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They also represent an unspoken and deep-seated depravity that country folks sometimes have to face in order to keep their homes safe.(It is a dark and stormy night. The Peacocks represent an unspoken type of love, that is for sure. “Wonderful, Wonderful” by Johnny Mathis never sounded so deranged. The episode ends with a song that we hear often throughout. And people like Sheriff Taylor are caught in the middle, trying to navigate their way through the safety of small town life and the moralities that modernity often represents. When you get past the incest (which I know some people can’t), ultimately there is a struggle between different people’s ideas of what home should be.
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And the city-dwellers are preventing them from reproducing in the way they want. The Peacocks see them only as outsiders, and they are the keepers of what is “safe” and wholesome. But no one thinks of themselves as savages. There is talk of “savages,” which to me immediately points to a city-dweller’s stereotypes of rural Americans. “You don’t have to lock your doors around here” is what you expect in a small town, but for people like them, the small town is exactly where you should worry about the deranged. Sheriff Taylor and others in his town have been unwilling to see the Peacocks, despite them being right there for hundreds of years.Īnd then you have Mulder and Scully.
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I’m reminded of Stephen King’s It, in which Pennywise is there in Derry, yet the entire town is in a haze, unwilling to acknowledge the evil that exists there. X-Files Episode “Home”, Season 4 Episode 2 The Peacocks are the untouched, offensive, immoral nastiness that still lingers in their otherwise safe home. Most small town people think they are the “moral” country, the safe space. The episode goes out of its way to bring up the fact that the Peacocks don’t represent most of them. Disregarded, but ultimately disgusting and there nonetheless. They are the world that has always been there. “I knew one day the modern world would find us.” Of course that is a contradiction. But he also knows underneath that safety, there is the same derangement that exists in all of mankind. In Sheriff Andy Taylor you have someone who is comforted in rural life. What I can appreciate about “Home” is that you have a representative of this small town, country life. That is, the implication that if you stray too far into backwoods country, you’ll find that the people there are uncivilized and dangerous. As much as many people may appreciate classics such as The Hills Have Eyes (I’m a giant Wes Craven fan) or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is hard to escape the problematic aspects of such stories. If written poorly or looked at from a cursory view, it can be demeaning to rural people. Mulder and Scully are the outsiders, coming in to see the small town life and what it entails. In terms of horror tropes, what is fascinating in the X-Files banned episode “Home” is that it is playing off the trope that is common in horror, and that is “Hillbilly horror”… the idea that if you find yourself taking a wrong turn, you might just find yourself dealing with country folk that aren’t so civilized. If it isn’t clear yet, the title of the episode is very intentional. To bury it.Īnd that was the introduction to the episode. And the disfigured family bringing the baby into the world carry it out into the rainy night. It is dark in more ways than one, but the events are clear enough. It’s quite bold to start the episode the way it does. It begins like many of the classic tales of yesteryear. But the episode is well grounded in a long tradition of what could be called Hillbilly Horror. The first scene really kicks it into gear and could be considered fairly graphic for broadcast television. It was the first episode of X-Files to have a viewer discretion warning and the only X-files episode to have a TV-MA rating when it was first broadcast in 1996. Season 4 Episode 2 of the long-running science fiction crime drama, the episode has become well-known for its controversy. And it’s a line from the famous X-Files banned episode “Home”. Someone from a city remarking on small town or country living. “You don’t have to lock your doors around here.” That’s a line I know I’ve heard a lot.