Although horror is a tougher genre to crack on the small screen than in cinemas, the overwhelming enthusiasm that the genre has received within the past decade (and last 12 months in particular) has made it inevitable that streamers would eventually capitalize on the appeal of a confined miniseries released around the Halloween season. There have been attempts to take advantage of existing horror IPs, such as the prequel It: Welcome to Derry or this year’s Carrie reboot, but the success of Backrooms and Obsession indicates that genre buffs desire to see “newness.” Of all the subgenres best-suited for television, folk thrillers have advantages above slashers, supernatural, and sci-fi horror. In comparison, a slasher film shouldn’t be longer than 90 minutes, and an entire season of television would be flattening. Folk horror requires a level of invention and atmosphere that can be stretched over the course of multiple installments, but it doesn’t necessitate the type of budget that a high fantasy or science fiction series would.
Below is set within the coastal Newfoundland town of Snook’s Arm, with Josh Hartnett in the lead role of the grizzled fisher and family man Calvin Penney. Hartnett’s had a comeback in the past couple of years following his dynamic performance as a serial killer in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, and Below is another example of why he’s well-suited for the horror genre. Although Hartnett was once projected as being an adolescent heartthrob before he had a brief stint in the Apollo Theatre’s production of Rain Man, his best work has been in grimy genre fare like Sin City, 30 Days of Night, and Black Dahlia. Below doesn’t buck that trend, but it has also taken advantage of Hartnett’s paternal instincts. He stepped outside the spotlight in 2012 to raise his four children, so it’s not hard to believe him as a tough, but sensitive subsistence fisherman and family man off the Atlantic coast of Canada’s largest island province.
Calvin’s family consists of his eldest son Wade (Charlie Heaton), university-aged daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes), and younger son Jay (Rohan Campbell), who has found work in the province of Alberta. His sister Ruth (Willow Kean) is a Harbour Master faced with a potential government buyout that has the entire community up in arms. Below is a contemporary show, but the town gatherings and public debates could’ve been lifted out of a medieval adventure. The confidence Below has in its incisive worldbuilding is enough to sustain interest in a story where details about the supernatural are kept at a distance; it’s about halfway through the six episodes that the main “threat” to the island is revealed to be a squid-like monster that’s been anchored to an iceberg. There’s no doubt that it’s the same creature that caused the death of Calvin’s father, depicted in a Jaws-like prologue, but the show’s mystery is centered on the insidious forces at play that have preserved the danger.
Below is on its surface a shanty aquatic adventure about things that go bump in the night, but its societal specificity is substantial. The continuous relocation and devastation of the local economy is something that Canadian workers have dealt with for generations, forced to pay the consequences for environmental damage they didn’t participate in; the prospect of a government buyout is essentially a request to erase any grip they had on a cultural homeland so that its resources could be scrubbed out. There’s been enough superficial horror projects about “who the real monster is” that it isn’t surprising when the enigmatic entity in Below is revealed as not particularly malevolent, but it’s the “creature feature” components of the series that are the least interesting. It’s more successful as a didactic analysis about a community forced to come together to oppose criminal scavengers and government assailants who’d risk any erosion of nature to control a potential asset.
A tentacle-waving, massive sea creature is bound to look ridiculous within any grounded context, so the monster in Below has little screen time; this is likely the same reason that Scylla was only depicted in the abstract in this summer’s The Odyssey. The time taken to get to the confrontation is made more entertaining because of the family drama involved for the Calvins, including an appearance by Mary’s boyfriend Noah (Kaleb Horn) and Jay’s run-in with shady figures who he has owed money to. Heaton’s given the least interesting part because Wade’s infection with an ancient curse of sorts is the only part in which the metaphorical narrative of Below is confused with its literal plot. It’s too amusing that the Stranger Things star is at the center of another family-centric supernatural adventure series on Netflix. Below doesn’t have the nostalgia-pilled obsession with references that made Stranger Things such a slog in its final seasons.
The familial themes of Below are similarly more effective than those of Stranger Things because it’s set within an interesting era for a struggling family; with kids in their 20s who’ve moved towards independence, Calvin is left to reflect on whether his work is “over,” and if he now has the responsibility to be a more serious leader in the community. The series doesn’t risk schmaltz because Calvin is given a more pragmatic counterpart in the marine biologist Dr. Fonda Howander (Mackenize Davis); if his argument is that the community should be self-run because of cultural heritage, her point is that independent governance is the most logical route to maintain homeostasis.
Some of the unresolved narrative threads and generic side characters in Below can be forgiven by the fact that it’s six episodes long, and doesn’t collapse under the weight of “Netflix bloat.” There is no doubt that the series will continue if it happens to break viewing records for the streamer, but a second season isn’t a requirement.