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.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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