RED WEDDING

THE DUFFER BROTHERS' FIRST PRODUCTION SINCE ENDING STRANGER THINGS IS A BLOODY BAD MARRIAGE. SHOWRUNNER HALEY Z BOSTON TALKS SFX THROUGH WRITING HER VOWS

- JACK SHEPHERD

WHEN HALEY Z Boston was 10 years old, her mother warned her: “Don’t marry the wrong person.” Fairly normal advice from a parent, you might think, but advice that would haunt Boston for the next 17 years. “When you’re 27, you’re closer to 30,” she tells SFX. “There were all these people I knew from school who were getting married, and I felt very far from that. The idea of, ‘What does it mean to find the right person to marry, to find your soulmate? How do you know when you meet them?’ I heard people say in their wedding vows, ‘I never had a doubt in my mind’ and I’m like, ‘How could you never doubt?’ I was envious of people who could just go with it.”

Her mother’s words haunted her, and Boston felt an “intense pressure” to find the right person to spend her life with. “Because I had a model of [a wonderful marriage] in my parents, I was like, ‘I know it exists; I know you can have lifelong love, be fulfilled, have a partnership and be teammates.’ So I found myself weighing so much against my parents’ marriage. All those things coming together, it felt obvious to me that that’s a horror story.”

DREAD CENTRAL

A few years after her 27th birthday – and following a pitch to executive producers the Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things – Boston would transform her marital dread into her debut series as a showrunner for Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen. The pilot starts with a terrified bride, Rachel (Camila Morrone), walking down the aisle, almost in tears. We’re then transported back five days before “I do”, with Rachel and her fiancé Nicky (Adam DiMarco) on a road trip, the pair seeming utterly in love.