MGM+’s FROM: Season 1 Review & Theories

Horror television isn’t quite as popular as many other types of TV. I think that most people don’t mind being scared for an hour and a half long film, but when it comes to committing to a horror series, they’d would rather allocate their TV-watching hours to a more relaxing experience, like a serialized detective show, sitcom, or the latest hit reality program.

Evil and Achieve 81 spring to mind as recent examples of shows that attempt to be truly scary, but the fact that one was quickly cancelled by Netflix and the other is on Paramount+ actually helps demonstrate that there’s a lack of horror shows being produced. For fans of the genre like myself, From helps fill that void, as a well-done series that’s also frequently genuinely frightening.

From excels at atmospheric horror. There aren’t a lot of jump scares, but there’s an uneasy feeling in almost every shot – the sense that something could attack one of our characters at any given moment. The show focuses on a small town that’s straight out of your worst nightmares. Once someone enters the town there is seemingly no escape (if you try to drive out of town you’ll end up just going in circles and re-enter). But that’s not the worst of it since every night flesh-tearing monsters roam the town searching for their next victims.

From is well-acted and written overall, but it’s really the (nameless) setting itself that feels like it’s strongest attribute. In addition to nightly monsters and no way to escape, there are other unexplainable elements, like electricity that seemingly comes from nowhere, magic trees with the power to teleport, and a little boy dressed in white who appears only to select residents. From was created by John Griffin, who doesn’t have many other credits to his name, but one of its executive producers, and the director of most episodes, is Jack Bender. Bender has worked on lots of shows, but most noteworthy in this case is his work on Lost. From feels extremely like Lost in lots of ways – it’s basically a horror version of the first season of that series.

Like Lost, From focuses on a group of people trapped in a location with mysterious happenings going on all around them and no obvious way to escape. I worry that From will suffer from a similar problem to Lost, in that once things begin to be explained, the explanations are never as interesting as the questions that were being asked. It wouldn’t surprise me if the first season of From (or seasons depending on how long the show goes on), when nothing is really revealed to us, ends up being when the show is at its strongest. Still, it’s not really fair to judge the show on any of this since we’ll have to wait, likely for quite a while, to see if the resolutions to the many mysteries of the town are satisfactory.

As for Season 1 of From, I’d definitely say it’s a worthwhile watch for horror fans. It’s not spectacular, but it’s extremely bingeable, and an edge-of-your-seat-type show.

Grade: 8/10

From is definitely the type of show that almost encourages viewers to predict what’s really going on. As such, I have some pretty strong feelings as to what’s happening in our nightmarish town. Read on to check out a few of my theories. Of course, they’ll most likely all be totally wrong, but just in case I end up being right, you’ve been warned if you don’t want things spoiled for you.

**Theories follow** Potential spoilers **

Where is everyone “From”?

One thing I think is vital to uncovering what’s really going on is understanding where all of the characters are from – the title of the show is From after all. The sheriff has a bulletin board with pins in it by his desk showing all of the places that the town’s current residents were traveling when they ended up trapped there.

The pins, at first, seem to be totally random, but they’re not, because all of the pins are somewhere in the United States of America. If what was going on in town was entirely some sort of supernatural occurrence, why would it be happening within the manmade borders of a country?

At first, I thought that everyone being from America might just be something overlooked from the creators of the show, but in the final episode of Season 1, it became clear to me that this isn’t the case and that everyone being from America is extremely important. In Episode 10, right after we’re shown characters looking at the map of America with pins in it, we’re then shown a lamp that has a globe attached to it. We’re shown this globe-lamp very clearly in several more scenes in the episode, and it’s a pretty out-there lamp for the creators to have just randomly chosen. What we’re really getting is a hint that the characters all arriving in the town from somewhere in America, and not from across the whole world, is important.

So why is this important?

So if all of the characters are actually “from” the same place (the same country), then what does this mean? It means that people showing up to the town is not a random occurrence – people are being taken there purposefully.

I believe that some sort of U.S. government agency is controlling the town, or at least investigating the area it’s in. Perhaps the town is somewhere that supernatural things do occur that the U.S. government has discovered over time, and now they conduct experiments there. The people of the town are guinea pigs being observed by the government.

I think there still may definitely be a supernatural component to the area where the town’s located, with multiple elements in play that each resolve some of the mysteries on the show. For example, the little boy in white could be the ghost of a previous resident and Sara, the girl who hears voices telling her to do things, might be hearing people who’ve died in the town in the past.

Still, I think that it’s the government (or some other covert group in the U.S.) that’s the primary antagonist to those in the town. In the last episode, it’s somebody working for the government or some secret-type organization that we hear when Jim uses the radio. The same organization is likely watching the forest from the lighthouse and sent the spiders/spiderwebs as a deterrent to prevent Boyd and Sara from reaching the boundaries of the area.

What about the monsters?

I actually think that the monsters aren’t going to be a super important part of the overall story From is telling. The monsters may have once been humans that the government experimented on at some point or something like that – what’s important is that they’re being kept in the same observation area (the “town”) as our other characters by this unseen third party (the U.S. government).

The Spy

If the above theories do actually end up being correct, and if I know these types of TV shows, then there’s definitely a spy amongst the townspeople – or at least someone who knows more than they’re letting on.

So who’s the spy in the group secretly working for the government gathering intel in the field? I think it’s Fatima, the woman who quickly becomes friends with Julie at Colony House and later becomes engaged to Ellis. I think the spy has to be someone who arrived in town alone. Fatima also tells a story at one point about how her father was killed in the Middle East because of his beliefs and it clearly had a profound impact on her. I think that there’s more to the story that happens after what she’s telling and that her father’s death eventually led her to be a part of whatever group she now belongs to that’s observing the people trapped in town.

Well, that’s surely a lot of theories! It’s either exactly what I described above or aliens. Or the people are trapped in a simulation. Whether I’m right or not, I’m definitely curious what the creators of From have in store for us in Season 2 (that’s currently being released) and in future seasons of the show. Hopefully, they can keep the show entertaining while resolving the questions they’ve presented.