From

Has a preposition ever been so scary?

The video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent is too scary for me to play, but I did at one point spend hours watching a college crush play it in a dark dorm room. The concept is you’re in a castle or something and you’ve just woken up with no memory. At first it seems more like a puzzle game, as you are roaming around this castle picking up old letters and clues and trying to figure out where you are and what you’re doing there. You discover pretty quickly you can’t leave the castle. Doors are locked and windows are all too high to jump from (I was very focused on trying to get my friend to fashion some sort of rope from the bedsheets and avoid…playing the game, but this was rejected). So you’re bopping around, exploring the castle and all of a sudden there are monsters attacking you. The worst thing about it is you literally cannot kill them, nor can you really run from them. You’re also, naturally, really afraid of the dark at this point. Not just you playing or me watching, but your character has a literal sanity meter that goes down the more he’s in total darkness. So you have to keep candles lit, search for matches, etc. When your sanity meter gets low, your vision clouds, bugs start running across your field of view, and generally everything just goes to hell. So you hide in cupboards, you evade, and you try to move deeper and deeper into the castle towards some possible escape.

The scariest thing about the Amnesia games is they are not about fighting monsters. They are about surviving a situation in which monsters are present. You cannot fight them, you can only try to evade them and escape with your sanity intact. That is more unsettling than any monster fighting game or TV show or movie I’ve ever seen because your impotence hangs around your neck as a dead weight. You have to be inactive; you have to act like prey. This is precisely what makes the horror drama From so unsettling and so effective.

The initial premise of From is simple: a family appears driving an RV down a long, wooded road. They encounter a tree that’s fallen in the middle of the road and have to turn around and look for another way forward. They end up driving through a small, dilapidated town: a diner, a few houses, a church, and a mansion high on a hill in the distance. There are a few residents walking around and even more gathered for a funeral in the church’s graveyard. The family drives on through. But as they drive down the road out of town, they find that the road has looped back around and they’re in front of that cemetery again. Strange. Must have taken a wrong turn. So they drive out again, and again, and again, and every time they end up back in the middle of town. They can’t leave; no one can. Once this place sucks you in, you’re stuck forever. Oh, and there’s those unkillable monsters that come out at night and rip you apart (this is not a show for the squeamish or the easily frightened).

From is a unique, weird little piece of television. It’s the brainchild of two Lost producers (and stars someone from Lost) and that spiritual DNA is obvious from the beginning. In some ways, From feels like an attempt to try Lost again in a different setting and a different television landscape (no need to stretch a season for 20+ episodes, for instance), and to not make some of the mistakes that Lost made. Despite it being a show that would obviously invite flashbacks, there are very few, for instance. It also very early addresses the “could we all just be dead” question, coming down definitively on “no.” It has a large cast, but it focuses fairly well on a select number, using the new family as audience proxies in the first season. But it also shares a lot of spiritual DNA with Stephen King’s world of horrors, especially the show Castle Rock (another underrated horror gem), and also with the puzzle box/open map vibes of Westworld.

Lost remains the most brilliant, inventive puzzle-box show of all time, but one of the issues Lost ran into was the advent of internet message board obsessive detective culture. Lost was about puzzles upon puzzles; every solved mystery invited more questions and led to other puzzles and the drive to solve those with other viewers online drove viewership but also had a tendency to spiral out of control and push the writers to invent harder and harder puzzles, sometimes to the detriment of the narrative. Westworld got drunk on this problem throughout its first season; fans guessed certain plot points correctly, causing writers to alter course and veer away from overarching narrative consistency, often to the detriment of the show. The creators were too online, responding to fans and pushing for more complex puzzles and distractions and misdirections. The show became nonsensical, too caught up in it’s need to confuse us to communicate why we should care about its characters. After an incredible first season, a decent second, a lackluster third, and a last-ditch fourth, the show was cancelled and quietly removed from HBO’s library entirely. From was developed in a post-Lost and post-Westworld landscape and it is clear to me that it was developed carefully so as not to fall into the Westworld trap. To that end, the show takes its time with its puzzles, doling out information slowly and getting viewers used to the fear of not knowing anything at all.

From is committed to not telling you anything that its characters don’t know and every new piece of information we learn comes through individual characters discovering them. For the majority of the first season, the characters are entirely confined to a closed area - they either live in the small town (that’s one road with a few houses on it and a diner) or in Colony House, a large mansion nearby that has been set up as a communal living space. People cannot go anywhere else and they’re too afraid to explore beyond the boundaries of those spaces (they know the monsters come from the woods at night, so they avoid them almost entirely). They also have to be in a house when it gets dark (there are these talismans that the sheriff discovered at one point that, if placed within a house somehow prevents the monsters from entering) so they cannot explore so far away they would get caught outdoors at nightfall. The narrative benefit of this is the first season feels frighteningly claustrophobic; you feel trapped the way the characters feel trapped, yearning to see what else is in this world but too afraid to push beyond the relative safety of their bubble. Because so much is unknown, and the unknown is literally deadly, the murkiness of the beyond both beckons and repels. Towards the end of season one, it becomes clear to the leaders of the town that they cannot solve the ultimate mystery (how to go home) without pushing beyond that bubble, but for every answer their exploration provides there are scores more questions.

This makes for a slow and sometimes repetitive show. Most critiques of the show have noted that the speed at which these mysteries are revealed can be a little too slow, but I think there’s a deliberateness with which all this is unfolded and I think the goal is to make it nearly impossible to solve anything outside of the show (also the name just makes it incredibly hard to even Google). I have my theories, but I’m lacking so much information that I would be taking shots in the dark if I tried to posit answers to the majority of our questions. And such is the case with the denizens of this little hellscape. Some are trying to figure it out (some are just resigned to their fate) but it is only when they make a discovery that it is revealed to us. This is a tradeoff I will happily make; slowly unspooling this tangle is worth far more to me than a fevered glut of mysteries meant to keep us hooked. The episodes with no monster attacks at all tend to be my favorite; I love just watching these people try to run a society while slowly working their way towards an answer to one of their 5000 questions. This show has found a way to largely avoid the puzzling traps its predecessors too often fell into and by doing so found a way to keep our gaze more on the characters, rather than on those 500 questions.

How uncertain are these days, though! The third season of the show just premiered and is being reviewed favorably; the show as a whole has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, for what that’s worth. It’s a mid-budget show and it’s on a small network, which means that although it has never gotten a ton of attention the way a Netflix show might, the viewership expectations are way lower; I hope this means it survives and thrives, not just because it would be nice to get some answers, but also because I love these characters and I want to see how they continue to live under these circumstances.

This is such a well-crafted show, so terrifying and fascinating, that I feel inordinately protective of it. I want to shine a spotlight on it and get those of you with a strong tolerance for horror to check it out, but I also want it to stay a little under the radar, far away from the pressures of big budgets and big viewership expectations. At the end of the day, all we can do is hope that it, too, survives an uncertain world.