Below: Is the Giant Squid Real or CGI?

In Netflix’s ‘Below,’ a mysterious creature haunts the waters of a small Newfoundland town called Snook’s Arm. It is accompanied by weird things, like bad ice that infects people, driving them to their deaths, and many questions about the town and its residents’ fate. While at first, the creature remains a mystery, it eventually shows itself to the townsfolk, leaving them entirely awestruck. The creature’s presence looms heavy on the town, particularly Calvin Penney, who first encountered it when he was a boy. Through this storyline, the series touches on pressing, relevant issues that raise questions about the creature’s true nature. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Squid is Likely a CGI Creation in Below

While ‘Below’ starts out as a creature feature of seemingly supernatural origins, it eventually turns out to have strong roots in real science. It turns out that the creature floating in the sea is the North Atlantic Giant Squid, or Architeuthis dux, a real marine creature known to inhabit the ocean depths. As shown in the Netflix series, the squid can grow to about 30-40 feet, likely capable of capsizing boats and other things. While the show does give us a picture of what the squid looks like, it exercises restraint in bringing it fully to life on the screen. We never really see the squid in its true form. Rather, the characters see parts of it, like its giant eye or its tentacles, from different angles.

This makes sense on several fronts. To begin with, it keeps the creature’s mystery alive and maintains its status as a humongous force of nature that cannot truly be controlled by humans. The squid’s scope is teased by the cephalopod’s limited visibility to the characters. Additionally, keeping the complete view hidden from the audience means the show’s creators don’t have to invest as much time and resources in presenting the entire creature, since viewers’ imaginations do the rest. So even as the creature brings down houses and boats, all we see are collapsing structures, and that’s all that’s needed to fill in the gaps.

As for the parts we do get to see in the show, CGI seems to be the most obvious way to go about it. The creators likely studied the real-life creature through its available footage to get a more realistic sense of what an ocean dweller like that looks like. Additionally, they likely added some details of their own to lend the giant squid an increased sense of danger. While 90 percent of it is based on scientific facts, some details were possibly tweaked to serve the show’s plot and make the squid more bloodthirsty than it might be in real life. All in all, the combined effect of these elements works really well, as the show succeeds in maintaining a sense of dread from the very start to the very end.

Read More: Is Netflix’s Below Based on a True Story?