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Netflix dropped the first teaser for Below today, and the creature is the least interesting thing in it. What sticks is the town. Josh Hartnett plays a Newfoundland fisherman whose community looks like it was already losing before anything crawled out of the water, which is a much better setup than another big shape with teeth.
Below is a six-part limited series arriving October 8. Jesse McKeown created it and serves as showrunner, coming off writing work on The Umbrella Academy and 19-2. Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a stubborn and warm-hearted bayman from the small Newfoundland community of Snooks Arm, a single father of three still carrying his own father’s unexplained death from decades back. An unidentified sea creature starts working its way through his hometown. Calvin has to hold a small place together while it happens.
What the Teaser Actually Gives You
Not much of the monster, which is the correct instinct. Netflix’s own framing for the teaser keeps the creature as an absence: a village under attack, locals coming apart as strange events pile up, and Calvin eventually pairing off with visiting marine researcher Fonda Howander, played by Mackenzie Davis, to work out what is underneath all of it.
The thread I would watch is Wade. Calvin’s son, played by Charlie Heaton, starts showing what Netflix describes as terrifying new symptoms. Symptoms is a specific word and the series is choosing it deliberately. It suggests the thing in the water is not only a predator but a vector, and that whatever happens to Wade may be a biological process rather than an attack. I am not going to call it body horror on the strength of a teaser. I am going to say the possibility is clearly on the table and that it is the smartest card the show has shown so far.
Hartnett and Davis play the investigation as a two-hander. Davis has described their dynamic to Tudum as buddy cops solving a mystery, a funnier register than the marketing suggests, and Below is being pitched as a series that mixes suspense with local humor rather than unbroken dread. Netflix’s own first-look images put Calvin and Fonda together as early as episode one, so this is not a slow-burn team-up.
The Ocean Is Not Scenery
Small-town creature stories usually treat the setting as a container. Below wants the location doing actual work, and McKeown has said the quiet part out loud. Talking about the region’s past, he pointed to killer storms, maritime disasters, the collapse of the cod fishery and people going hungry, adding that “surviving the winter here can be a horror movie in and of itself.”
That is the whole pitch, and it is a good one. Newfoundland has a documented history of catastrophe that has nothing to do with monsters. The cod moratorium gutted the province’s economy and emptied outport communities, and any story set in a fishing town there is standing on that ground whether it acknowledges it or not. Below is acknowledging it. The creature is arriving somewhere that has been absorbing loss for generations, which means the horror has a foundation under it rather than a premise.
The production backs that up practically. They filmed on location and put people on the actual ocean instead of building water in post, with Heaton describing time out with the Coast Guard and kayaking in open sea. You can usually tell. Cold water photographs differently than a tank, and actors who are genuinely uncomfortable stop performing discomfort.
McKeown has cited Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter as influences, which tracks. Jaws was about a town that could not afford to close the beach. The Thing was about a small group with nowhere to go and no way to trust each other. Below is not remaking either, but it is fishing in the same water, with the added weight of a family already fractured and a father who thinks he is cursed.
Local myth is in the mix too, which raises the question the teaser does not answer. Nobody has confirmed what the creature is or where it came from. I would leave that alone and let the show tell you.
Who Made It
McKeown wrote the series with Karen Walton of Orphan Black, Perry Chafe and Natty Zavitz. Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn directed the episodes, which is a strong bench: Childs came off The Sandman, Shaver off The Penguin and Station Eleven, and Dunn made Closet Monster. Alongside Hartnett, Heaton and Davis, the cast includes Willow Kean as Ruth Penney, Ruby Stokes as Mary Penney, Rohan Campbell as Jay Penney and Kaleb Horn as Noah. Hartnett also executive produces.
All six episodes of Below hit Netflix on October 8, 2026. The teaser is up now and worth your time, especially for whatever is happening to Wade.
