Why Home remains the scariest episode of The X-Files

Over its initial nine-season run and then its two-season revival, The X-Files had several downright scary monster-of-the week episodes. Squeeze, Pusher, and Irresistible still hold up well in terms of frights. However, none quite had the chills of Season 4’s Home, an episode so disturbing that it was banned from network TV for a few years after it initially aired on October 11, 1996. As The X-Files celebrates the 30-year anniversary of its debut this month, now is a great time to revisit its most spine-tingling episode.

Home tackles very, very taboo subjects, specifically infanticide and incest. From the opening sequence, its images are grisly and harrowing. But that’s not the only reason Home remains the long-running series’ most blood-curdling episode. It holds up so well and remains a classic because it’s pure Gothic American horror, a story about a small town trying to ignore the monstrosity that lurks within.

Home has several traits of Gothic literature and film, including a romanticization of the past and a grotesque resurfacing of sins that won’t stay buried. Like a Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner story, the episode’s characters, including Mulder (David Duchovny), fixate on some idealized version of America long gone. After the terrifying opening, which we’ll get to in a second, we find the FBI agents in the tiny town of Home, Pennsylvania, where they investigate an infant found buried near a sandlot.

When the agents arrive on the scene, Mulder picks up a baseball, recalling his childhood with his younger sister Samantha. “Brings me back to pick-up games with my sister,” Mulder says. “The only place you had to be on time was home for dinner. Never had to lock your doors, no modems, no faxes, no cell phones,” he tells Scully (Gillian Anderson). She scoffs at Mulder’s daydreaming about his bygone childhood in sleepy town America, quipping, “Mulder, if you had to do without a cell phone for two minutes, you’d lapse into catatonic schizophrenia.”

Scully, ever the show’s skeptic, bursts Mulder’s romanticism. That said, he insists that if his work didn’t demand he live in a big city, he’d settle down in a place like Home. This theme is played up even more when the agents meet Sheriff Andy Taylor (Tucker Smallwood), who tells them no one in Home locks their doors, and he doesn’t even carry a gun. However, the monsters literally live feet from the sandlot where the three converse about some perfect version of American life. In the background is a depilated farmhouse with a white Cadillac that belongs to the incestuous Peacock family. They are the inversion and a perversion of the nuclear American family.

This very idea of “home” contrasts with the monstrosity that lurks within the town’s borders. The episode opens with booming thunder, pounding rain, and Mama Peacock (Karin Konoval) screaming out, giving birth. Her three deformed sons then bury the baby, which is what brings the agents to Home in the first place. The Peacocks, even in daylight, linger in the background, be it shots of their house within the frame, or the characters themselves, who, once their horrid secret is revealed, go on a killing spree to keep the family line going.

What Home proves is that no matter how hard the sheriff and others try to ignore what’s right in front of them, it’ll resurface, and likewise, the Peacocks’ hideous secret can’t stay hidden. The dead baby is discovered from the episode’s outset, and Mulder and Scully eventually find Mrs. Peacock under the bed, without hands or feet.

Yes, many of Home’s images and subject matter still shock, but the episode stands the test of time because like the fiction of Poe, O’Connor, Hawthorne and Faulkner, or even in its resemblance to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s simply a classic American Gothic story. There’s an unsettling farmhouse with a truly frightening family and a minuscule town that can no longer ignore the horrors within.

Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the episode ends without the monster’s demise. In the conclusion of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece, Leatherface dances wildly under the blazing Southwestern sun, twirling his chainsaw, while final girl Sally (Marilyn Burns) laughs hysterically on the back of a pick-up truck. She escapes, but barely, and you know she’ll carry trauma with her. In comparison, at the conclusion of Home, Mama Peacock and one of her sons escape. You hear her voice in the trunk of that white Cadillac, telling him they’ll start again in a different town. The monster lives to haunt our nightmares, and thus, Home is The X-Files’ most bone-chilling episode all these years later.

Every season of The X-Files is currently streaming on Hulu.