Editorials
The 10 Goriest and Most Gruesome Episodes of “The X-Files”
Television shows don’t get much more iconic than The X-Files. Even people who have never seen the show know the names Mulder and Scully, and that they chase UFOs and government conspiracies. Most people consider The X-Files science-fiction; some call it a supernatural procedural; a few people even find it the most slow-burn “romance” on television.
I have always considered the series flat-out horror. The show frequently featured monsters that would make Freddy Krueger shudder, along with well-plotted episodes that ratchet up the tension to uncomfortable levels. Plus, the show has always had a healthy amount of gore.
In honor of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, I present to you the goriest, most gruesome, most horror-fying episodes of The X-Files.
Episode 202: “The Host”
The monster in “The Host” is the most gruesome sight in this episode. Half-man, half-flukeworm, this creature is one of the most iconic in the history of The X-Files. Flukie has wrinkled white skin and a big, round mouth with curling fangs. The size of a man, but with no human attributes, Flukie is a walking/swimming nightmare.
Episode 220: “Humbug”
A personal favorite of mine, “Humbug” sends Mulder and Scully to an off-season carnival camp to investigate a strange murder. A humorous episode, the carnival folks are quirky and generally gentle people. It turns out that the murderer is an attached, parasitic twin that is little more than a torso with skinny arms it uses to drag itself along the ground. The twin detaches from his host, leaving a shark-sized hole in the host’s abdomen. The little, bloody creature – not too different from Belial in Basket Case – drags himself through dog doors and various vents in order to attack.
Episode 222: “F. Emasculata”
The agents head to a prison to help with the manhunt for two escaped convicts, only to discover a much more diabolical problem: the prison is under quarantine with an unknown disease. This disease causes huge, bleeding, throbbing boils to form on the skin. Frequently in the episode, these boils rupture, exploding an enormous amount of pus on whoever is in the way. An extra dimension of ick: the infection is caused by an insect, and it procreates when the pustules explode, sending the larvae flying onto their next host.
Episode 402: “Home”
This episode is one of the most upsetting of all episodes. It was the first episode of the show to carry a viewer discretion warning. Even still, Fox Network received so many complaints about this episode when it premiered in 1996, the network pulled it from rotation and it didn’t reair for a year, in syndication, on the FX cable channel. The most notorious scene from the episode is probably the opening, in which a woman gives birth to a grossly deformed baby, then three similarly deformed men bury the infant in a nearby sandlot. Things get weirder when you find out the mother of the baby has no arms or legs, is kept under a bed, and the baby is a product of mother-son incest.
Episode 406: “Sanguinarium”
This episode, about witchcraft, blood sacrifice, and plastic surgery, starts off gross enough: with a liposuction gone horribly wrong. Things get grosser, with scenes that include leeches on a woman’s stomach; a laser burrowing through a woman’s face and out the other side; a nurse hiding in a bathtub full of blood, only to leap out and attack a doctor; and another doctor burning off a woman’s face during a chemical peel. The grand finale features a doctor literally peeling his own skin off – and leaving it in a puddle on the floor, like a misshapen Halloween mask.
Episode 607: “Terms of Endearment”
Most episodes of The X-Files have some basis in science. Even the monsters come with some kind of pseudo-scientific reasoning. This episode is about demons. Not metaphorical demons, but horns-and-tails demons. In the opening sequence, a demon steals a woman’s baby right from her womb. The demon has claws, horns, and glowing red eyes, and he stands against a wall of flames as he holds the tiny half-demon baby aloft. Bonus: this episode stars Bruce Campbell.
Episode 804: “Roadrunners”
A particularly weird episode – even by The X-Files’ standards – “Roadrunners” follows a cult of desert-dwellers who worship a giant parasitic slug. Scully is trapped in a tiny “town” in order to care for a man who seems to be dying. It turns out the cult has infected this man with the giant parasitic slug in the hopes that he would then become their god. While caring for this man, she discovers a fist-sized hole in the small of his back. When she presses the edges, it oozes blood, and a lump starts squirming around beneath the skin. With a pair of pliers, Scully digs in to the hole to remove the lump. She only gets half of it.
Episode 807: “Via Negativa”
This episode – about a cult led by a man with a third eye – doesn’t waste any time getting to the gruesome bits. In the cold open, a couple of cops keeping surveillance on the cult go into the headquarters in the middle of the night – and find every one of the followers dead in their cots, due to an axe wound in their head. Adding to the copious amounts of blood in the scene are the faces of the followers. Clearly, this was no suicide, and many have a look of surprise or sheer terror on their faces.
Episode 1109: “Nothing Lasts Forever”
This episode wasn’t quite as good as “Home,” but it is loaded with grotesquerie. Back-alley surgery and cannibalism are the set-up for a cult seeking to cure aging. In one scene, a woman mixes up miscellaneous human organs in a blender, then drinks the resultant goo. In a few other scenes, the leader of the cult, a “doctor” sews himself to young, nubile cult followers, in order to imbue himself with their youth.
Episode 1110: “My Struggle IV”
The final episode of the revival is a terrible episode, but it has two amazing, bloody scenes. Mulder and Scully’s teenage son, Jackson – the one Scully gave up for adoption when he was just a few months old – is back, and he has “superpowers” due to his alien DNA. One of the powers he has is the ability to make people’s heads explode without laying a hand on them. In this episode, you see him do it to several conspiracy goons. He explodes them all one at a time, in succession, spray painting the cheap motel room with blood and brains and goo. In this scene you get to actually watch him explode these men, but a more impressive scene is the preceding one, in which we see yet another goon who has already been exploded in the front seat of his car. In addition to bits and pieces, the goon’s face has peeled off his skull and is stuck to the car window like a bloody decal.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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