Netflix's Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen: The Bloody Ending Explained

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, Netflix's gnarly new horror series, takes what starts out as a simple story about a young couple's impending wedding and turns it into a frequently bizarre fever dream of a rabbit hole full of curses, spirits, and death. It's the sort of series that, for most people, is best experienced without knowing too much about it. So please heed this spoiler warning if you haven't had time to check it out yet.

Warning: The rest of this article is full of spoilers for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, including detailed descriptions of its ending. If you haven't watched the Netflix series yet, you may want to hold off on reading the rest of this.

With that out of the way, let's break down the plot.

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The setup

This is a story about Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco), a young couple traveling to Nicky's luxurious family home out in the woods for their family-only wedding. Because of a certain curse that we'll discuss at length further down, Rachel has no family — but Nicky has a very large and very wealthy one. Yes, this has all the makings of a "a young lady is marrying into a rich family that has secrets" kind of story, but it turns out that Nicky's family secrets are mostly pretty normal ones, like the fact that his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and dad (Ted Levine) aren't quite as happily married as Nicky and his siblings believe.

Instead, it's Rachel who has the big family secret, though even she doesn't know about it until some important backstory is revealed in Episode 4. Her family is out of the picture because her mom died during childbirth, the result of a curse on her bloodline. The curse requires that members of the family who decide to get married must only do so with their true soulmate. If they don't, they'll die at sundown on their wedding day. 

That's what happened with Rachel's mom, who decided to marry Rachel's dad only because he got her pregnant. Since they weren't soulmates, Rachel's mom died on her wedding night by grotesquely and uncontrollably bleeding out of her face while she was still pregnant, forcing Rachel's dad to perform an amateur Caesarean section to save baby Rachel's life. 

And since all this went down in the same area where Nicky's family home is, Nicky's brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) actually witnessed that entire nightmare when he was a child. This is why Jules is able to so easily believe the story about Rachel's curse, and it's also why his wife Nellie (Karla Crome) helps Rachel in her research instead of being skeptical.

Rachel didn't know all this stuff about her own backstory before the events of the series, but eventually she learns the truth. First, Rachel's dad tells her about her mother, and shows her a home video of their wedding day and her death. Then, she meets a creepy old guy (Zlatko Buric) in a bar who fills her in on the rest of the story, which involves a generations-long curse on her family's bloodline.

The curse

A long time ago — like centuries — a woman's fiancé died in a hunting accident right before their wedding. His widow begged Death to bring him back, and Death agreed to do it so long as she believed he was her soulmate. Then Death cursed her bloodline; all her descendants, if they choose to get married, will die on their wedding night if the person they marry isn't their soulmate.

This old man Rachel met in the bar, the Witness, was a descendant of that couple. Eventually the Witness had his own wedding day, and a different creepy man warned him that he'll die if he doesn't marry his soulmate by sundown. So the Witness chickened out, and the family of his betrothed inherited the curse. The woman he scorned ended up marrying her soulmate later, and they had lots of kids, all of whom unknowingly had this curse hanging over their heads. And now it's Rachel's turn to deal with it. 

Between her conversation with the Witness, and her own subsequent research into her own family tree, we get a pretty good picture of the situation. There are a couple details she doesn't learn until the very end of the season, though.

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The rules

So there isn't any real fix, cure, or loophole for this curse, or at least none that will allow for a truly happy ending. Never getting married is completely fine as long as you never get engaged or set a wedding date, but it seems like folks generally don't learn about the stakes until they're beyond that point. The curse is apparently triggered by successfully proposing or accepting a marriage proposal, and also setting a date. Once that happens there are only three possible outcomes. 

1. The person from the cursed bloodline gets married, their spouse actually is their soulmate, and everybody lives.
2. The person from the cursed bloodline gets married, and their spouse is not their soulmate, and the cursed person dies at sundown on their wedding day. 
3. The person from the curse calls off the wedding, and at sundown on the wedding day the curse passes to the family who's been snubbed. 

While Option 3 sounds like the least terrible of the three, that's only because Rachel doesn't know all the consequences. In that particular scenario, in which the wedding simply doesn't happen, any member of the newly cursed bloodline who's married to someone other than their soulmate will immediately be struck with the curse, have their face turn into a blood fountain, and die. And then the person from the old bloodline becomes the new witness.

In her research into her own family tree, meanwhile, Rachel discovers what she hopes is a lead: One of her family members was married for 50 years and had a bunch of children before dying of old age. Rachel, with the aid of Nicky's sister, summons this dead woman's spirit during a seance, and through this she learns a recipe for an old magic potion that will turn her into Nicky's soulmate. Since the ghost initially described this state as "living dead," it may not be the most ideal way to live. And ultimately Rachel decided against drinking it even though she had to let Jules cut off one of her toes, among other witchy things, to make it. 

What went down at the end of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

Rachel decides to roll the dice and take her chances, despite the mounting evidence that Nicky is not her real soulmate. But then Nicky decides to cancel the wedding himself instead of saying "I do." It turns out Nicky doesn't understand the stakes of the situation at all, because he thought all the talk about a curse was some kind of metaphor. After a lot of yelling at each other, Nicky eventually grasps the reality of the situation and agrees to finish the wedding ceremony.

But Rachel has had an epiphany because of this conversation — if Nicky didn't actually believe all the stuff she said about the curse, then he can't be her soulmate. So she changes her mind, the sun goes down without a wedding, and the curse spreads to Nicky's family and extended family, nearly 100 of whom have shown up for the wedding. Any member of the bloodline who ever married someone other than their soulmate immediately starts hemmorhaging blood from their eyes, nose, and mouth. That includes Nicky's mother Victoria and his sister Portia (Gus Birney), and many other members of the entire extended family — but not Nicky's brother Jules. It's a bloodbath.

As they watch the carnage, Jules and Nicky come up with a plan that they hope can reverse the curse and save all their dying relatives. Since Rachel actually said her vows and gave her "I do" before Nicky called the ceremony off, they try to finish the matrimony quickly with Nicky slipping the ring on Rachel's finger and finishing his vows, and Nicky's dad announcing them as husband and wife. 

The gambit seems like it might be working when Rachel starts bleeding from her nose and then dies a few minutes later, but it's just a misdirect. The deadline had already passed, and the curse now belonged to Nicky's family. Rachel, instead, is just taking her place as the new Witness, undead and immortal. After she dies, she gets back up, warns little Jude, Jules's son, to choose his spouse extremely carefully when he grows up, and drives off in the Witness's janky old pickup truck while smoking a joint.

Why Jules and Nicky survived

It turns out Jules and Nell, who frequently offer each other brutally honest insults, actually are soulmates — that honesty contrasts pretty starkly with the other couples on Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, who all lie to make each other happy. So while their honesty with each other may seem cruel at first, it's actually the reason they're good for each other and belong together.

Nicky's survival is a little harder to pin down, and we may not actually have an answer for it right now. But the two most plausible options are either that his attempt to finish the wedding simply didn't count, since he would have died had he actually married someone who wasn't his soulmate — or that Nicky and Rachel actually were soulmates, which would add too many levels of irony to the finale to deal with, and wouldn't make any sense next to Jules' and Nellie's story. The first option is much more likely to be correct, especially since Nicky's survival isn't actually discussed at all.

But it could be that Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen will explore these details further in Season 2, should Netflix renew it. (It should be noted that it's categorized as a miniseries, so renewing it for another season isn't as easy as it seems.) Though maybe it shouldn't, since stories like these don't always fare that well when they explore the details too much. Supernatural stuff doesn't tend to hold up well to much logical scrutiny, so keeping things nebulous is good.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is now streaming on Netflix.