Five eerie Netflix thrillers to watch if you loved ‘Below’
Finally, Netflix has given us its first eerie drop of October, and Below proves there is still some life in the old dog yet. The thriller takes us to a Newfoundland fishing town that is already having a rotten time of it… and then, because misery likes company, something starts lurking in the sea. That can’t be good!
The fishing trade that kept generations going is fading, and naturally families are under pressure. So one source that they are dependent on is also contaminated
Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a fisherman who still has baggage from his father’s death while he is also trying to keep his family from falling apart. Then his son Wade starts showing some strange symptoms, which sends Calvin towards marine researcher Fonda for answers. The attacks keep coming, and the sea everyone relies on starts to feel menacing.
So it has everything from family drama to suspense to an eerie monster, and it clearly looks like your jam, so dig into the following five to keep that feeling alive.
Five eerie Netflix thrillers to watch if you loved Below
Midnight Mass (Mike Flanagan, 2021)
Below has already had you stuck in one cut-off community where nobody can make sense of what is happening, so why not make your next stop Crockett Island and let yourself have another headache?
Midnight Mass brings Riley Flynn home after prison to a place that has seen better days, then drops Father Paul into the middle of it with the one thing everyone there could use: hope. And, blimey, does this man deliver. People start recovering from illnesses that should have stayed put, and the church finds a new lease of life! Truly a miracle, but sitting in the viewer’s seat, you can see why the locals lap it up… wouldn’t you?
Trouble is, once people become convinced they are watching a miracle happen, telling them something smells fishy becomes a thankless job. Crockett Island is tiny; everybody knows everybody’s business. And now that faith’s in the picture, well… good luck getting away.
Katla (Baltasar Kormákur and Sigurjón Kjartansson, 2021)
Still thinking about the way Below turns its landscape into part of the mystery? Good, because our next pick, Katla, will take you to an even colder space. The Icelandic series is set around Vík after the Katla volcano has been erupting for a year, leaving the town buried beneath ash while only a handful of residents remain, including Gríma, who is still trying to understand the disappearance of her sister.
Then a woman emerges from beneath the glacier looking exactly like somebody who should not be there, and there is a small window for grief to reappear. More people start turning up, and each one brings something from the past back with them. That is what makes Katla such a good follow-up to Below: the place itself feels like part of the problem, not just the backdrop.
1899 (Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, 2022)
Okay, enough volcanoes and glaciers for a minute because it’s time for something coastal again. 1899 puts a ship full of European emigrants on course for New York, until Captain Eyk Larsen picks up a signal from the Prometheus, a passenger vessel that vanished months earlier. Naturally, they go after it.
From there, 1899 starts pulling the rug out from under everyone, because the abandoned ship is only the beginning, and the passengers soon find that their own memories are not behaving themselves either. The more they dig, the less solid anything feels.
That is where Below comes back into it, because being stranded is one thing, but being stranded with a bunch of people who cannot even agree on what the hell is going on? Yeah, you are in a right pickle then.
Wayward (Mae Martin, 2025)
Tall Pines looks lovely on the surface, but come on… two teenagers are desperate to get out of the local academy, so that wholesome image that the show builds at first cracks pretty fast. Alex Dempsey moves there with his pregnant wife, Laura, and soon enough gets wind of what Abbie and Leila are dealing with. Good thing she’s a detective because as soon as she is suspicious, she starts investigating.
Then you meet Evelyn Wade, who runs the academy and is a peculiar woman, and you have to hand it to Toni Colete for doing an excellent job of creeping us all out. Alex keeps digging, and the answers get dirty, but you also need to know that her wife, Laura, was an alumna of the same school. Just like Below, the problem is bigger than one person or one building.
Black Spot (Mathieu Missoffe, 2017–2019)
Now Below has already made the sea look like a terrible life choice… fancy a forest instead? Bad news, people. Black Spot drops you into Villefranche, a remote French town where the phone signal is rubbish and people keep turning up dead at a rate that makes you wonder why anyone still lives there. Prosecutor Franck Siriani arrives to find out what on earth is going on, and man, he has some gits because the place is screaming trouble before he has even scratched the surface.
Then you get Laurène Weiss, the local police chief, who knows the forest far better than she would probably like after being abducted there years ago. The murders give you something solid to follow, but the forest keeps sticking its nose into everything, and that is where Below comes back in. Both shows leave you with that same rotten thought: maybe the people are not the only problem here. Maybe the place itself has something to answer for.