Netflix Releases New Thriller Below Directed By Casted Creators

You could say the fictional Newfoundland village of Snooks Arm is dying, but in truth, it has been dead for a while. Climate change and overfishing have slowly stripped away most of Snooks Arm’s reasons to exist. There is nothing left to do here besides leave, but some of the locals do not want to go.

That includes Calvin Penney, played by Josh Hartnett, whose family has lived in Snooks Arm for 40 years. Calvin uses his old fishing boat to gather chunks of polar ice after they calve off from glaciers and float south into the waters of Snooks Arm. The local vodka distillery pays well for pure glacier ice, so Calvin gets by.

When Calvin’s latest glacier turns out to be something else entirely, it is the first sign that something bigger has gone wrong in Snooks Arm. As the town warms up for what could be its last great festival, something new and dangerous waits in the water just outside the village light.

Below is a new six-episode miniseries coming to Netflix on Oct. 8. Creator and Canadian showrunner Jesse McKeown, best known for writing episodes of The Umbrella Academy and Letterkenny, calls it Jaws set in rural Newfoundland, where Snooks Arm faces mortal danger from several different sources before something worse shows up. If forced resettlement, petty crime, or climate change do not wreck the town, something in the water might.

A few weeks before the release of Below, we received an advance look at the first two episodes before sitting down for a Zoom conversation with Jesse McKeown. Here are some of the highlights.

Houses on the water

Below opens on a scene set during a well-known era of Canadian history that may be unfamiliar to viewers elsewhere. Starting in the 1960s, when Canadian fisheries began to modernize, many rural Newfoundlanders were resettled to bring them to designated growth centers. Sometimes that meant physically moving entire houses over the water by boat. The first time we see Calvin Penney, he is a young boy in one of those families, riding a rowboat across the ocean with his family home in tow.

For anyone who grew up in Newfoundland, that image of the house floating across the Atlantic Ocean is very familiar. It was a big piece of the history of the last 75 years. The resettlement program still continues to this day.

Should I stay or should I go

The first episode of Below includes a town meeting in Snooks Arm where locals argue over whether to accept an offer of provincial government resettlement. Do they stick it out and try to make things work in the village where they have lived all their lives, or take a check and start over somewhere else?

There are lots of remote communities that are still grappling with the decision of whether to stay or leave. Now it is very democratic. The town votes to stay or leave just like in the show, and a certain threshold of the town has to agree to it to be officially resettled by the government, but that was not always the case. Back in the day, there was a lot more pressure. It was quite violent and coercive. It is a very difficult part of Newfoundland history, and a lot of people were affected by that. I wanted to open the show with that.

More history went into Below than appears on screen. The show is set in a part of Newfoundland settled to take advantage of coastal cod fishing, with hundreds of little fishing villages built by English and Irish immigrants to feed an industry.

In the 1990s, overfishing led to a moratorium on cod that wiped out an entire way of life almost overnight. Below is set in the aftermath of that moratorium, in one of the dozens of remaining villages on the Canadian coast barely finding ways to hang on.

John Carpenter meets H.P. Lovecraft

In pre-release material for Below, Jesse McKeown acknowledges his influences. Jaws is a major reference, but the series also owes a stylistic debt to John Carpenter.

I grew up on movies in the ’70s and ’80s that were a certain old-school handcrafted sort of genre movie that I love. John Carpenter was the king of that, with movies like The Fog and The Thing. Those were a big influence when I was writing this.

When working on horror set on the east coast of North America, comparisons to H.P. Lovecraft are difficult to avoid. Below is particularly reminiscent of seaborne horror explored in stories like “Dagon,” featuring unknown terrors that suddenly appear from the ocean depths.

I wanted to tap into that kind of cosmic folklore feeling. There is something in the air in Newfoundland, a kind of mystery. It feels like a haunted place in a lot of ways. It is a family story too. I wanted the family stuff to feel just as potent as the horror. I always said that the stuff out on the water should feel just as dangerous as the stuff around the kitchen sink. I wanted Below to feel intimate in the same way as those British dramas that I watched on TV as a kid. I was trying to merge those things: Lovecraftian cosmic horror with that Carpenter thriller vibe, plus working-class British kitchen-sink feeling.

Real monsters

In its first two episodes, Below takes a deliberate less-is-more approach. Focus centers on Calvin, his family, and Snooks Arm while horror builds quietly around the edges of each scene. This decision keeps the show grounded so events feel genuinely possible.

Everything that we could do practical, we did do practical. That means shooting on location, shooting on real boats, using prosthetics, and all kinds of old-school Hollywood tricks. Of course, there is CGI as well, and we had a brilliant team at Mr. X. Matt Glover was in charge of our VFX team and did some incredible work.

Below airs on Netflix on Oct. 8.

Source: Polygon