Netflix's New 6-Part Thriller Is 'John Carpenter Meets H.P. Lovecraft' With a Canadian Twist

That includes Calvin Penney (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 Snooks Arm's waters. The local vodka distillery pays well for pure glacier ice, so Calvin gets by.

But when Calvin's latest "glacier" turns out to be something else entirely, it's 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, there's something new and dangerous waiting in the water just outside the village's light.

Below is a new 6-episode miniseries that's coming to Netflix on Oct. 8. Its 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 is already in mortal danger from several different sources before something worse shows up. If forced resettlement, petty crime, or climate change don't wreck this town, there's something in the water that might.

A few weeks before Below's release, we were given an advance look at its first two episodes before we sat down for a Zoom conversation with McKeown. Check out some of the highlights below.

Houses on the water

Below opens on a scene that's set during a well-known era of Canadian history, but might not be familiar to people from anywhere else. Starting in the '60s, when Canadian fisheries began to modernize, many rural Newfoundlanders were resettled in order 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’s 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," McKeown says. "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

Below's first episode includes a town meeting in Snooks Arm where several of the locals argue over whether or not they should accept an offer by the provincial government for resettlement. Do they stick it out and try to make things work in the village where they've lived all their lives, or take a big 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," McKeown says. "Now it's 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 wasn't always the case."

"Back in the day, there was a lot more pressure. It was quite violent and coercive. It's a very difficult part of Newfoundland history, and a lot of people were affected by that. I wanted to open the show with that."

There's more history going into Below than necessarily appears on the screen. It's set in a part of Newfoundland that was settled to take advantage of the cod fishing along the coast, with hundreds of little fishing villages built by English and Irish immigrants to feed what became an industry.

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

John Carpenter meets H.P. Lovecraft

In the pre-release material for Below, McKeown has made sure to acknowledge his influences. Jaws is a big one, of course, but it 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," McKeown says. "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."

That having been said, if you're working on any kind of horror that's set on the east coast of North America, it's hard to avoid comparisons to H.P. Lovecraft. Below is particularly reminiscent of the same sort of seaborne horror that Lovecraft explored in stories like "Dagon" about unknown terrors that suddenly appear from the ocean's depths.

"I wanted to tap into that kind of cosmic folklore feeling," McKeown says. There's something in the air in Newfoundland, a kind of mystery. It feels like a haunted place in a lot of ways."

"It's 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. Much of its focus is on Calvin, his family, and Snooks Arm, while the horror builds quietly around the edges of each scene. It's a deliberate decision by McKeown to keep the show grounded, like the events of Below could really be happening.

"Everything that we could do practical, we did do practical," McKeown says. "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."

What lurks beneath

Warning: mild spoilers follow for episode 2 of Below.

You still haven't seen Below's real monsters by the end of episode 2, but if you know your marine biology, you'll have a good idea of what's about to happen in Snooks Arm. There are plenty of clues onscreen even before one particular scene, which involves a wildlife camera and a couple of unfortunate glampers.

Even that monster, however, is part of this specific area's history.

"The giant squid is a huge part of Newfoundland," McKeown says. "All the major sightings of the North Atlantic giant squid are around the coast of Newfoundland, so it's a big part of the culture and the folklore. So it's not even that far-fetched."

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Below airs on Netflix on Oct. 8.