Josh Hartnett as Calvin in episode 105 of Below. Cr. Jan Thijs/Netflix© 2025
The opening of Below is an attention-grabber. In the first episode, “Come Home Year,” the Penney family is towing their home across the water when the creature drags it under, taking Calvin Penney’s (Josh Hartnett) father down with it. As showrunner Jesse McKeown and producer Jessica Rhoades told What’s on Netflix, the production really did sink a house. It’s a stirring sight, but also a stirring sound, and one with an unexpected source.
Tom Jenkins, the sound designer on Baby Reindeer, was the sound effects editor on Netflix’s seaside horror series. He’s also worked on Black Mirror and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, so he’s no stranger to crafting otherworldly sounds. For the sinking house in Below‘s opening, he turned to an unlikely source: the cries of his newborn daughter.
How a Newborn’s Cries Became the Sound of a Sinking House
Jenkins told What’s on Netflix:
In episode one, there’s that brilliant opening with young Calvin when the house gets pulled down. A lot of those creaky house sounds are the sounds of my daughter that were pitched and modulated and had weird stuff done to them. They were put in there to help add this visceral, emotive quality to things. I think it’s a good example of how you become obsessed with accurately conveying emotion through sound.
Because what we do, it’s easy to think of it sometimes as: see an image, put a sound on; see a dog, put a dog bark on. Actually, the fun of the job is the sort of emotional meta-narrative of sound and being able to weave these emotional narratives through sound design to make audiences feel certain things or just to slightly subvert images in certain ways.
It’s something else Paula [Fairfield], our sound designer, did a brilliant job of as well.
Jenkins added that sounds often become a (healthy) obsession while he’s working on a project. Short on sleep and with a crying baby on his mind, he let it fuel his work and serve the story. Below is ultimately about a man and a creature each protecting their young, so a child’s cry fits right into the sound mix for a sinking house.
Why Sound Designers Rarely Reveal Their Secrets
After a creative choice like that, does a sound effects editor tell their collaborators exactly what they’re hearing? Jenkins’ response:
Very rarely. I learned early on, never let anyone know how the sausage is made, because as soon as you start explaining the layers behind things, often the whole edifice of the whole thing crumbles.
It’s fun in interviews to chat about stuff, but at the time, you never want people, our showrunner, audiences, or anyone watching something to be conscious of our hand as sound designers.
The weird thing about the crafts in television is mostly what makes our job successful is when people don’t notice the mechanics of the job. From editors, maybe slightly less so on the composing side of things, we’ve been successful if people are just fully immersed and there’s no question about where the sound came from. There’s no thinking necessarily about what went into it.
It just feels natural, and it feels right, and it feels of the time and of the space.
All six episodes of Below are streaming on Netflix now. For more on the series, including the full cast and first-look images, head to our Below hub.
