Scarecrows

Just some thoughts out loud.

I’m not going to talk about the fairly popular ritual theories that have already been discussed many times, but I want to discuss this village full of mysteries and pagan symbols, especially the scarecrows, the totems, and their meanings.

So, what do we have:

The totems at the border of the village - pretty mysterious, but there is an explanation for them. Totems in paganism and mythology have always served as protection against evil or outside forces, marked boundaries, or acted as markers of spirit territory.

In From, the totems look humanoid, with distinctive features and deformities (scars, nails), and a design choice like that always has meaning. In mythology, the head usually symbolizes memory, personality, consciousness. So the totems may not only play the role of border protectors, but also be physical embodiments of certain images or identities.

The scarecrows are a very disturbing and dark phenomenon. In mythology scarecrows are almost always a bad sign. They could represent a specific person, contain a spirit inside, serve as a vessel for an entity, or act as a substitute sacrifice. This could theoretically be something neutral, but in this situation everything is much more unsettling because the scarecrows are tied up and submerged underwater.

We saw that the scarecrows are connected by a rope that can be pulled to drag them back onto the shore. This was not done by accident, because if someone wanted to get rid of them forever, there would be no need for a rope.

Why do it this way?

Most likely, we are dealing with an object that cannot be left free, but also cannot be destroyed. In many cultures, water is a boundary between worlds, a place of sealing or isolation. In archaic beliefs, objects associated with illness, curses, or taboos were submerged in water, drowned, or hidden in order to contain the evil force inside. As long as the object remains bound, it stays dormant, but once it is released, the entity awakens. And that is obviously what our characters did.

There are other very specific details suggesting that the scarecrows may not simply contain entities, but are archetypal representations of certain people. This is hinted at by the gender differences between them (one of the scarecrows is clearly female, wearing a dress and having long hair), the clothing, the button eyes (the male scarecrow is missing one eye button), and the sewn mouths.

What do the buttons and sewn mouths mean? The mouth is a very important symbol and usually represents knowledge and speech. A sewn mouth on the contrary points to a prohibition against speaking or revealing the truth.

The button eyes hint at the existence of a surveillance system. Not vision in the literal sense, but its imitation, like observation, monitoring.

Thus, the scarecrows may not simply hold entities inside them, but could actually be prototypes of certain individuals who, for some reason, must remain silent, must stay bound and hidden. But their complete destruction could lead to catastrophe and the release of these entities, which is why they have to remain under control.

And now for the terrifying assumption: what if the totems at the border are not protecting the village from outside evil, but are actually keeping that evil trapped inside the settlement?

Think about it yourselves, why place totems around a place that contains sealed evil? It would make more sense to throw the scarecrows into some other lake (Brundles, for example), but for some reason everything was done differently. On top of that, Jade broke one of the totems, violating the protective boundary, but complete release required one more thing - pulling the scarecrows out of the water. It’s possible that the footsteps outside the cabins belonged to these scarecrows, but the protective layer prevented them from entering, and now that protection is gone.

In my version, some terrible incident may have happened in this settlement, forcing its inhabitants to seal the place and abandon it.

I believe this settlement, filled with pagan symbols, ritual stones, signs, and so on, is a very dark mythological place where something truly evil may have existed, something that was supposed to remain sealed forever. Possibly the site of some dark ritual, but exploring it is necessary for the story.