While I can’t say that I’ve ever been truly scared of an X-Files episode, there have been some that have left me unsettled or double checking my surroundings. The majority of these episodes are about the terrifying things that humans do to one another as opposed to some supernatural force at work. And that’s precisely why they’ve stuck with me over the years and many (many, many) rewatches.
Tooms being the worst Santa ever.
Squeeze (1×03)/Tooms (1×21)
In the first episode, a series of murders involving liver extraction and no conceivable points of entry lead Mulder and Scully to Eugene Tooms. The quiet sanitation worker has the ability to elongate and contort his body in order to gain access to his victims through impossibly small passages like vents and, as we see in the sequel, toilets. Why livers? He needs them in order to survive and has been working every 30 years to sustain himself.
What’s so creepy?
These two episodes shake the notion that people are safely confined to their homes or offices. Tooms is viewed as harmless and as someone who just does his job, even by the other FBI agents who don’t buy Mulder’s theory (which, honestly, anyone but Mulder would balk at). Bonus creep factor for casting real life gross dude Doug Hutchison.
Ice (1×08)
Mulder and Scully join a team of scientists to investigate the mysterious deaths of an Arctic drilling team. What they find is a long-buried worm-like creatures that cause psychosis and paranoia in their hosts. Trapped by a storm, the team grows increasingly suspicious of each other and who might be harboring one of the organisms.
What’s so creepy?
The isolation, simply put. This episode really ratchets up the claustrophobia and fast. Shortly after arriving, they end up trapped with Scully and a couple of the scientists trying to figure out what these organisms are and how to stop them. Even scarier than the effect the creatures have on their hosts is the group’s seemingly contagious paranoia.
Shady ass kids.
Eve (1×11)
Two fathers die at the exact same time by the same means – exsanguination. The only witnesses are their daughters, who just so happen to be identical and share the same story. Products of a continued eugenics project known as The Litchfield Experiment, the two girls exhibit great intelligence and psychotic behavior like their predecessors.
What’s so creepy?
Killer kids. What more explanation do you need?
The Host (2×02)
Separated by the Bureau, Mulder and Scully secretly work together to uncover the cause of a series of deaths in New Jersey. What they find is more horrifying than either could have expected – a mutant creature capable of reproducing through its hooked bite.
What’s so creepy?
That goddamn toilet factor comes up again in this episode – which is just a big ball of NOPE. Flukeman, as he’s known, hides out in the sewers and in the cesspools beneath portable toilets before attacking his victims. The end of the episode posits that Flukey is likely a result of the Chernobyl fallout, which has led to some strange things over the years.
This fucking guy.
Irresistible (2×13)
Originally thought to be the work of aliens by a local detective, a series of corpse mutilations turns quickly to murder. Ex-mortuary employee and culprit, Donnie Pfaster sets his sights on Scully after a chance encounter at the local holding tank.
What’s so creepy?
There’s a reason that cases involving a very human (we’re ignoring what “Orison” put into canon for Pfaster) monster are the most unsettling to me – they could, and have, happened. Pfaster is unassuming and harbors a deep hatred of women that he acts upon, as is true with most male serial killers. Also, if anyone ever refers to me as “girly girl,” I’m never speaking to them again.
Die Hand Die Verletzt (2×14)
The devil is afoot in a small New Hampshire town, presumably called up by a couple teenage boys who were trying to get laid (which results in one of them being murdered). What the locals believe isn’t far from the truth, but the force that killed one boy is after a group of lip service-paying, Satanic PTA members.
What’s so creepy?
That big ole snake that eats one of the PTA members alive in his basement. I like snakes and that is pretty damn unsettling to watch. Earlier in the episode, a girl hallucinates that the fetal pig she is about to dissect in class has come alive and screams in agony. The story which she tells to Mulder and Scully about her alleged multiple rapes, forced abortions, and the murder of her younger sister is incredibly upsetting.
Or being murdered.
2Shy (3×06)
Online dating, especially in its infancy, can make a lot of people apprehensive. You don’t know who really is on the other side of their profile. As it turns out for the female victims in this episode, the charming guy they met online is a serial killer who feeds on human fatty tissue.
What’s so creepy?
This episode hits pretty close to home (aside from being set in Cleveland and my last name being on the victims’ list, that is) because I’ve had some online dating experience. While it was mostly lackluster, the episode does play on that fear of “what if” as mentioned in the summary. Of course anyone can be charming online, but you never really know if it’s genuine or if it’s just a façade.
Oubliette (3×08)
A young girl is kidnapped by a photographer who briefly met her during her school’s Picture Day. Across town, at the exact moment of her abduction, another woman begins bleeding and faints at work. It turns out that this woman, a former victim of the same man, is experiencing everything the girl is and even bleeding the girl’s blood.
What’s so creepy?
This is another case that is rooted in reality – we’ve all seen many reports of men preying on young girls and women and imprisoning them. Wade, the photographer, sees Amy once and becomes so instantly obsessed with her that breaks into her bedroom to kidnap her. He positions photos of the two of them together and tells her repeatedly, “Nobody’s gonna spoil us.”
“Our family tree is a wreath.”
Home (4×02)
After a group of kids playing baseball uncover an infant corpse in a field, Mulder and Scully join local law enforcement to investigate. What they end up uncovering is a family with a long history of inbreeding who keep their injured mother beneath a bed.
What’s so creepy?
Well if the incest and infanticide weren’t a tip off as to how fucked up this particular episode is, then know this: it was inspired by real life. While it might not have involved dead babies, writer Glen Morgan pulled from a disturbing event mentioned in Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography where he met a quadruple amputee who was kept in a cupboard.
Unruhe (4×04)
Mulder and Scully investigate the disappearances of two separate women wherein the only clues left behind are photos of them screaming with a swirl of skull-like faces behind them. After being apprehended, Gerald Schnauz escapes police custody by killing an officer, and then drugs and abducts Scully in order to carry out the same procedure.
What’s so creepy?
Much like the other serial killer/kidnapper episodes, what’s so unsettling is the amount of access these men have to their victims. In this case, Schnauz is a construction worker who worked near where he kidnapped each woman. What still stays with me to this day is how he drugs his victims before abducting them: it happens as he’s passing the first woman in the rain and later, he jabs Scully in the foot with a needle while he hides beneath her car. He uses a sharp instrument to perform messy transorbital lobotomies on the women, rendering them zombie-like and incapable of communication. Until the mid-1960s, this procedure (also known as an “ice-pick lobotomy”) was performed on the mentally ill in order to “calm” them.
Quick game of Horse with a child murderer, then back to the investigation – Fox Mulder, probably.
Paper Hearts (4×10)
Following a dream about an old, disturbing case, Mulder uncovers another body of a young girl with a heart cut out of her nightgown. He speaks with the imprisoned killer in order to identify her, but ends up believing that the man may have also abducted his sister, Samantha.
What’s so creepy?
Again with the access – in this case, the murderer worked as a traveling salesman in the 1970s. He came into people’s homes, knew their names and where their children slept, and he used that to his advantage. And when Mulder temporarily signs him out of prison, he immediately finds a new victim.
Milagro (6×18)
Mulder’s new neighbor, a writer who lives in a nearly empty apartment next door, may be orchestrating a series of murders through his writing. He becomes infatuated with Scully, and begins to focus his writing on her.
What’s so creepy?
Aside from the pretty gory murders in the episode, the fixation Padgett has on Scully is disturbing, to say the least. He follows her, notes her routine – in other words, he stalks her. The audience hears his narration, how he writes Scully as succumbing to him in bed, and it’s all just very skeevy.
Which episodes still make your skin crawl? Leave them in the comments below.
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