By Leticia Urieta

From is the horror show you never knew you needed. Streaming on MGM, this series is equal parts frightening and tender, seat-clenchingly tense (or in my case the arm or leg of my patient partner) while developing its characters in unexpected ways. 

In a small American town lost to the world, a group of people are trapped together, forced to make a life as best they can while trying to keep each other safe from the creatures that come out of the woods at night, wearing the faces of people beckoning to be let into their homes to feast on their flesh. 

Spoilers for Episode One ahead!

Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau) is the self-appointed Sheriff of this town, making it his mission to keep the peace and to keep people safe. As the sky darkens each day, he walks through the town ominously ringing a cowbell to signal that it is time for everyone to lock themselves inside. But in the very first episode, one of the townspeople, Frank (Bob Mann) gets drunk and doesn’t come home one night, leaving his family vulnerable. His daughter opens the window to a monster claiming to be her grandmother and she and her mother are killed. From the beginning, the illusion of safety Boyd is attempting to create is very ruptured. In the morning, Boyd pulls the father inside the house and forces him to witness the mutilated bodies of his daughter and wife, yelling that “a man protects his family, Frank!” As he leaves, Boyd finds the stone talisman that hangs by the doors of every house to keep the monsters from getting in, on the floor, and he pockets it with a sigh. Later, we find out that it was Boyd who found the talismans in the first place, so his frustration and hurt that even these could not keep the people in the town safe is palpable.  

Later in the episode, we are introduced to the Matthews family, parents Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Jim (Eion Bailey) and their kids, teenager Julie (Hannah Cheramy) and her younger brother Ethan (Simon Webster) as they travel down a remote road in their camper on a family road trip. There is tension brewing under the surface of this idyllic family vacation as Jim refers to their life before the death of their baby son Thomas, how things used to be between them, and Tabitha scoffs, trying to change the subject. Suddenly, they are stopped in the middle of the road by a felled tree blocking their path and a murder of ominous crows, causing them to backtrack the way they came. In so doing, they enter the town just as Boyd and Father Khatri (Shaun Majumder), the resident priest, are burying the family killed the night before. Boyd tells the Matthews that if they want to get back to the highway, they have to keep driving. As they drive away, he looks pained, knowing what is coming. We watch the Matthews begin to panic as they keep driving, each time ending up in the middle of the town as it begins to dawn on them that they cannot escape. 

As they try to turn the RV around and go back the way they came, they swerve to avoid another car and fly off the road, crashing the camper into a tree where all four of them are injured. This is the first sign that even in a place as strange as this town, two sets of newcomers being trapped there is an ill omen. Ethan is badly injured and Tabitha must escape to town with Julie and Kenny (Ricky He), Boyd’s deputy, as the sun sets while Boyd and Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot), the resident medic, attempt to help Ethan. They have to stay the night in the wrecked RV while Boyd tests the power of the talisman, hanging it in the window to ward off the monsters.

Tabitha and Julie escape the monsters with Kenny and Ellis (Corteon Moore), Boyd’s estranged son who begrudgingly agrees to help, to Colony House, a large home on the outskirts of the town where the residents have been living communally for some time apart from the rest of the town. Donna, the de facto leader of Colony House, has to tie up Tabitha and Julie to explain what is happening to them, as unreal as that seems. 

The show unfolds from there with the rhythm of a drama and the atmosphere of a dark fairy tale. Each episode reveals more about the main characters, who they were before being trapped in the town and those still coming to grips with their realities, including the Matthews family. Early on in the first episode, Ethan remembers a book his parents used to read him, The Flight of the Cromenockle, an adventure story about a hero, The Cromenockle, on a quest who must face many dangers. Throughout the series, Ethan reminds his family of the parallels between this story and what they are experiencing. Each of the characters embarks on different quests to try to solve the mysteries of the town they cannot escape in hopes of saving everyone and finding their way home. The lore of the town is advanced even further in Seasons 2 and 3 when Ethan befriend’s Victor (Scott McCord) who was a child in the town when everyone, including his mother, was killed and he had to grow up alone before more people came to and were trapped by the power of the town.  

At night, the monsters of the town walk calmly and inexorably towards the townspeople unfortunate enough to be outside after dark. The majority have the appearance of white people wearing clothing of a bygone 1950’s era and their smiles are wide and open but immediately unnerving, meant to disarm their victims but are instead uncanny and threatening. They even try to lure folks outside, especially newcomers to the town who don’t know any better, by using calm, beguiling voices that invoke politeness, “why won’t you come and play?” These monsters prey on people’s need for connection amid isolation and lure them outside, overriding their fears so that they can torture, maim and feed, leaving behind their mutilated corpses in the light of day. As open white supremacist violence runs rampant in the United States and many well-meaning white liberals continue to invoke civility as the country continues to descend further into a fascism that evokes an era of a “better time,” From reminds us that this “civility” can be deadly, as it denies the violent intentions behind the smiles which can and do real harm. 

From’s showrunners share a deep understanding of how to balance developing strong relationships between characters with the terror and lore of this very frightening place. The depictions of communal care in From reflect the need to protect and uplift one another in terrifying times, something that viewers living through pandemics and political unrest can relate to. Kenny’s mother, Tian Chen (Elizabeth Moy), has taken it upon herself to use the abandoned diner in town to cook and serve food to the people who live in town for all their meals. Kristi operates a limited clinic in the abandoned post office. This is, of course, a messy kind of care. Boyd, who cares deeply about protecting the townspeople and keeping the peace, ultimately fails time and again when he attempts to recreate the authoritative hierarchy of a police officer over everyone else, which undermines real trust among the community and makes it so that every death and setback is perceived as his fault. 

In contrast, Donna and the people of Colony house share a level of intimacy and vulnerability because they ban together to share, live communally, grow their own food (and weed) and live more freely than the people in the rest of the town who live in separate houses and cannot always reach out when they most need one another. The social contract between these two spaces is not the same, illustrating the similar isolation that suburban neighborhoods in the US have versus other more communal living spaces where mutual aid is central to everyone’s ability to thrive. Julie, trying to find some independence from the dysfunction of her family, chooses to live in Colony House for a time with Ellis and his charismatic, loving partner Fatima (Pegah Ghafoori) who takes her under her wing. 

At the end of Season 1, Colony House is breached by the monsters during the one year anniversary party of Fatima’s arrival in the town, shattering their sense of safety and community and causing everyone there and in the town to rely more on one another with a renewed push towards finding a way home. Boyd and Sarah venture into the woods to try to find a way to escape the town and bring help, only for them to be separated and for Boyd to travel through a “faraway tree,” as Victor calls them, one of the many portal trees in the woods that bring him to a tower where he finds Martin (Robert Verlaque), an emaciated man chained to a wall who infects Boyd with his blood, passing on a contagion that will bring another horrifying force to the town. 

In Season 2, a charter bus rolls into town, complicating the already dire situation and escalating tensions to a breaking point. The sinister magic that governs the town and the surrounding woods traps people together of disparate ages, genders, diverse racial, ethnic, cultural and regional experiences that foments jealousy, suspicion, paranoia and fear. The community is not chosen, but is one thrown together by circumstances beyond their control. By necessity, the people trapped there must come together, find common ground, or die, which is easier said than done, as each of the characters has their own traumas and losses they are carrying, many of them having lost people to the monsters in the woods. But in the push and pull of the horrors the characters must face, so too are there moments of connection and hope. Fatima and Ellis decide to get married, and later Fatima, who in the past had experienced infertility, finds out that she is pregnant. Julie finds a friend in Elgin (Nathan D. Simmons), one of the people on the bus, a soft-spoken young man who is seeing visions and strange occurrences and is just looking for kinship.  

The drama that propels From forward often arises when the townspeople do not share all of their experiences plainly, instead choosing to keep the visions they are having, the problems with the food supply, or their discoveries about the things they see in the woods surrounding the town to themselves until conflict and death boil over. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that the monsters with eerie smiles are not the only malevolent beings seeking to destroy the hope and humanity of the residents. Jade (David Alpay), who was in the car that crashed into the Matthews, becomes obsessed with a symbol he sees through bizarre and frightening images in the woods, and realizes that he and several others in the town, including Tabitha and Sarah, may also have psychic connections to this place where time seems to loop, showing them images of people who once lived in the town and some of the horrible things that happened to them. The more each character digs into the history of this place, the more the evil that permeates it escalates. Boyd and Donna are the most guilty of withholding information from one another as the leaders of the two town factions, but in Season 3, it becomes clear that this is no longer a viable or sustainable option, especially in Episode 4 when the normally fierce and composed Donna collapses in Boyd’s arms, sobbing and shouting, “Why can’t they (the monsters) just leave us alone?!” Season 3 tests everyone’s breaking points. Panic and despair threaten to overtake all of the characters, especially Boyd, who continues to be targeted by the evil in the woods. Ultimately, the characters are forced to reckon with the fact that, unlike in the Cromenockle, no one person can be the savior for everyone. 

Unfortunately, Season 4 of this incredible series is not slated to release until 2026, so we have an agonizing year to wait, and of course, get on Reddit and speculate wildly about every single minute detail! Until then, watch and rewatch the first three seasons. This is a layered series and, as the showrunners have said, every detail means something to the progression of the story.