The official synopsis for Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Netflix’s dour new eight-part horror series, loftily invokes two decades-old classics. Where Carrie (1976) was “horror’s version of a girl becoming a woman”, and Rosemary’s Baby (1967) was the “horrific version of a woman becoming a mother”, this new series is, we are told, “horror’s take on a woman becoming a wife”. Here, wedding jitters are imbued with the occult; the worry isn’t so much cold feet but severed ones.
The bride-to-be in question is Rachel (Camila Morrone), a twitchy enigma with a slight deer-in-headlights quality, who travels out to the country to stay with her fiancee’s family in the days before their wedding. Said fiancee, Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco), is blandly nice, while his family are different shades of creepy. The only memorable one of the bunch is Jennifer Jason Leigh (a top actor in her day, here operating more or less in third gear). One of his siblings, played by Gus Birney, is ditzy and femme in a way that uncannily invokes Meredith Hagner’s character in Search Party. (She even shares that character’s name, Portia.)
