a breakup story. And so Rachel getting to be reborn and getting to leave and be free, that is the happy ending to a breakup story.”