It applies classic horror genre tropes to a cutting social commentary about the institution of marriage, taking its cues from the landmark 1968 horror movie Rosemary’s Baby. Anyone who enjoys the miniseries is highly likely to enjoy this film, and vice versa.
Just as Rosemary’s Baby finds horror in the everyday realities of domesticity and motherhood, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen reflects the real pressures placed on young couples by matrimony. What’s more, the Netflix series fully justifies comparison with one of the best horror movies of all time.
Haley Z. Boston’s chilling small-screen creation brings gothic undertones to a contemporary setting, working the sinister implications of dark magic into the ordinary concerns of a betrothed couple. The end to Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen brings these implications to the fore, with a masterclass in breaking the cumulative tension of a long-form screen narrative.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Was Inspired By Rosemary’s Baby
Given the clear similarities between Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and Rosemary’s Baby, it’s hardly surprising that Haley Z. Boston herself has admitted to being inspired by the Roman Polanski movie. The creator of Netflix’s latest hit horror series has explained in an interview with Tudum that she based its tone and visuals on the 1968 big-screen classic.
Some viewers have also pointed out the resemblance of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen to Stephen King’s Carrie, which Boston has named as another key inspiration. But there’s no question that Rosemary’s Baby has had more of a bearing on the TV show’s thematic conceit.
Just as Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse finds herself alienated from her husband in apparent domestic bliss, before she’s cursed with the birth of a child worshipped by satanists, Camila Morrone’s Rachel Harkin begins to see her fiancé as a stranger as their wedding approaches in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.
She’s warned by unsettling pseudoreligious figures that a curse will afflict her if she doesn’t do the right thing by the institution of marriage, and faces all kinds of pressures and hostility from her fiancé’s family. These aspects of the series have obvious parallels to the various characters who gaslight Rosemary about her baby.
Rosemary’s Baby Was The First Modern Horror Movie
Aside from being an all-time great horror movie masterpiece in its own right, Rosemary’s Baby was effectively the first of what we now consider to be “modern” horror movies when it came out in 1968. A seminal work of New Hollywood, it was the first big-budget, major studio production to bring traditional elements of gothic horror into a truly contemporary setting.
The movie also doubles as an overtly feminist critique of the extreme social pressures placed on women in marriage and motherhood. It was adapted from the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, which was published just a year before it came out in theaters.
In this sense and many others, Rosemary’s Baby was the product of an exciting new era for cinema. Over the six decades since its release, it’s inspired countless works of screen horror, from The Omen to Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
The movie might not have grabbed the headlines to the same extent as the first mainstream slasher movies in the 1970s, but it remains one of the most influential productions in the history of its genre. While there have been multiple remakes and reboots of Rosemary’s Baby down the years, the original is still the one to watch.