Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files written by Zack Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff, out on October 16th. 

Written by James Wong and Glen Morgan / Directed by Kim Manners

If you wandered far enough into the countryside surrounding the tiny town I grew up in, you’d find people who desired the absolute minimum of human interaction, people who put signs up on their farms warning that trespassers would be shot, people who collected abandoned sheds and set them up in a lonely cow pasture in some semblance of a small ghost town consisting almost entirely of chicken coops. If you talked to these people, they were almost always friendly but terse, able to interact with others but attempting to end that interaction as soon as possible. It’s not so hard to imagine twisting this terse emptiness into horror.

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. That house holds a family that doesn’t want anything to do with anyone who might disrupt them. 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.

And 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. 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. In particular, this might literally be the darkest episode of the series, with shots emphasizing narrow slits of light to highlight, say, Mrs. Peacock (Karin Konoval) lurking underneath a bed.

Related Article: The Real UFO History Behind The X-Files

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