something I sort of forgot about From, but which is increasingly exasperating to experience on rewatch, is the deeply weird attitude the characters are written to have about anything supernatural. like, there's of course the familiar tedious baseline where if one person experiences something supernatural and another doesn't, there's this immediate whole skepticism song and dance, the "well maybe you're under a lot of stress and hallucinated things, due to being upset about being trapped in a non-euclidean town full of cannibal vampires". this kind of goofy thing where you can accept that a town is just floating around the countryside scooping up tourists but the minute someone sees a ghost you're like mm nah seems fake bro is ubiquitous in bad tv and I've gotten kind of used to it, even if it's annoying. (I mean, can you at least learn from the example of shows like Lost and The Leftovers and Mrs Davis and focus on the more interesting question of "do I trust that the source of this revelation is being honest about what it means or hasn't lied by omission"?)
but there's this deeper embarrassment about seemingly anything weird that happens in the village. a radio starts crackling randomly and a character is like ... yeah it does that just ignore it, look at this wall of unexplained phenomena doesn't this make you just want to Give Up? where are you going with the radio, be rational and surrender to your fate!! the jukeboxes in the town diner not only randomly play music, they have THEMATIC AWARENESS and play music that DIEGETICALLY HAS CHARACTER RELEVANCE. and people are like oh erm yeah they do that sometimes ah sorry god this is so awkward. it's like every single plot hook gets the same treatment as like a drunk uncle at thanksgiving who keeps telling sexist jokes and you're going to the girlfriend you brought along like oof aaah sorry about him he always makes a scene he's really fine once you get to know him just try to ignore him ok?
it's a really good example of how the writers know, apparently, the whole path the show is going to take, but they won't let the characters ask any questions about it until it's the designated moment where they Solve That Mystery. it's such a stultifying way to write that I do think is influenced by this weird fear of being "too much like Lost" and upsetting people online by "failing to answer the lore questions or giving unsatisfying answers". there's no dynamism because the characters are just sort of waiting around for when the GM decides that it's time for the plot to progress in accordance with the Lore Mystery Master Plan.
but there really is something kind of comical about the way they've solved this narrative issue: just make everyone perpetually act really embarrassed whenever the town has the bad manners to be a spooky supernatural puzzle box instead of just another rural backwater that just happens to have 30 to 40 cannibal vampires running through the backyard. as you do.
