Jesse McKeown

With Netflix’s Below, Jesse McKeown brings Newfoundland’s folklore and history to a global audience, finding a different kind of horror in the things we struggle to leave behind.

“I spent my whole life on the water. I thought I understood it.”

Calvin Penney was just ten years old when he watched the Atlantic swallow his childhood home, his father still inside. Beneath the surface, he glimpsed an enormous eye looking back at him. No one believed what he saw. Four decades later, in Jesse McKeown’s six-part Netflix thriller Below, Calvin (Josh Hartnett) still makes his living on those waters, harvesting ice from drifting icebergs. But when terrifying events begin unfolding offshore, they threaten to push the community of Snook’s Arm to the breaking point.

McKeown makes the supernatural threat inseparable from the troubles already bearing down on the community. Family tensions carry as much weight as the dangers at sea, while the mystery repeatedly overturns expectations. The series moves between domestic conflict and genuine terror, sustaining an unease that rarely lets up.

Newfoundland isn’t simply the setting of Below; it shapes the story as decisively as any character. The cinematography finds beauty in the coastline’s severity and scale, the Atlantic’s changing light and interiors worn by weather and time.

McKeown first visited Newfoundland 18 years ago and knew almost immediately that he wanted to make something there. Something ambitious, strange and equal to the place that had captivated him. With Below, he has realized that ambition on an extraordinary scale, bringing an international cast and Netflix’s global reach to a story whose Newfoundland identity remains firmly intact.

More than two decades into a career writing and shaping television, McKeown had the opportunity to create a series entirely on his own terms. “I feel like it was all kind of like building up to this,” he says. What surprised him was how naturally the work came. Despite the greater responsibility and pressure, having full creative control made the process easier. “I can create the environment that I want to create.”

McKeown’s ambitions took shape early. While studying at the University of British Columbia, he joined the story department of Da Vinci’s Inquest, where he worked alongside Chris Haddock, whom he calls “the best showrunner I’ve ever worked with.” Haddock “really brought me along and gave me a lot of opportunities,” he recalls. The experience showed him “what was possible in Canada”: television that could be both “distinctly Canadian” and “uncompromising.”

He went on to write for 19-2, The Sinner and The Umbrella Academy, eventually becoming co-showrunner of the latter’s final season.

When a conversation with Netflix turned to Newfoundland, McKeown saw his opportunity. He pitched an original idea, wrote the pilot and secured a straight-to-series order.

McKeown had already spent years collecting stories from Newfoundland, where tales of sea monsters mingled with accounts of Fata Morgana mirages and strange sightings out at sea. “It’s very hard to tell what is a myth and what is folklore and what is just a story and what is real history or what is family history,” he says. “It’s all such a murky sort of area.”

For McKeown, that connection was personal. Throughout childhood and into his teenage years, he experienced sleep paralysis, waking unable to move while sensing a presence in the room. He later recognized those experiences in Newfoundland’s Old Hag legend, which tells of a sinister, witch-like figure who visits sleepers and presses down on their chests.

“Everyone talks about the old hag as if it’s real,” he recalls. “It’s like, oh, yeah, I had the hag something fierce last night. She came to me.”

In Below, McKeown draws on the Old Hag legend to create one of the series’ most unsettling supernatural mysteries, leaving viewers to question where folklore ends and reality begins.

One of Below’s most haunting images, however, comes from Newfoundland’s own history. During resettlement, families sometimes floated entire houses across the water rather than abandon them. “Those outports and those communities were people’s entire universe,” McKeown says. Leaving meant uprooting generations of history and belonging.

The fictional Snook’s Arm shares its name with a real Newfoundland outport resettled in 2018, a reminder that the difficult choices surrounding relocation are hardly confined to the past.

The collapse of Newfoundland’s northern cod fishery and the 1992 moratorium transformed coastal communities, forcing many to leave and others to find new ways of making a living. McKeown met former fishermen who had adapted their knowledge of the sea to harvesting icebergs, a trade whose practitioners are sometimes called “iceberg cowboys.” Their resourcefulness impressed him, though even ice, he notes, is a finite resource.

It is one of Below’s central contradictions: the ocean that has sustained these communities for generations can no longer guarantee their survival. Newfoundland’s history, McKeown says, is “marked with tragedies and calamities” on the water. Leaving means surrendering a place that has shaped an entire life; staying means facing an uncertain future.

“It’s like life is change, but we resist it,” McKeown says.

The island’s influence extended well beyond the script. When Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton arrived to film, they joined local performers including Willow Kean and Marthe Bernard, alongside a crew whose knowledge and experiences helped shape the storytelling. McKeown calls Newfoundland the production’s “magic ingredient.” “We were out there on the water all together,” he recalls. That shared experience shaped Below in ways he could never have anticipated on the page.

Directors Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn give Below its cinematic power, capturing the Atlantic’s immense beauty and danger while bringing equal intensity to the Penneys’ intimate family conflicts.

Mark Korven’s score moves seamlessly between wonder and dread. The soundtrack draws heavily on Canadian music, with Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” and Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” taking on an unexpected eeriness in scenes already charged with suspense. Like the series itself, the soundtrack crosses generations and genres, from Spirit of the West and 54-40 to Nico Paulo and KILLY.

That distinctly Canadian character extends far beyond the music. Rather than using Newfoundland as a stand-in for somewhere else, Below draws its identity from the province’s history, language and culture. McKeown saw no reason to dilute that identity for an international audience. “The more specific you are, then the more universal it becomes,” he says.

Calvin begins Below believing he understands the ocean. By the end, he must reconsider much of what he thought he knew about his family, his past and himself. McKeown hopes viewers will leave questioning the influences that have shaped their own lives, perhaps asking themselves the question he poses: “What are the unseen forces above water and below that may be acting upon my life?”

Below is now streaming globally on Netflix.