Streaming columnist NICK OVERALL heads into scary country with a look at the horror TV show “From”.

A DISHEVELLED, frightened looking man strides down a derelict street ringing a bell. It’s a warning.

A strange coterie of townsfolk begin to hurry inside, locking their doors and boarding up their windows. Something is coming when night falls. What it is we don’t know yet, but we do know it’s dangerous.

Scrawled on to a chalkboard on the local sheriff’s office are the words “96 days without incident”. There’s a feeling in the air that’s about to change.

This is where the audience finds themselves in the opening minutes of the thriller series “From”, an underrated horror import from the US that begins streaming its second season on Stan this week.

This one comes from the producers of the once television hit “Lost” (on Disney Plus) and stars Harold Perrineau as the town’s noble, yet haunted sheriff Boyd Stevens. He’s in charge of this ominous settlement where the residents all seem to understand the rules: The daytime is safe, the nighttime isn’t and there’s no escaping.

Almost all the residents anyway. When a young family takes a disastrous wrong turn on their holiday road trip and ends up as the newest arrivals, the townsfolk must rush to teach them how to survive. 

Much of the tension in “From” comes from a ticking clock that is always visible to the viewer.

It’s not a clock with hands and numbers, but instead how much sunlight is still in the sky. When darkness arrives the monsters come out. Those not safely locked inside by the time night falls are the ones in danger.

That core premise makes for some addictive telly, with 20 episodes so far strung together by some tense cliffhangers.

The best thing about “From” is that it doesn’t play its hand too early. For the most part, it leaves the origin and explanation of its monsters a mystery, one that plays on the audience’s imagination and keeps them coming back for answers.

That formula harks back to the tension created in a little horror film released in 1975 called “Jaws” (which today streams on Binge and Amazon Prime Video). In it, Steven Spielberg terrified audiences with one of the scariest monsters ever put to screen and he did it by barely showing it at all. Out of the 124 minutes of the film, the famous shark is only actually visible to the viewer for about 200 seconds.

This was always Spielberg’s vision. It was his view that he should not reveal his iconic monster in all its animatronic glory until the dying minutes, instead leaving the audience’s imagination to do the work.

Amusingly, when looking back on the film, Spielberg even goes as far as to say he thinks the shark didn’t look scary, but kind of “dumb”.

For me that very same quote came to mind while watching “From”.

The show is at its best when one can’t see the monsters haunting the other side of the boarded up windows. “What are they? What do they look like? Are they going to get inside?”. Those questions naturally stem from the mystery and naturally create the show’s tension. When the series does go as far as to reveal some of the creatures in their CGI format, I couldn’t help but be a little let down. A TV show has a visual-effects budget, but the human imagination doesn’t.

Don’t let this detract from the fact that “From” still makes for a compelling and creepy piece of streaming.

In some ways, the set up here conjures up the popularity of the early seasons of “The Walking Dead” (on Binge). The zombie apocalypse hit brought millions of viewers to watch week-in, week-out with its chilling atmosphere and intriguing roster of characters.

“From” has a similar setup. The audience follows an ensemble of survivors, they begin to root for their favourites and hope they make it through each episode alive. 

All this is to say that the show has a shot at carving itself out as an authoritative piece of television horror.

That is, I suppose, if all its characters aren’t already dead anyway. These are the producers of “Lost” we’re talking about…