Shows Like
Shows Like Below
By Jordan A. · · 4 min read
Netflix's Below drops this week, and it is built on one of horror's most reliable foundations. Josh Hartnett plays a hard-bitten fisherman in a remote Newfoundland town that comes under threat from a mysterious sea creature, with Mackenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton rounding out the cast across six binge-ready episodes. It is isolation horror, the kind where the real monster is partly the place itself: too far from help, too small to hide in, too tight-knit to trust. If that specific dread hooks you, these are the shows to line up next.
The Terror
If Below works on you, The Terror is the next thing you watch, full stop. The first season of AMC's horror anthology follows a doomed British Royal Navy expedition trapped in the Arctic ice, hunted by something out in the white, and it is a masterclass in cold, creeping dread. Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies lead a cast slowly coming apart as the environment closes in. It streams on AMC+, and it shares Below's core idea exactly: nature is already trying to kill you, and then something worse arrives.
The Rig
For the maritime-isolation angle, Prime Video's The Rig is the cleanest match. A North Sea oil rig crew is cut off from the mainland by a strange fog, and a supernatural threat begins working through them one by one. It is Below's premise moved from a fishing town to a steel platform in the middle of a hostile sea, with the same claustrophobia and the same slow realization that nobody is coming to help. If you like your horror damp, gray, and trapped, this is your show.
From
From, on MGM+, takes the trapped-community idea and cranks it to eleven. Harold Perrineau plays Boyd Stevens, the sheriff of a town that nobody can leave, where monstrous things emerge after dark and the residents barricade themselves in every night to survive. It has run since 2022 and built a fiercely loyal following because it marries the creature horror of Below to a genuine, maddening mystery. If you want the sea monster swapped for a bigger, stranger puzzle, start here, but clear your calendar, because it is addictive.
Stranger Things
The gateway version of this genre is still Stranger Things on Netflix, which conveniently lives on the same service as Below. A small town, a hidden creature, a tight group of people who have only each other, it is the friendly, nostalgic end of the isolation-horror spectrum. If Below is a touch too grim for a given night, Stranger Things gives you the same small-town-under-siege shape with more warmth and adventure folded in. It is the pick for when you want the monster without the bleakness.
What these stories share
The thing that makes all of them tick is not the creature. It is the geography. A monster in a city is a disaster movie. A monster in a place you cannot leave is a trap, and a trap turns neighbors into suspects and every decision into a gamble. Below understands that the fishing town is as much the antagonist as the thing in the water, which is why it sits so comfortably beside these shows. For a wider survey of the genre's current best, our ranking of the best horror shows of 2026 is the companion piece, and fans of grueling survival setups should also see our list of titles like The Last House.
How scared do you want to be
Pick by your tolerance. Want the most prestigious, most devastating version? The Terror. Want the tightest, most claustrophobic one? The Rig. Want a bottomless mystery to obsess over? From. Want to dial the dread down and keep the small-town-monster thrill? Stranger Things. Each one delivers the central promise of Below, a community cut off from the world with something hunting it, just tuned to a different intensity.
A note on the slow burn
One thing to know going in: this subgenre rewards patience. The best isolation horror spends its early hours making you care about the people and the place before it starts taking them away, the same slow-tightening approach we admired in our roundup of thrillers like The Whisper Man. Below does this, and so do its best companions. Give them an episode or two to set the trap, and the payoff lands far harder than a jump-scare ever could.
If you want the movie version
Television is not the only place this dread lives. The whole subgenre traces back to the creature feature, the lone beast picking off an isolated group, and the movies still do it brilliantly. A good monster film gives you in two hours what a series stretches across a season, which is handy on a night you want the scares without the commitment. If Below leaves you wanting a self-contained shock rather than another multi-week mystery, a tight creature thriller is the move. The point is the same either way: put ordinary people somewhere they cannot escape, add something hungry, and let the pressure do the work. The format barely matters once the trap is set.
The snag, as always, is that these shows are scattered across Netflix, AMC+, Prime Video, and MGM+, and nobody wants to subscribe to four services to chase one mood. BingeNext reads across all of them and tells you which isolation-horror pick is already included on the apps you pay for. Get TV recommendations and find your next sleepless night.
Topics covered: shows like below, the terror, from mgm+, the rig, isolation horror
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.