Stranger Things Creators’ New Netflix Series Looks Just As Creepy In These First Look Images

Stranger Things may have ended, but the Duffer Brothers are already showing off their new Netflix limited series, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the first project the Duffers are producing and releasing through their new Upside Down Pictures production venture. Thanks to a new featured article on the series, we’re getting some first-look images from Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, featuring the cast, but more importantly, setting the tone for what the new show will be about. Take a look for yourself, below!

What Is Netflix‘s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen About?

The show follows Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone), a girl who “road-trips in mid-winter with her fiancé, Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco), to his wealthy family’s secluded vacation home, where they will be married in five days.” However, once there, things are not what they seem, and the show takes on a unique format as “Each episode tracks a single day around this private ceremony, and each day Rachel’s paranoia and superstition, fed by an accelerating number of strange occurrences, ramps up.”

While Matt and Ross Duffer will be producing, the creator and showrunner of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is Haley Z. Boston, who wrote the Netflix limited series Brand New Cherry Flavor and wrote for the Amazon Prime series Hunters. When it comes to Something Very Bad…, Boston took inspiration from films like Rosemary’s Baby and Carrie, teasing that it asks, “What’s the horror version of a woman becoming a wife?”

She does promise that the series will live up to the titular implications, as “It would be false advertising if not,” Boston told EW. “Something bad happens in every show, right? We need the conflict, but the special thing about this show, and what I think the title offers, is we’re gonna keep you guessing on what the very bad thing is.”

The show has a choice cast, including Jennifer Jason Leigh as the rich family matriarch, Victoria Cunningham, with an extended family that includes actors Jeff Wilbusch (Jules), Karla Crome (Nell), Gus Birney (Portia), Ted Levine (Dr. Cunningham), and Sawyer Fraser (Jude), and Zlatko Burić (Superman, Wonder Man) also appearing in the show. Each episode tracking one day of the wedding ceremony is a unique take, but Boston teases that there’s a very good reason for the stylistic format:

“We wanted you as the audience to feel the paranoia and the fear that Rachel is feeling,” she explained. “Even when she’s not in the scene, we were always thinking about constructing the show in terms of her discomfort. It really represents how it feels to walk into a house for the first time and meet your significant other’s family. There’s all this lore that you are not aware of, and you’re suddenly stepping into it.”

“I sort of grew up with this thing looming over me where I knew that it was possible to have lifelong partnership and the fear of marrying the wrong person was such a presence,” she continued. “So as I was approaching the age of 30 and everyone’s getting married, it just felt so natural to me that you would explore the fear of commitment and the fear of marrying the wrong person through a horror lens.”

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen WILL Be A Horror Show

But what kind of horror will it be? Boston won’t reveal that yet, but the images give us an idea that it won’t be a low-key experience for poor Rachel when the mask of the Cunningham family finally slips off. Admittedly, this kind of bridal horror story has been developing into its own kind of sub-genre, with films like You’re Next, Ready or Not, and The Invitation (2022) all playing on the theme of horror heroines having to survive insane (if not demonic) “meet the family” milestones in their relationships. Turning that experience into a long-form limited series is the trick: the pacing of seemingly normalcy into full-on lunacy is typically best suited for films. But Boston has a gameplan:

“I can’t tell you [what it is],” Boston said about the nature of the threat. “But Rachel’s superstitious. So there is a bit of this groundwork of someone who is aware that there is maybe something cosmic going on. The show is about soulmates and ‘how do you know if someone’s your soulmate?’ What is a soulmate? And it comes up, whether that’s fate or whether it’s something that you create. So I’m just gonna leave that there and you’ll have to watch it to find out.”

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen has a premiere date of Thursday, March 26th, only on Netflix. As stated, it will be the first from the Duffer Brothers’ Upside Down Pictures deal with Netflix. The limited series will be followed by will be followed by the geriatric sci-fi/mystery series The Boroughs, and the animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85.

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