The X-Files was creepy, until the Internet made horror the norm
Isolation, loneliness, and some scary subreddits
By Asher Kohn
The X-Files was old-fashioned back when it debuted in 1993. The conspiracy agenda was straight out of Cold War kitsch and the theme song was inspired by The Smiths. It shouldn’t have worked as a network TV show, but it did — for nine seasons. It worked in part because the viewer was at home and the truth was out there. It was up to The X-Files to mediate between them.
The show was fueled by a feeling of isolation for almost a decade as its lead duo, Mulder and Scully, traveled to small towns solving mysteries and piecing together a nationwide conspiracy. The Internet ruined this premise. Between Facebook and Twitter and the r/creepy subreddit, there are thousands of unexplained mysteries to explore.
The X-Files returns to TV on Sunday. However, the show may have time-traveled into 2016 without grasping the fact that the Internet has made it obsolete.
Mulder and Scully’s America was Lovecraftian. They were catnip to a country where people got their news from a local paper and the 6 o’clock news. The X-Files gave its audience a way to connect their personal experiences in Sioux Falls or Mundelein to something bigger. The show was something to discuss at the water cooler or while leaning against a school locker. It was a center of gravity to, at the show’s peak, about 16 million lost souls a week.
And then, the Internet. In Brian Phillips’ elegy on The X-Files, he discussed how connectivity destroyed the show’s central premise:
“It made every place accessible to every other place. We could no longer assume that the peculiarities of our own environments were private. Our hometown murders might appear on CNN.com.”
What America learned was that monsters weren’t necessary for grotesque entertainment. Its small towns weren’t special cases. Real humans do awful things every day. In 2014, two sixth-grade girls in Wisconsin convinced themselves that a mythic stalker named Slender Man told them to stab a friend 19 times. The story made its way to seemingly every Facebook feed in the country. To approach the case as Mulder would have, to wonder if Slender Man was real, looked pathetic when the violence was real.
Two white detectives travelling the country as they try and lift the veil of ignorance from American eyes now seems … quaint. The isolation that The X-Files preyed upon is gone. The monsters that preyed upon the show’s victims are irrelevant. Folks who called themselves X-philes now call themselves woke. The truth that was out there isn’t obscured by horror, but surrounded by it.
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