Josh Hartnett‘s new Netflix series Below places him back in horror territory, but that territory is one he’s been circling since the very start of his career. His first two movies were both horror, and he shot them concurrently — the genre was his entry point into film, not a detour from it.
For Hartnett, the appeal has never been about scares for their own sake. “It’s funny, it’s never the horror element that really draws me to these projects,” he said. “It’s always that I think horror is a really great genre for directors to experiment in. It feels like you can get away with more in a horror film.”
That room to experiment is what shapes Below. The sea monster series uses Jaws as a familiar way into its Newfoundland fishing community, then takes a different course after episode 2. Across 6 episodes, the threat grows into something Lovecraftian, with tentacles, while the story follows a family and the community around them.
“Because it was a familiar vernacular to everyone, we wanted it to be the starting point, but then we wanted to move away from it,” Hartnett said. The extra time gave the series room to develop its characters and experiment with the creature-story conventions audiences already know.
Hartnett stars as Calvin, a father of 3 who’s spent his life in the village and carries scars from his past. He’s also an executive producer. Asked about a comparison to Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody, Hartnett pointed instead toward Robert Shaw’s Quint: Calvin belongs to this place and knows its waters. He describes the series as a mix of mystery, suspense and comedy, with Newfoundland itself shaping the story.
The show was filmed in Newfoundland, where Hartnett spent time with fishermen and out at sea to understand Calvin’s life. He grew up in Minnesota without a connection to the sea, and in Newfoundland a small fishing boat took him far enough offshore that land was barely visible. During his first week there, he also went out to watch and swim with whales, encountering humpbacks larger than the boat beneath him.
That sense of the unknown is exactly the kind of thing horror lets a director push on. “Things beneath the surface are, in a very real sense, alien to most people,” he said. “Obviously, we’re playing with the idea of that and growing it a bit, but it’s part of the idea of what’s out there already when you’re there.”
