The X-Files is the show that literally taught childhood you that the dark was full of things with too many teeth, and you probably shouldn’t trust the people telling you it’s all in your head.
I use to watch it when I wasn’t supposed to In Italy in the late 90s, The X-Files lived in that forbidden “red” slot on TV, the colour that basically screamed “no kids allowed” even if every kid immediately took it as an invitation. I remember peeking in the dark living room at around ten years old, while my dad watched the episodes with volume turned down to almost nothing, trying to watch Mulder and Scully chase monsters without him noticing that I waws mainlining the stuff the broadcasters had politely tagged as off-limits.
At least once it did exactly what that red badge warned about: a single episode slipped through my brain’s defences and followed me into sleep, the imagery turning into those cheap, sweaty nightmares that feel more like glitches than dreams.
How it feels on rewatch Coming back to it now
The X-Files feels like a transmission from a world where paranoia is analogue: VHS grain, CRT glow, case files in metal cabinets instead of cloud drives. Those Vancouver years are still the definitive look in my head: endless wet forests, empty highways, flickering strip lights, and two flashlights cutting holes in the dark while something ugly breathes just outside the frame. The show’s mix of “monster-of-the-week” weirdness and slow-drip conspiracy is clumsier than you remembered, but that actually makes it more charming; it’s messy, earnest horror TV that believes in its own campfire stories
Rewatching it now also adds this extra layer of fun: horror tastes have shifted so much that some of the cheap shocks, rubbery aliens, and overcooked conspiracy twists that once felt dangerous now land as accidental comedy, a kind of endearing, dumb genius that makes the scares and the silliness play together in the same scene.
Overall what hits hardest on rewatch isn’t the aliens or the green goo; it’s the tension between Mulder’s haunted need to believe and Scully’s stubborn, exhausted scepticism.
As a kid, Mulder is the fantasy: the adult who says “you’re right, there really is something under the bed,” and then goes to fight it; as an adult, you end up feeling more like Scully, trying to autopsy every fear into something rational. Somewhere between those two positions is where the show lives, and maybe why it sticks: it gives shape to the idea that not knowing is scarier than any rubber-suit monster, but also suggests that having someone next to you with a flashlight makes that unknown survivable. Does it still work? The big mythology arc absolutely wobbles now: years of retcons and reversals mean the alien colonisation plot feels more like a migraine than a narrative. But the standalone horror episodes still have teeth; they’re tight, strange little urban legends that remember the basic rule that made ten-year-old you hide under the covers afterward: show just enough, then cut to black and let the brain do the rest.
Rewatching The X-Files in 2026 is a weird comfort: it’s a return to that “red stamp” ambient terror of childhood, but with the awareness that the thing you were scared of was never just the monster—it was the feeling that the adults didn’t have answers either.