Hello and welcome.

My name is John August, and this is episode 732 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting,

and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we have a very special guest.

Haley Z. Boston is a writer whose credits include brand new cherry flavor, hunters,

and Guillermo's Cabinet of Curiosities.

She's also the creator and showrunner of the excellent. Something very bad is going to happen. Welcome, Haley.

Thank you. Happy to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you because I want to talk about your show. I want to talk about horror, about relationships. I want to dig in on the state of streaming shows and mentorship and show running.

And I want to talk to you because you are the ideal person for all of these conversations. So I'm so grateful to have you here. Thank you so much. I want to answer some of the questions too. But in our bonus segment, we're premium members. I'd love to talk about red herrings and misdirections because your show does it really well. but I wanted to assess more generally the role of redhangers and misdirections in storytelling, which is right up your alley.

I think making a horror show is very challenging because when you reveal the monster,

it's no longer scary.

That's the real challenge in horror.

And then trying to get the protagonist to stay and not have the audience yelling at the TV, like, just leave.

Which I have read some comments online that do yell at her, which I would like to defend myself by saying she does try to leave.

She does.

And so in the bonus segment, I want to get into a little bit more spoiler territory here. Because one of the things I love so much about your show is that I watched it completely cold. So I watched it because my friend Mike said, oh, this is legit. You should absolutely watch it. And it's like, okay. And I started, I hit play not knowing whether it was a movie or a series and just went for it

and so I love it for that we have to talk about some parts of it yeah but I love most people to

experience it kind of cold and then the bonus segment will spoil some more things okay all right

can we talk about who you are and sort of how you got to this place where you're making a show.

So I grew up in Oregon, Portland, Oregon, with two doctor parents. I had no idea that you could be a writer.

I didn't either growing up. I didn't know it was the thing. Yeah. I don't know how that was possible that I didn't know. Like you don't think someone's job is to write a script and then, I mean, you just have no idea.

Well, you probably know, you know there are authors.

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