LOST IN THE WOODS

A TOWN WITH NO EXIT SURROUNDED BY MONSTERS WITH NO MERCY – WELCOME TO FROM

- TARA BENNETT

ASK A PERSON WHAT scares the hell out of them and you’ll get a variety of different answers: vampires, zombies, sharks… There have been reams of movies full of those things that give us all nightmares. Which is why screenwriter John Griffin was looking for something different to send those little hairs on our necks into overdrive.

Going as far back as the events of 9/11, Griffin’s brain has been pondering the notion that the scariest thing in life is to have everything you know, and rely on in your existence, suddenly change in a blink.

“How would we live, how would we behave, and what kind of people would we become if our day-to-day reality were to be ripped away and replaced by a nightmare?” Griffin explains to SFX, in a Zoom call from his LA office.

After years of honing the parameters for that nightmare scenario, Griffin distilled his best ideas into a horror pilot that attracted the talents of executive producers Jeff Pinkner (Alias) and Jack Bender (Lost), and inspired the Epix network to greenlight From.

Knowing that humans inherently fear the unknown, Griffin constructed a scenario where a small, rural town becomes a magnet for very specific people, who are lured within its borders. Once inside, every road leads them right back into the town centre, no matter how many different routes they try.

“In writing the pilot and our approach to writing the [series] episodes, it was always focused on what if something like this really happened – what decisions would you make?” Griffin says. “And then always trying, as best as we could, to lean away from the idea of creating a TV show, as much as creating a realistic experiment.”

Pinkner, who’s written for many enigmatic genre series including Alias,