Over 11 seasons, the way The X-Files managed to stay fresh was by telling a wide variety of television stories. The show might be about aliens for one week and then follow that up with an urban legend before pivoting to a story about the occult. The show also managed to switch up its genre of stories. While sci-fi was especially prominent, The X-Files managed the occasional comedic episode and sometimes explored outright horror. It was during one of those horror episodes in season 4 that The X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, along with director Kim Manners, crafted the show’s scariest, most disturbing episode (and one of the most unsettling hours of broadcast television ever).
Created by Chris Carter, The X-Files was a 1990s series about two FBI agents named Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who investigate cases involving paranormal phenomena. In the season 4 episode “Home,” they are called to the small town of Home, Pennsylvania, after some kids playing baseball discover the body of a newborn buried in a field. The body is so riddled with birth defects that it defies logic, so the case gets referred to the FBI’s X-Files division.
At the crime scene, Mulder asks the local sheriff (Tucker Smallwood) about a nearby house whose residents have been watching the agents investigate the burial site. The sheriff explains that the home, which has no running water or electricity, belongs to the Peacock boys, three men who are the product of inbreeding that dates back generations. They had resided there with their parents, but after a car crash a decade ago, the parents are assumed to be dead, though the sheriff says they can’t be sure since the Peacock boys hauled the bodies of their parents back home.
Throughout the course of the investigation, the evidence suggests that one of the Peacock boys must have fathered the child and that they must be holding a woman captive in their house. After Mulder and Scully infiltrate their home, the Peacocks retaliate in violent ways.
Why “Home” is so scary
“Home” is notable for being one of the more grounded episodes of The X-Files, with no paranormal elements at all. It’s also an especially gory, gruesome episode, not only because of the heavy subject matter of a dead newborn, but because of the disturbing appearances of the inbred Peacock boys and the violent ways in which they retaliate for encroachment onto their property. It was the only X-Files episode to receive a TV-MA rating and was only rerun once on Fox, though it would later be rerun regularly in syndication. In the years since it aired, “Home” has become widely considered one of the greatest episodes of the entire series. It can be found in nearly every top 10 list of the show, particularly of the “Monster of the Week” episodes, which refers to the standalone episodes of The X-Files not pertaining to the show’s central mythology about aliens and the government conspiracy surrounding them.
What makes “Home” so scary is, in part, how real it is. Without an alien, a mythical monster, or a super-powered human at the center of the case, “Home” feels much more like a real FBI investigation rather than an X-File. The makeup effects for the Peacock family look especially realistic, making the characters hard to look at. The gore in “Home” also pushed the limits of what was allowed on TV at the time. The horror trope of disturbing, sometimes inbred locals has been effectively scary in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and Manners’ direction on “Home” is similarly claustrophobic, emulating the best of that genre with some original twists of its own.
That’s what makes “Home” the single scariest episode of The X-Files. While Mulder and Scully would investigate a wide array of spooky subject matter over the course of the series — from ghosts to werewolves to vampires — The X-Files was never as scary as the time the agents squared off with a group of murderous inbreds.
The X-Files is available to stream on Hulu, Disney Plus, and Pluto TV.