The Duffer brothers, Matt and Ross, creators of Stranger Things, have ditched 1980s nostalgia for 21st-century relationship horror with their first project since their Netflix megasmash took its final bows, over Christmas.
They are executive producers of the brilliantly chilling and surreal Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen (Netflix, from Thursday), an unhinged slow-boil thriller from Haley Z Boston that lives somewhere between Meet the Parents and David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
It’s as peculiar as anything, but the dread is hypnotic, like a pool of dark water you can’t look away from. We are introduced to Rachel (Camila Morrone, stepdaughter of Al Pacino), who is driving with her fiance, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), to his family’s woodland cabin for their wedding.
But something feels off as they set out on the road trip. At a diner, Rachel hears two people talk about someone killing dogs; later, a stop at a motel takes a turn for the mind-bending when a ghostly man tells Rachel not to go through with the wedding.
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Then, when they finally reach their destination, she discovers that Nicky’s mother, Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is a banshee-like basket of nerves with a soul-shrivelling glare. Oh, and there’s a family myth about a folk-horror-style beastie in the woods called the Sorry Man, who is attracted to the blood of women.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen taps into the fundamental truth that other people’s families – even those of a loved one – are just weird. More than that, they make your significant other seem weird, too: you don’t understand their dynamic with their siblings or their parents, and they have suddenly become a stranger to you again.
Boston is an assured new voice in horror, having already received acclaim for her writing on Brand New Cherry Flavour, the #MeToo Hollywood revenge fantasy. With Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen she drills into the fear many people have that they are marrying the wrong person and that it’s too late to do anything about it. “I’ve been to weddings where people say in their vows, ‘I never once had a doubt.’ I hear that and I’m, like, ‘That’s crazy. What do you mean?’”
There are jump scares, and at moments the series is genuinely disturbing. But its most powerful quality is a slowly building foreboding that intensifies as Rachel’s wedding dress vanishes and her fiance has to drive through the night to retrieve it, leaving her alone with her bonkers new extended family.
The idea of being stranded with your in-laws will fill many with pretty stonking levels of unease – and that’s the universal feeling this terrifying series taps into with style and wicked wit.
