Peacock (Karin Konoval) lurking underneath a bed. In particular, this might literally be the darkest episode of the series, with shots emphasizing narrow slits of light to highlight, say, Mrs. Director Kim Manners proves equally at ease with the gentle domesticity of small-town life (particularly in a small town with a sheri named Andy Taylor, played by Tucker Smallwood) as he does with the chilling horror sequences. Plus, the writers had a terrific sense of when, exactly, a dark wisecrack would lighten the mood just enough to break the tension-and to deepen the next plunge into utter terror.Īnd why does the episode need those tension-breaking moments? Certainly much of that suspense is due to Morgan and Wong’s script, but this is also possibly the most evocatively directed episode of The X-Files.
The humor builds on the realistic rapport between our two protagonists because by now, we know that Mulder and Scully stare directly into the face of awful, awful things and find a way to keep going. One of the common fan complaints against the episode when it first aired was that Mulder and Scully’s jokes destroyed any mood the episode had built up to that point, but the jokes actually enhance the atmosphere. One is Morgan and Wong’s sense of grim humor. Two touches set “Home” apart from other episodes. Now, Mulder and Scully could pop in and out of a small town to hang out with an inbred sideshow for just a few days’ time. In earlier decades, you had to be road-tripping through the Texas wilderness to run across a family of chainsaw-wielding freaks. The rise of mass communication (and especially the Internet) made little local monsters and urban legends into well-known national gures, the best spreading and choking out more localized phenomena. That the two overlap so comfortably is proof that the show’s template was so elastic as to incorporate almost anything the writers and producers could throw at it, but it���s also evidence that the weirdness and wildness of America was becoming almost commonplace.
#WHAT EPISODE IS X FILES HOME MOVIE#
“Home” is somehow both a creepy house horror movie and an episode of The X-Files. Morgan and Wong understand both what makes The X-Files work and what makes those old horror movies work, and they understand where and how the two intersect. Morgan and Wong were fantastic at taking old horror movie templates and updating them for the show’s universe, as they did when they turned The Thing into “Ice” (S1E8) and folded any number of ’80s Satanism chillers into “Die Hand Die Verletzt” (S2E14). This is, basically, the show’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre episode, only here the family are three inbred brothers, products of generations of incest, attempting to beget another child with their own mother. That house holds a family that doesn’t want anything to do with anyone who might disrupt them. The setup Morgan and Wong exploit is a simple one: There’s a creepy house at the edge of a small town in the middle of nowhere. “Home,” in particular, is among the nest episodes the show produced, a reminder that The X-Files could do brutal, scary episodes even as it was crossing over into a mainstream hit. “Home” is the first episode of four this season written by the returning Glen Morgan and James Wong, and every one of those episodes is a notable break from the form the show had established up until that point. Like so many X-Files tales, it’s both a sterling example of a certain kind of horror story and a last-gasp effort within the subgenre, a sort of sad farewell to the weird America that was rapidly smoothing over. “Home,” like its central gures, the Peacock family, is a remnant. If you go for a drive in even the most isolated parts of the nation, you’re still connected to the rest of the country.
In the 2010s, small towns feel like part of a much more homogenous whole, thanks to the wonders of modern connection. “Home” is twenty-two years old, but it feels part of a different world entirely.
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