Revelations About Early 'X-files'

With [X-Files: I Want to Believe] coming out in a few weeks, it made sense that 20th Century Fox would try to milk the nostalgia of fans like myself that need a way to get back into the show's groove. It's been almost a decade since the last new episode aired, so it stands to reason that a refresher course is sorely needed. While I was excited to check out [The X-Files: Revelations](http://www.amazon.com/X-Files-Revelations/dp/B00177YA0G), a collection of eight essential episodes selected series creator Christ Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz, I was also more than a little reluctant. Childhood biases rarely hold up as much as they should and for some reason the thought of watching David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson track down giant blood-sucking fluke worms and alien abductees was too painful to dwell on. All I could remember from the original series was a laundry list of bad things: a lot of convoluted plot twists from the later seasons, [Robert Patrick](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001598/), and [a particular episode](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751165/), about a tattoo of a Hawaiian girl that compelled its wearer to kill every woman he came into contact with (the tattoo was jealous, you see).

Still, I couldn't help but fixate on the prospect of rekindling some childhood nostalgia. It sounds strange, but I firmly believe that The X-Files is a great kid's show. It touches upon the superstitions and fears that both attract and repulse children in equal measure. The prospect that the boogeyman not only exists but also comes in several different forms (aliens, vampires and ghosts: oh my!) is exactly what children should be exposed to. It's strange and it's disturbing but I guarantee it's more stimulating for kids than whatever crap they watch today.

Naturally I'm biased: Who doesn't think that the books, movies, music and TV shows of their youth were 10 times better than whatever drivel is churned out for today's children-but there's no denying that The X-Files is a great quasi-mature fairy tale. The urban legends they mythologize are the kind that adults love to scoff at but secretly find fascinating. No matter how silly grainy photographs, graphic eyewitness accounts and fuzzy video footage of the paranormal appear, they appeal to a part of us that wants to believe in them.

"Bad Blood," the best of the eight episodes collected in Revelations, perfectly encapsulates that feeling of disbelieving cynicism with genuine fascination for the many and varied forms of the vampire myth. I couldn't wait until the end of the episode to troll wikipedia about the [Jiang Shi], the hopping Chinese vampire and other cultural approximations, like the intestines-wearing [Brahmar_k_hasa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_folklore_by_region#India), from Northern India or the voodoo-inspired [Loogaroo ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loogaroo), (figures that the best ghosts haunt New Orleans).

What makes ["Bad Blood" ] work so well is that screenwriter Vince Gilligan fixates on the obscure details that make vampires captivating. Nothing is more effective in a good X-Files episode than these little idiosyncratic minutiae. Even in the most dull episodes collected in Revelations there are some great little images, like the eerily silent ghost of Scully's father in ["Beyond the Sea"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Sea_%28The_X-Files%29) or a psychic insurance salesman's (a wonderfully hangdog Peter Boyle) recurring dream in ["Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Bruckman%27s_Final_Repose)

Those details are also what make fables so memorable. Whether it's how the Japanese [kappa ], commonly, "feed on...victims by sucking out the shirikodama (or entrails, blood, liver, or "life force", depending on the legend) through the anus," or the vampire's aversion to sunlight and garlic, there's a wealth of weird culture-specific trivia. If the show ever mistreated its myths, it's because it neglected these wonderful factoids.

I have faith that even if the movie can't muster up a memorable story-does anyone actually remember anything about [X-Files: Fight the Future ] except the weird techno-greenhouse full of bees and that giant submarine-it will have a few good ideas and that's more than enough to make it bearable. Oh and [ Billy Connolly](http://www.billyconnolly.com/main.html); he's the one good thing in The Boondock Saints (see 0:26-0:27, 1:43-1:45 and 2:03-:205 seconds in [this trailer](http://youtube.com/watch?v=rcsZU9vmTz4) for irrefutable proof).