‘Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’ Ending Explained: A Cursed Wedding

In her new Netflix horror miniseries, Haley Z. Boston makes a promise right in the title: Something very bad is going to happen. She definitely keeps that promise.

Boston served as the creator, showrunner, writer and EP for the new series, executive produced by the Duffer Brothers. The series follows Rachel (Camila Morrone), who meets the family of her fiancé Nicky (Adam DiMarco) as they go to their secluded cabin for a wedding.

But things start to feel off for Rachel as the big day draws closer. Between Nicky’s creepy family (including Jennifer Jason Leigh as his mother and Ted Levine as his father), the presence of a mysterious stranger (Zlatko Burić), a family legend of “The Sorry Man” and a number of other strange occurrences, Rachel begins to feel like … well, like something very bad is going to happen.

As Rachel’s big day draws nearer, secrets quickly come to light, putting her marriage — and her life — in jeopardy. But how does it all shake out, and what happens in the explosive finale?

If you’ve seen the “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” ending and have questions, we have answers.

But be warned. This article contains spoilers.

Does something very bad happen?

Boy, does it.

Days before her wedding, Rachel learns that her family lineage is cursed. Any time anyone in her bloodline gets married to someone other than their soulmate, they die on the night of their wedding, bleeding profusely from their eyes and nose. It’s what happened to her mother, and many others before her. Scary stuff!

There is one way to avoid the curse once you’ve accepted a proposal: You can leave your partner before getting married. Once you do this, however, you pass the curse to their bloodline. This was the path taken by the mysterious stranger (Zlatko Burić), who explains the rules of the curse to Rachel. As penance for leaving his own bride-to-be, the stranger (known as The Witness) was cursed with immortality, forced to attend the weddings of everyone in his fianceé’s bloodline (including Rachel).

After hemming and hawing for days (and chopping off her toe for a potential spell), Rachel decides to get married as she originally planned, taking a leap of faith and trusting that Nicky is her soulmate. Unfortunately, Nicky has a change of heart, deciding that he’s going to leave Rachel at the altar as a statement against the institution of marriage. They should choose each other every day, not get married!

Bad timing, Nicky. This decision triggers the swapping of the curse from Rachel’s bloodline to Nicky’s. What they didn’t expect is that this affects everyone in Nicky’s family retroactively as well — including the 100 extended family members attending his wedding.

What follows is a truly brutal sequence where dozens of poorly chosen spouses — including Nicky’s mother and his sister Portia (Gus Birney), the latter of whom got secretly hitched in Vegas — bleeding to death from their eyes and noses. Maybe don’t wait to prove a point until you’re already at the altar, buddy.

Do they stop the curse?

Nicky and his family attempt to stop the curse at Rachel’s expense, tricking her back to the altar and allowing Nicky to say, “I do,” in front of the The Witness (Rachel already said it herself during the wedding proper). Rachel begins bleeding and stumbles into the house’s atrium to die.

But this move doesn’t save Portia, who soon dies from the curse. The Witness, too, is finally greeted by death, passing off his role in the curse to Rachel, who soon wakes from the apparent dead. And Nicky’s father decides to off himself with the lethal dose of pentobarbital they had intended to use on Nicky’s mother.

The curse remains on Nicky’s bloodline, and Rachel begins a life of immortality as a new Witness.

There are a few ways to read this ending — why Nicky lived, why Portia died, why Rachel came back, why The Witness could finally rest. The clearest explanation seems to be that the rushed second attempt at marriage didn’t take, leaving the curse on Nicky’s family and causing the role of The Witness to pass onto Rachel (with the eye-bleeding being part of the transition). Nicky’s survival could mean that he truly believed Rachel was his soulmate, or it could mean that the curse didn’t accept the marriage as legitimate.

At any rate, the show ends with Rachel talking to Nicky’s nephew, Jude (Sawyer Fraser), about the curse, telling him he has to be very careful about how he chooses to marry. She then drives off in The Witness’ truck — complete with strings of cans the words “Just Married” painted in red on the back.

Was Nicky’s family crazy?

The first two episodes of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” present Nicky’s family as your typical horror in-laws: a group of terrifying, threatening strangers. They’re on edge, they’re acting like they have something to hide and they genuinely seem ready to snap at any moment.

One of the brilliant choices made in Boston’s horror miniseries is the decision to portray the family entirely from Rachel’s perspective. In the early episodes, they seem malicious because that’s how Rachel (paranoid from the feeling that something very bad is going to happen) views them. She soon learns, however, that Nicky’s mother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, a fact that’s been hidden from Nicky, with the wedding meant to serve as a secret last hurrah.

Once Rachel (and the audience) learns this fact, the demeanor of Nicky’s relatives changes. They’re simply presented as a normal family going through crisis. Rachel may be living in a horror series, but they all think they’re simply in a family drama.

Who is The Sorry Man?

Soon after getting to the house, Rachel learns of The Sorry Man, a creepy man who terrorized Nicky’s brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch). As the story goes, a young Jules was alone in the woods when he heard a screaming woman. Jules went to the source of the screaming to find The Sorry Man cut the woman open and “turn her inside out,” repeating “I’m sorry,” over and over. Portia tells Rachel that The Sorry Man follows the scent of blood, looking for women to slice open to find the soul of his wife.

What Jules and Rachel later learn is that there is no Sorry Man (at least, not really). The day Jules came face-to-face with The Sorry Man was actually the day of Rachel’s birth — the day her parents got married, and the day her mother died from the curse.

What Jules stumbled upon was not The Sorry Man, but was actually Rachel’s father, cutting Rachel out of her dead mother’s womb after she began bleeding from her eyes and nose so he didn’t lose them both.

The true story of The Sorry Man is relayed in Episode 4, told through a series of home videotapes intended to celebrate Rachel’s parents’ wedding day. It’s a terrifying sequence, with Boston and the “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” crew dipping their toes into the found footage subgenre to explain the curse at the show’s center.

Will there be a “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” Season 2?

When TheWrap spoke with her, Boston wouldn’t say definitively whether a continuation of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” will come in the future. But the filmmaker said she left an “open thread” — likely Rachel’s status as The Witness or Jude’s taking on of the curse, which could see Morrone returning to witness a grown-up Jude.

The creator noted that she’d need something major to come along to convince her to continue her limited series.

“It was so inspired by my own fear that I’m gonna need another existential fear to explore,” Boston told TheWrap. “I think we’re done with the wedding thing.”

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