Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen review – so scary it will send you hysterical

3 hours ago 4

Personally, I have always broken off my engagements no more than halfway through a portent-filled night drive to meet my fiance’s parents for the first time in their sprawling, dark-corridor-laced ‘cabin’ in the woods. I might get through the true-crime podcast about a local blood-letting serial killer. I might survive finding a maggoty dead fox in the smashed toilet of a rest stop on the way. But at the first sign of a mysteriously abandoned baby in a parking lot and long before I find myself standing in front of a shrineful of taxidermied family pets in the cabin’s entrance hall, I’m outta there. I’m gone.

I commend you all to have such boundaries, but none more so than twenty-something semi-orphaned Oregonian Rachel (Camila Morrone), who finds herself doing precisely that in the eight-part horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

To be fair to Rachel, she hasn’t seen the title.

She and her perfectly nice beau Nicky (Adam DiMarco) are on their way to said cabin in the woods, where the little family-only wedding they have planned is to take place in five days’ time.

However. Despite the podcasts about throat-slitting killers (who leave pink Barbie shoes at the scene), rotting vulpine corpses and abandoned babies on the way there, plus a peeping tom, stabbing the peeping tom through the hand with her keys as he asks her “Are you sure he’s the one?” and – before you can say “Holy recurring motif, Batman!” – finding a Barbie shoe on the rest stop floor, Rachel cleaves to the itinerary.

Adam DiMarco and Camila Morrone in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

To be fair to her, she doesn’t know that Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is the creation of Haley Z Boston, writer on revenge horror series Brand New Cherry Flavour and the almost self-explanatory Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and imprimatured thereafter by the Duffer Brothers, of world-conquering Stranger Things fame.

She also can’t, I don’t think, hear the soundtrack, which does much to reduce whatever remaining emotional equilibrium the viewer has left.

At last we are past the ancestral stuffed dogs (sitting before a large portrait of the unsmiling clan as currently composed, earlier wives painted out), and it’s time to meet the living family. This comprises: sugar-voiced, platinum-blonde – Barbie-esque, one might say – sister Portia (Gus Birney), who is eager to tell her the story of the monstrous Sorry Man who is purported to rise from the dead and kill women who venture into the woods; brother Jules (Jeff Wilsbusch), who is purported to have seen the Sorry Man when he was a boy and “came back changed” (he is certainly a predatory creep with potential sisters-in-law now); his deeply unwelcoming wife Nell (Karla Crome); their frightened son Jude (Sawyer Fraser); patriarch Dr Cunningham (Ted Levine); and last but never least, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Nick’s borderline-incestuously devoted mother Victoria. We meet her collecting post in a nightgown and the moonlight. One of the envelopes is addressed to Rachel. It contains an invitation to the wedding with ‘Don’t marry him’ written on the back. What could it possibly mean?

Gus Birney as Portia in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

I am not good with horror. Either it is Too Much – too bloody, too insistent, too preposterous – in which case I roll my eyes and become irate, or it is Too Effective – too uncannily at odds with reality, too nicely judged, too convincing – in which case I end up hysterical on the sofa and unable to sleep for four days.

By the end of a well-executed bait-and-switch by [details redacted], Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen has me firmly in the latter camp. The women’s obsession with the wedding dress, the atmosphere, the hints of unspeakable activities in the past rising up to greet us in the future have got me good. It helps that Rachel is no idiot and no passive victim. Morrone has an irreducible strength and spirit to her that lends the whole affair its needed credibility.

And then there’s the underlying terror of the message. What does marriage really mean? Do we ever really know someone? Can you think of anything worse than being trapped by sacred ritual to the wrong person? Of being absorbed into his family and never let go?

Actually, I may never sleep again.