Expert guide to the X-Files

A grim search effort extending across an ice lake, missing girls and a hunter lurking out in the dark, even Glasgow's own Billy Connolly as a priest seeing visions that make his eyes bleed... From the trailer alone, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, out in the UK on 1 August, looks like one of the top movies of the summer. But what the heck is an X-File anyway? The truth is in here...

The film is a sequel to 1990s TV show the X-Files, which took its title from alleged Federal Bureau of Investigations case files dealing with unexplained or paranormal events, supposedly stored in the Washington DC FBI headquarters basement.

According to the show (though not the real-life FBI, which denies all knowledge of such matters) the very first X-File was opened by legendary Agency Director J. Edgar Hoover back in the 1940s, and concerned possible encounters by a werewolf.

In 1992 brilliant serial killer expert FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) seemingly commits career suicide by requesting to take over the long-neglected X-Files section. But Mulder has a hidden agenda: his younger sister was abducted back when he was a child, and he thinks aliens were responsible. Mulder believe that investigating both past and present X-Files represent his best hope of finding her again.

To keep tabs on his seemingly erratic behaviour, Mulder’s bosses assign Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a deeply sceptical medical doctor, to partner him on the X-Files cases. Their first investigation draws them to the woods of Oregon, where four teenagers have gone missing at the same time as UFOs were sighted…

So began the pilot episode back in 1993. The X-Files creator Chris Carter was a former surfer who had previously worked on sitcoms, but wanted to make something scary instead. Carter hoped the show might be a cult hit – but over the course of its first few seasons it became one of the most watched and influential shows on television, both in the US and UK.

The X-Files ended up running for nine years, stacking up a total of 201 episodes – if you wanted to watch them all non-stop without sleep it would take you just under a week (though don’t worry, the film makers claim you don’t have to have seen them to understand the new movie…).

The show won an Emmy (the Oscar of the US television world) plus several Golden Globes. Not only that, while still running on TV it spawned a movie (The X-Files: Fight The Future, released in 1998) and a spin-off television show  - The Lone Gunmen about a bunch of conspiracy freaks  (this show entering conspiracy lore in its own right when one episode featured a plot to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre,  shown in early 2001) - plus served as inspiration for hit records (Catatonia’s single ‘Mulder and Scully’ reached number three in the charts in 1998) and even ad campaigns (Duchovny and Anderson reprised their roles to advertise mobile phones).

Why was the X-Files so successful? First of all it was very well made, and true to its creator’s vision, it was indeed very scary. One stand-out early episode called ‘Squeeze’ featured a man who could constrict himself through openings as small as a letter box, which he did in order to get his hands (and teeth) around fresh human livers. Many episodes were inspired by supposed real-life paranormal phenomena as well as scientific research, so Mulder and Scully came up against everything from vampires and the Jersey Devil to a homicidal AI (Artificial Intelligence) and man-eating shadows.

Then there were the aliens. Unlike other shows before it, the X-Files had an ongoing storyline – later dubbed ‘the mythology’ – concerning Mulder’s attempts to find out more about extraterrestrials, and why shadowy elements in the US government were attempting to cover them up.

This subject chimed with popular interest of the time. There was an upswing of interest in UFOs, and especially those people who had claimed to be abducted by them, back in the early 1990s.

In the previous decade horror author Whitley Strieber wrote a real-life account of being abducted by aliens called Communion, later turned into a film. Communion was highly influential on popular culture, not least because it originated the idea of the small big-eyed alien called ‘the Grey’, which would become one of the defining images of the 1990s, seen on bumper stickers, T-shirts, new-fangled websites and quite often on the X-Files itself.

The sort of paranoid governmental secrecy that Mulder and Scully came up against in the show was also on display in real life. There was a huge buzz of publicity about Area 51, the mystery airbase in the Nevada desert that the US government would not even admit existed. Public fascination was increased by rumours that alien spacecraft were stored at the high-security site.

The idea of the government hiding the truth about aliens also seemed reasonable to some as more facts came out about the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, where reports at the time claimed a mystery ‘flying disc’ had crashed. Now, half a century later witnesses arose to say they had seen alien bodies salvaged from the wreckage of a flying saucer.

The US Air Force countered that the wreckage had been a classified weather balloon sent aloft to detect Russian atomic explosions, and any sighting of bodies were probably mannequins used for drop tests at the time. But with Mulder intoning ‘Trust no-one’ on the television every week, such basically reasonable explanations fell on deaf ears.

Then in 1995 came apparently compelling evidence that the government were indeed lying. Antique footage of an alien autopsy was released, supposedly part of the investigations into the Roswell Incident. The lines between reality and fiction were getting blurred – and sure enough, a video of an alien autopsy featured in an episode of the X-Files soon after.

It was only in the following decade that the full truth about the footage came out – it was indeed a modern special effects-based fake. Bizarrely enough, Ant and Dec ended up staring in the film version of how it was done (in a movie called Alien Autopsy, released in 2006).

The X-Files became expert at feeding such real-life incidents back into their show mythology. In 1996 planetary scientists claimed they had found microscopic fossils of alien life forms in a Mars meteorite (the claim remains unproven, and controversial to this day). A similar item soon starred in its own X-Files two parter. Except of course their version of the meteorite oozed toxic black oil that could take over your body…

But such flexible plotting had a downside. By the time the movie came out, the complex mythology episodes of the show were getting difficult to follow, and viewers began to entertain the theory that Carter and his fellow writers were making it up as they went along. And Scully’s continued scepticism about alien involvement seemed unlikely after all she had seen. At the conclusion of the first movie she even witnesses a giant mile-wide flying saucer taking off from beneath Antarctic ice.

The better episodes were the stand-alone stories where Mulder and Scully encountered non-alien related mysteries – often frightening, sometimes funny, almost always watchable.

By 2000 Duchovny had tired of Mulder’s investigations and quit the programme. True to form, the producers had Mulder abducted by aliens to keep the possibility of the character returning. The X-Files was too popular to be cancelled: two new FBI agents were introduced, with Scully staying on as their advisor, and Mulder returned in the occasional cameo.

The very last episode aired in 2002, its peak popularity long since ebbed away. Topical to the last, Mulder returned as a captive in the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, but escaped to go on the run from the government by the episode’s end.

The original plan was to make a new movie immediately afterwards, but public interest was no longer there and Duchovny and Carter became embroiled in a lawsuit over a profit-sharing deal.

So it’s taken six years in total to get the second movie in motion. As the director, Carter will be hoping that the new generation will find themselves won over by the X-Files. Carter seems to have learnt the lesson of alien over-exposure. Although the title ‘I Want to Believe’ comes from a UFO poster that Mulder used to have pinned up in his office, the new movie’s story will be a stand-alone tale without ET involvement (at least that’s the story so far…).

And the confusing business of the final episode will hopefully be explained away – from what we know of the movie so far, Mulder is back working for the FBI again, and so is Scully. Although judging by the size of their mobile phones at least, it is not a period piece set in the 1990s.

If you enjoy Flipside’s paranormal investigations you could do a lot worse than giving the X-Files’ TV incarnation a try. Its production values, strong writing and ongoing storylines went on to influence the next generation of TV, including such programmes as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost and the reincarnated Doctor Who. Check it out and remember, the Truth is Out There…