I Smile At Dogs

Here is where From departs from the usual American horror tropes that idealize the nuclear family unit at the expense of everyone else

I appreciate how the nuclear family is shown to be some of the most extractive, self-absorbed and utterly useless members of the community. The two children do best in their growth emotionally and morally when they are away from their parents.

The Matthews are parents who already lost one child through their negligence and are now continuously misplacing their remaining children because of their own distinct obsessions of the hour, reliant wholly on the rest of the community to do the most difficult daily labor of raising their kids (Tian-chen to feed and babysit, Boyd for yet another dangerous rescue mission, Fatima etc for morale boosting). Julie has to yell at her father not to leave all the parenting duties of Ethan to her while he and Tabitha go off into their respective coping fixations.

And both parents are quite thankless and entitled about how they extract and do not reciprocate towards the community. They take over Tian-chen's home and make Kenny so uncomfortable he moves out. Ethan expresses normal emotions of sadness about Tian-chen's death but the parents show minimal empathy towards Kenny. Their single-minded effort to figure out something causes their own original allotted house to collapse and they are the only ones who emerge unscathed, meanwhile others lose their lives saving them from their own misadventures. Tabitha returns empty-handed, facing the wrath of the community. Later, Tabitha will literally stop in the middle of searching for Fatima to have all the men (Jim, Victor, Jade) focus their attention on her; she's too busy saving imaginary children to be of any help saving anyone else in a moment of crisis. Jim is one of the town's able-bodied men who does the least to help anyone out--they regularly go into the diner, oblivious to the fact that they should maybe contribute to its upkeep? Only the youngest, Ethan, helps out--once-- and is effusively praised by Bakta. The implication is that Tabitha's marriage to a white man insulates her from any expectation that the women of color (Tian-chen and then Bakta) might face from the community to perform the daily labor of providing food and comfort. Unlike most mothers, she never seems to be worried about the daily chores of feeding her family.

The parents never seem to experience any sense of moral obligation towards their fellow community members as if everyone else's needs are secondary to the primacy of their own selfish unit but ultimately, the parents are too selfish to even really help each other. There's also a subtle twist in how Tabitha (played by the always excellent Catalina Sandino Moreno) has erased her own ethnicity in marrying Jim Matthews. The only clue that remains is her accent which is there when speaking with her own mother but has not been passed down to her kids.

Yet her tuning with Jade Herrera suggests some buried hunger for something outside of the assimilationist marriage she has with Jim. In a show where the monsters are 1950s white stock characters (what a powerful statement given how much those ghosts continue to haunt America), these racial undertones are no accident.

I want to find my people, whoever they are. I want to find my strength. I want to make a life where we're not always doing and trying and fighting.