FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated some pretty strange stuff on
The X-Files — but on top of all the weirdness on-screen, plenty of bizarre stuff happened
on the set, too.
Trust us on this one: The truth is way out there.
Animal wrangling is a dangerous business on the best of days - and for a show like The
X-Files, it could be particularly harrowing.
For example, the episode "Signs and Wonders" features Mulder and Scully encountering an
Appalachian snake-handling church.
Director Kim Manners insisted on using real rattlesnakes for the episode, according to
the X-Files Episode Guide.
In fact, thirty actual snakes were used in "Signs and Wonders."
While filming, a professional snake wrangler was standing by the whole time — along with
medical services, just in case.
And here's a buzzworthy news nugget for you.
In a scene from The X-Files: Fight the Future film, a bee wanders out from under Scully's
collar and along her shoulder.
This was achieved in a totally bizarre way.
First, a bee wrangler handpicked bees that tended to walk more than fly.
Then, the bee wrangler used a pheromone trail and a small fan to direct the bee where to
go.
The bee successfully pulled off its big scene 12 times.
Great work, bee!
Fans of The X-Files are certainly a passionate bunch — but one teenager really took the
obsessiveness to the next level.
As Den of Geek reports, this fan learned that The X-Files: Fight the Future film was shooting
near Bakersfield, California.
It turned out they were filming the infamous bee colony scene, which features Mulder and
Scully running from thousands of swarming bees.
"Give me your hand."
Well, this particular fan was willing to crawl a mile through a cornfield — yes, the same
cornfield that's featured in the film.
This X-Files fanatic even managed to sneak onto the set and record the production with
a video camera.
The crew had no idea this was even happening … until the footage wound up on the local
news the next day.
The fourth season episode "Home" is some extremely disturbing stuff.
Mulder and Scully are called to a small town where a baby with multiple birth defects has
died.
There, they meet the Peacock family; three reclusive brothers who also suffer from physical
deformities.
No spoilers here, but it's a bleak, horrifying episode.
"This room alone should convict them."
In fact, the show's producers initially rejected the episode, but they relented after several
cast and crew members argued in the script's favor.
According to NME, one crew member remarked during filming,
"[This is] awful, even for us."
According to The New York Times, producers wanted the episode to include a song recorded
by Johnny Mathis, but he refused because the script was too gruesome.
Discussing the episode's opening scene — which involves a baby being buried alive — director
Kim Manners said:
"[That was] the most awful shot of my career."
"Home" was the first American television episode to ever receive a TV-MA rating.
And after its initial broadcast in October 1996, Fox only aired "Home" one more time
— as a Halloween special in 1999.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were both vegetarians while filming The X-Files, and
the show often put them in rather difficult situations.
For example, a large chunk of the episode "Red Museum" finds Mulder and Scully prowling
around a slaughterhouse, with lots of hanging meat and blood everywhere.
In that same episode, they had to film a scene in which they chow down on ribs.
No word on whether those ribs were real or not, but we imagine that must have been a
touch awkward.
Also awkward: A bizarre scene in the Season Two episode "Humbug" features Scully seemingly
devouring a live cricket.
Yum!
"Thank you."
But it was all just a bit of sleight-of-hand... a delicious game for Scully.
Nevertheless, Anderson claimed she had actually eaten the cricket, telling People in 1995:
"They spent thousands of dollars making a fake [cricket], but I’d seen this guy named
Enigma who was in the show eat 200 right in front of us, so it seemed silly not to try
one."
But here's another shocking development from CricketGate: In a 2013 Reddit AMA, Anderson
later admitted that she didn't actually eat the cricket, writing that:
"It was a magic trick called spitting when cut."
Okay, now we don't know what to believe.
Which is so X-Files.
The Cigarette Smoking Man became Mulder and Scully's main foe, but that wasn't always
the case.
William B. Davis was cast as an extra in the show's pilot, but he was so capably sinister,
producers brought him back for more episodes.
As he explained to CBC in 1999,
"Gradually they gave me a little more to do, and I thought, 'Well, this is really interesting,'
and then slowly it built up and the fans kind of got interested in the character.”
Well, they don't call him the Cigarette Smoking Man because he likes to lick lollipops.
The character smokes like a freight train, and he's almost never seen without a lit cigarette
in his hand, or in his mouth.
There was just one problem though: According to the Palm Beach Post, Davis is an ex-smoker.
"Apart from my own terror about it because I was a heavy smoker, my brother, my older
brother, died of lung cancer when he was 50."
Davis was actually smoking real cigarettes in his earliest appearances on The X-Files.
Obviously, that wasn't ideal for the actor… but it was part of the job.
Davis later admitted that it nearly caused him to start smoking again.
When the crew found out that he'd previously quit smoking, they let him smoke herbal cigarettes
instead.
Those were much easier to resist, because they reportedly tasted awful.
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