Below Netflix release date and trailer: Jaws meets The Thing, with Josh Hartnett and Stranger Things' Charlie Heaton as father and son
Netflix's new creature series has a monster in the water, an ominous iceberg, and one piece of casting math that deserves its own investigation.
Netflix has picked its Halloween-season monster: Below, a six-episode limited series arriving October 8, all episodes at once, in which a remote Newfoundland fishing town discovers that the thing decimating its waters is not a quota problem. The trailer sells exactly the hybrid the logline promises — small-town-under-siege Spielberg dread on the surface, and something colder and more Carpenter underneath, complete with a mysterious iceberg parked offshore like a loaded gun. CBR read it the same way, framing the series as a straight revival of Jaws-and-The-Thing horror for the streaming era.
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Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a big-hearted, stubborn fisherman and single father haunted by his own father's unexplained death, who teams up with a visiting marine researcher (Mackenzie Davis) once the creature starts working through his community. His trailer thesis statement, per TV Insider:
"I spent my whole life on the water. I thought I understood it."
About that father-son casting
Charlie Heaton — Stranger Things' Jonathan Byers — plays Wade Penney, Calvin's son, who has a close encounter with the creature he can't put into words. Which brings us to the math: Hartnett is 48. Heaton is 32. Netflix is asking us to accept a sixteen-year age gap between father and son, a detail that implies Calvin Penney had an extremely eventful adolescence. Streaming TV has done worse — but not much worse.
The rest of the roster:
- Rohan Campbell, Willow Kean, and Ruby Stokes fill out the Penney family
- Natasha Henstridge — a creature-feature veteran from the Species side of the aisle — plays Jan
- Jesse McKeown (The Umbrella Academy) created the series, and he's a Newfoundland native who wanted the island's isolation to carry the fear while keeping its communities' humor intact
- Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver, and Stephen Dunn split directing duties
Shot where it hurts
Production filmed on location in Newfoundland starting June 2025 — real coastline, real weather, minimal green screen — a shoot memorable enough that Hartnett ended up briefly hospitalized after a collision with a police vehicle during filming. He recovered, and his enthusiasm for the material survived the fender damage:
"I read the first two scripts in less than an hour. The voice was so clear, the concept was so engaging, and the character was fantastic."
Six episodes, one drop, one monster. October 8.
Previously we wrote: Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar Netflix series: cast and 2027 release, 31 years after book one
