Even the Cast of Netflix's Unique Sea Creature Thriller Below Have a Hard Time Describing It

The trailer for Netflix's Below understandably paints it as a thriller about a marine monster terrorizing a coastal town, but there's a lot more to Below if you go deeper. Yes, there's something monstrous in the water, and that's the bait that will bring viewers in, but Below wants to be more than just seaside scares. 

Created by Jesse McKeown, the co-showrunner for The Umbrella Academy and a writer on Letterkenny and The Sinner, Below mixes horror, drama, and even comedy as it follows Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett), a fisherman in Newfoundland, Canada, and Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis), a marine zoologist, as they fight to protect the community against the mysterious beast. 

"The way that it was sort of described to me is that there's a hook in this show," Hartnett told TV Guide. "It's set in Newfoundland, and there's something about it that everybody's going to respond to, but that's not really what the show is about. It's mostly about what happens underneath the surface. I know that sounds like another tagline, but it is true in many different senses." 

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Calvin's young adult children, Jay (Rohan Campbell), Mary (Ruby Stokes), and Wade (Charlie Heaton), each present their own challenges for Calvin. Jay and Mary are visiting from the mainland after spreading their wings and escaping the remote fishing island, while island-bound Wade wishes to prove himself to everyone, including his dad, with whom he runs an Airbnb out of their small home to rugged and eager tourists. But everyone is in the midst of change, whether it's sought out or forced upon them. 

"It's a show that's about family, but a show that's about something supernatural, and it's a show that's about our times and what we've lost, and what we could regain," Hartnett added. "And I think it's a beautifully written show, and I loved the experience of making it." 

"It is on paper really, really hard to describe," Heaton said. 

That theme of change propels Below. Climate change is affecting the sealife and reshaping the coasts, the young Penneys are in the adulting transition from dependence to independence, and even the town itself is on the verge of packing itself up and joining the rest of Canada. 

Filmed on location in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easternmost province, Below will take many to a world they've never experienced before, certainly on television, where only a handful of shows (the Canadians series Son of a Critch, Saint-Pierre, and Hudson & Rex, for example) have been set. McKeown's wife is from Newfoundland, so he was instantly drawn to making a TV show upon visiting there. With its gorgeous coasts, isolated towns, and strong Irish-Canadian roots (which create one of North America's most distinctive accents; just wait until you hear Heaton's interpretation of it), Newfoundland plays a major part in the show. And its history of government-forced resettlement programs, during which homes were literally floated across the ocean to the mainland, is intertwined with the story.

"What appealed to me and I think all of us is — this like is the difficult thing to describe — which is that it's an extremely site-specific story about a community that hasn't been represented a lot," Davis, a native of Vancouver, B.C., told TV Guide. "That like I have a lot of curiosity about. I'm sure the rest of the world — Canada knows very little about [Newfoundland] let alone the rest of the world. [It's] an incredibly artistic, funny, creative community of fishermen and people and folklore." She continued, "And coming from Vancouver, it's on the other side of the world from me. I mean, Canada's enormous. I'd never been there. I never knew if I would go there, and to actually get to plant my feet in the soil was such a gift."

Because it's a six-episode limited series, Below doesn't have lots of time to spend in Newfoundland, or with the family drama of the Penneys, or in the boisterous bars with the locals where tourists are required to kiss a dead fish when they order a drink. But you'll likely wish you could spend more time there as the horror and drama mix together in this indescribable show that straddles genres. 

And as Davis adds, "On top of that, it's funny. Like what the f**k?"