If you have just completed Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on Netflix and then proceeded to Google Larry Poole, you are not the only one. The custard shop killer is frighteningly real. Just so you know, Poole exists solely in this show and is not real.
However, his suggestion didn’t pop out of thin air. There are true-life criminal cases that mirror the details of his so eerily well, namely the case of the pregnant woman surviving a brutal attack. What the series does is transfer those real fears into a fictional context, which misleads Rachel and the viewer.
Who is Larry Poole in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen?
Larry Poole is talked about for the first time in the very first episode of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. He is a serial killer from the 90s who owned a frozen custard shop called Coldies. It was close to Somerhouse, the Cunningham family’s rural cabin. Nicky puts on a true crime podcast where a survivor describes running away from Poole’s violence. It is known that one of his victims had been pregnant.
He is only actually seen on screen in Episode 4 in a flashback. Most of the time, he is just a mysterious presence, the sort of man who could be hiding an evil heart underneath a bag of ice cream. That apparent dichotomy was very deliberate.
However, showrunner Haley Z. Boston has also explained that Larry Poole was also designed to mislead. He is one of several predatory male characters that have been introduced early on to disorient the viewer about who the Sorry Man is. Within Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, viewers were to speculate upon the following questions: Is he linked to the Cunninghams? Is he the stalker in the woods? Could he have something to do with Rachel’s mother?
For all those questions, the answer is no. The purpose is different. His connection to Rachel is her mother, Ali. Rachel somehow draws the Coldies logo without ever having seen it because her mother met Poole, and that memory was passed on over generations in a way too vague for the show to clarify.
Boston is designed to have you gaze outward for danger when the danger is really within. Larry Poole provides both Rachel and the viewer with something external to look at. That’s his whole purpose.
The real case that comes closest to Larry Poole in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
There wasn’t one particular serial killer that Larry Poole was inspired by. However, the fact that the survivor was pregnant meant that the killer could have been one of America’s most notorious unsolved murders: The Connecticut River Valley Killer.
This unknown murderer is thought to have murdered a minimum of seven people in the New Hampshire and Vermont border area from 1978 to 88. Most of these victims were young women whose bodies were found in sparsely populated woodland areas. The killer is no longer at large.
In the summer of 1988, a young woman named Jane Boroski was leaving a neighboring county fair when she decided to stop at a closed convenience store to buy something. She was seven months pregnant. A man pulled his car beside Boroski’s and assaulted her. He stabbed her 27 times and left her to die in the parking lot.
Boroski survived. So did her daughter, although she was left with lingering physical injuries. Boroski remains the sole survivor of the Connecticut River Valley Killer. Investigators theorize her survival may have pushed the killer into hiding or may have been the end of him altogether. The case remains unsolved.
The similarities to the Larry Poole in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen subplot are eerily tempting: pregnant woman, male assailant, miraculous survival, and a story told long after the fact. Regardless of whether this case was thought of or not, the echoes are overwhelming.
True crime podcasts have arguably been one of the most popular formats of media of the past ten years. Millions are listening to stories of real killers while walking to work, washing the dishes, or driving in their cars, as Rachel does in the opening episode of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. The show takes advantage of this cultural practice and capitalizes on it.
Placing a believable counterfeit podcast inside the narrative sets together any means for the writers to establish Larry Poole as a true individual. It parallels how real true crime content functions. Though listeners take in ghastly particulars and continue their lives, Rachel cannot. The story haunts her in inexplicable ways.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is streaming on Netflix.
Edited by Sahiba Tahleel