The Scariest Episode From Every Season of The X-Files

This article was originally published in HorrorPress.

It’s impossible to overstate the influence of The X-Files. Horror fans can spot its cultural ripple effects everywhere from Buffy to The Conjuring to Sinners. The show traversed countless subgenres and tonalities, including queasy body horror, B-movie monster yarn, and even frothy romantic comedy. For the uninitiated, wading into the paranormal investigations of Agents Scully and Mulder can feel like braving a haunted house with nothing but a flashlight. Fear not – if you’re in the mood for some Halloween-season thrills, I’ve chosen the scariest episode from each of the show’s nine original seasons.

Season 1: “Beyond the Sea” (Jan 7, 1994)

Owing much to The Silence of the Lambs, “Beyond the Sea” drums up genuine psychological scares by drawing the viewer into Scully’s precarious headspace. Her staunch rationalism falters when she encounters an unsettling vision of her dead father, setting the stage for a dizzying mind game between her and serial killer Luther Lee Boggs, portrayed with demented gravitas by Brad Dourif, a genre icon at the peak of his powers here. Thanks to a devastating performance from Gillian Anderson, this early episode broke the doors open on Scully, proving the show was as much about her journey through the unknown as it was her partner’s.

Season 2: “The Host” (Sep 23, 1994)

The show’s makeup effects team brought a cavalcade of nightmare visions to life throughout the franchise’s run, but none more stomach-turning than the Flukeman from this Season Two creature feature. Mulder investigates dead bodies in the New Jersey sewer system. The culprit? A parasitic flatworm with the size and physiology of a human. With Anderson’s pregnancy limiting her screen time, the episode has plenty of breathing room to linger on the gnarly attacks and dead-eyed visage of the Flukeman (played by Darin Morgan, who’d later pen some of the show’s most vaunted episodes). Not only does “The Host” feel like Creature from the Black Lagoon with an extra veneer of ick, the connection of Flukeman’s origins to the Chernobyl disaster adds a chilling layer of human culpability. “Nature didn’t make this thing,” Mulder intones. “We did.”

Season 3: “Wetwired” (May 10, 1996)

“Wetwired” tackled screen addiction over a decade before smartphones crawled into our hands and changed our brains forever. Paranoid vibes dominate this episode, in which binge marathons of cable news and game shows drive ordinary citizens to homicide. Scully soon gets pulled asunder by the nefarious broadcasts, causing her to turn against Mulder. “Wetwired” blends the show’s case-of-the-week format with its ongoing conspiracy saga to produce a high-anxiety thriller that presages our modern miasma of doomscrolling, fake news, and AI-induced psychosis. Along with the show’s other tales of techno dystopia (“Blood,” “Kill Switch”), consider “Wetwired” a proto-Black Mirror – with the added tension of composer Mark Snow’s slithering synth score that creeps under your skin.

Season 4: “Home” (Oct 11, 1996)

The X-Files cross-pollinated horror with related genres, but “Home” is perhaps the lone installment that feels like pure horror in its most undiluted form. Mulder and Scully investigate a grisly infanticide and run afoul of the Peacocks, a reclusive trio of brothers with unspeakable secrets. The dark power of “Home” pervades every frame. Behold the episode’s gorgeously photographed cold open, gruesome kills, and shiver-inducing reveals, all in service of the writers’ twisted treatise on family. “Home” was birthed at the top of Season Four, when the show found itself on a meteoric cultural ascent. The show’s growing popularity may explain why writers Glen Morgan and James Wong felt bold enough to send The X-Files into unhinged Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory. They may have overplayed their hand: this episode was famously banned from reruns after its initial airing.

Season 5: “Chinga” (Feb 08, 1998)

As the show’s profile continued to rise, the inevitable occurred: horror titan Stephen King reported for writing duty. The result is a sharp Gothic chiller with squirm-inducing set pieces. While on vacation, Scully happens upon murder and mayhem in (of course) Maine. While the local citizens are quick to blame Melissa, a single mom to a young girl named Polly, Scully hones in on the true source of evil: Polly’s doll, which can push victims to graphic acts of self-harm. Melissa’s eerie premonitions of death round out the incredible visuals of this episode, also notable for sending Scully on a solo adventure and nudging her yet another step closer toward acceptance of monsters and madness.

Season 6: “Drive” (Nov 15, 1998)

As production moved from Vancouver to sun-dappled Los Angeles in Season Six, the scripts themselves also veered toward sunnier stories, reflecting the writers’ continued hope to replicate the success of comedy installments like “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” or “Bad Blood.” Nevertheless, this season still offered more intense fare like “Drive,” a pulse-pounder about a Nevada man whose head will explode unless he drives westward – and fast. The episode owes much to the quick wit of Vince Gilligan, one of the show’s most seminal writers. Gilligan would go on to create Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston, whom he cast based on the strength of his guest turn in “Drive” as the afflicted man who takes Mulder hostage on his westward race against time. All the earmarks of Breaking Bad are here: can’t-look-away tension, character-driven thrills, and mordant humor belying a pervasive air of rage and doom.

Season 7: “Millennium” (Nov 28, 1999)

Season Seven also ran heavy on lighthearted oddities, but it did offer darker outings on occasion, especially when Carter leveraged The X-Files to tie up loose threads from his prematurely cancelled Millennium. Mulder and Scully call upon that show’s tortured hero, Frank Black (the wry and lugubrious Lance Henriksen), to help them thwart a small cult of FBI agents hellbent on bringing about the apocalypse by turning themselves into zombies. (Hey, it makes sense when you watch it – mostly!) The undead are depicted with moody flair, keeping goofiness to a minimum, and the satisfying climax offers us a glimpse of a monster-fighting trio that could have been. Meanwhile, for fans who are adamant anti-shippers of Mulder and Scully, this episode is the season’s scariest for an entirely different reason.

Season 8: “Roadrunners” (Nov 26, 2000)

With David Duchovny absent from half of Season Eight. Terminator 2’s Robert Patrick was introduced as Scully’s new partner, the stoic and steely-eyed John Doggett, and Scully became the unequivocal narrative center of The X-Files. The writers returned to the show’s darker roots as a way to level-set against the seismic changes. “Roadrunners” is the most stellar beneficiary of these shifts in cast and tone. Unable to fully warm to her new partner, Scully ventures alone into a secluded village to investigate the whereabouts of a missing tourist and realizes something is ever so off about the townspeople. The episode features the mounting social/psychological dread of The Wicker Man, coupled with the disgusting body horror of Alien, and Anderson discovers new shades of grief and resilience in Scully during this flawed yet compelling post-Mulder era.

Season 9: “Daemonicus” (Dec 2, 2001)

With Duchovny fully departed from the cast, the final season of the show’s original run saw Doggett paired with a new partner Monica Reyes (the effervescent Annabeth Gish), with Scully downgraded to a mere consultant for her X-Files comrades. Meanwhile, the writers continued to favor grislier stories such as “Daemonicus,” about a mental patient who may be wielding demonic forces against our trio of heroes. Director Frank Spotnitz goes heavy on the stylistic portents of doom to great effect, employing shots of roiling clouds and sound design laden with eerie whispers to conjure a world besieged by inescapable evil. Even the editing team gets in on the fun, offering up unusual scene transitions to underscore the episode’s mysterious boardgame motif. The episode’s true horror highlight: a projectile vomit scene that lasts for forty-some-odd seconds. Somewhere William Friedkin is saying, “That’ll do, effects team. That’ll do.”