Netflix Series Below Has a Sea Monster, But The Real Monster Is Perhaps Us Fighting Back

Netflix Series Below: Something feels embarrassingly “human” about calling nature a monster! A storm destroys a coastline, and we call it “monstrous”; a flood swallows a city, and suddenly the “water is angry”; a forest burns for days, and we talk about the earth fighting back; the ocean becomes warmer, stranger, more unpredictable, and our first instinct is to look for the villain.

Perhaps the “planet is changing” because of us, and that becomes a rather difficult sentence to sit with.

Netflix Series Below: When Nature Fights Back We Call It a Monster

Netflix’s Below, which was released on October 8, begins with a premise that sounds absolutely fictional; one which is far distant from our lives. A mysterious sea creature emerges around the Newfoundland town, terrorising its residents and threatening their lives. Josh Hartnett plays fisherman Calvin Penney, who finds himself trying to protect his family and community while a marine researcher, Fonda Howander, played by Mackenzie Davis, helps investigate what exactly is happening underwater.

The more unsettling part about Below is the identifiability; the “monster” does not feel entirely imaginary because what if we have simply become good at calling the consequences a monster?

We Love Monsters Because We Can Shift the Blame

There has been a rather comfortable language created. The nature “attacks”; the sea “turns violent”; the weather “goes rough”; a hurricane “swallows”; a flood “swallows”; it almost sounds like the planet woke up a fine morning, checked the collective list of humanity’s sins and decided, enough! 

Nature is not plotting, and that is an uncomfortable bit. The ocean does not have a vendetta against coastal towns; a glacier does not wake up angry; a glacier does not wake up angry a random morning; a heatwave is not nature’s “revenge”; nor does a cyclone possess moral intentions. Yet, the disasters are narrativised as if they are villains because villains are easier to understand than systems and habits.

Below plays with the fear; its creature initially gives the town a convenient terror that can be hunted down, but below the creature setup is a story about environmental change, a community losing its old way of life and consequences of a world that is no longer behaving the way people expect it to. There is a sense of tackling climate change and corporate greed alongside its sea-monster story.

The Real Horror Is the World Having Its Own Version of Below

There are several examples just around us, not even back in time, because we get new examples from time to time, which is bothersome. Since September 2026, Thailand has been facing severe flooding affecting millions across the country. One looks at the images, reads the news article and simply says “terrifying”. Yes, they are! But does terrifying explain anything?

It does not tell us why extreme weather conditions and extreme rainfall are becoming such a serious threat, why cities are struggling, or how a warming climate increases the risks communities already face. 

In August, devastating floods hit parts of Nepal and Tibet, causing severe damage and casualties. NASA, in fact, writes, “Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities (primarily the human burning of fossil fuels) have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate. This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today’s civilization.”

This is where the language of “nature fighting back” begins to feel almost childish because the planet is not fighting us but rather responding to the conditions we have created. The World Meteorological Organisation, in its State of the Global Climate 2025 report, writes, “WMO’s State of the Global Climate report 2025 confirms that 2015-2025 are the hottest 11-years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43 °C above the 1850-1900 average. Extreme events around the world, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones, caused disruption and devastation and highlighted the vulnerability of our inter-connected economies and societies.”

At some point, calling all of this “natural disaster” without discussing the conditions causing these disasters starts to feel like calling a house fire “a fire thing” while ignoring the kerosene can that was kept unattended.

We Have Been Asking the Wrong Question, Perhaps

The climate crisis asks an ugly question that we tend to overlook: what if there is no monster to defeat? What if nature is simply behaving differently because we changed the conditions? 

It does not make the disaster less horrifying but rather more terrifying, perhaps because the fictional monster can be hunted down, but a damaged climate cannot be defeated in a single climactic sequence; there is no superhero moment for this. There is only mitigation, adaptation, accountability, policy, conservation, scientific research and an uncomfortable amount of collective responsibility.

Below Feels Little Too Close to Home

The masterstroke of a sea-monster story has always been that the ocean is already unknowable enough to scare us. We cannot see most of it and do not know everything living inside it. It moves beneath us while we go around with our human routines above it, but today there is another layer to that fear.

We know that the ocean is warming, weather is changing; we know communities whose livelihood depends on the sea are vulnerable; we know that climate change is not some distant apocalypse neatly scheduled for fifty years from now, waiting calmly for us to finish our current watchlist. It is here, and thus the scariest thing about Below is not the creature itself.

It is the possibility that the creature is the part of the story we can still call fiction because perhaps the real horror is not that something massive might rise from under the water and destroy us; it is perhaps that we keep damaging the world above, then act surprised when the world changes altogether, sometimes above and sometimes below.

We call nature a monster because it is easier than admitting that we helped write the genesis of it, and if Below leaves us wondering who the real villain is, perhaps that is the point!

Watch Below on Netflix.

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