The camera is always right in Camila Morrone’s face throughout Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Of course the camera loves her, but here it feels like it’s pursuing her. Chasing her, even. That’s not the kind of pressure that any bride wants to endure as they prepare for their big day. For Haley Z. Boston’s sublimely dark limited series, Morrone’s character was put through the ringer as she decides what she truly wants in a partner…and she has a bloody good time doing it.
I told Morrone how much I responded to the different types of horror that Rachel encounters on her journey to meet the in-laws. It begins as a strange, mentally taxing road thriller where odd characters pop in and out and babies are left in abandoned, snowy cars. Even though Rachel and her partner, Adam DiMarco’s Nicky, are alone, they never feel alone. When she arrives with Adam at his family’s home, the literal dark corners of the house seem to be taunting Rachel as the series settles into a new kind of horror. Morrone reminds me that Something Very Bad didn’t shoot chronologically, so one day she’d be traipsing through the snowy woods and later that afternoon, she’d be drenched head-to-toe in a a bloody wedding dress.
Even without the device of a curse threatening the family, Rachel feels like an outsider, and we discuss how it feels to enter or join a family when you don’t know what the dynamics are. That loneliness can feel isolating and can change how you enter certain conversations and encounters, and that is all happens before Rachel walks down the aisle. Morrone describes what it felt like to wear the veil and take those steps towards a man she thinks she can call a partner and what it felt like to stand in front of all of those people with the stakes so high.
When you feel like you have been working nonstop to please everyone and make a nice impression…it must feel nice to be able to let that fall away and show people that you’ve had enough. As the series reaches its bloody crescendo, Rachel realizes that she shouldn’t hide any inch of herself and, as Morrone puts it, “let it rip.” Even though she’s doused in an entire family’s blood and she leaves the house alone, she knows she departs on her own terms.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is streaming now on Netflix.
