8 Best The X-Files Monster Of The Week Episodes

Season 5’s “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is the only episode of the show to make the bold choice of a black-and-white format. A clever and funny play on 1931’s Frankenstein, this The X-Files story introduces us to a sympathetic monster (Chris Owens) obsessed with Cher and a town full of mysteriously impregnated women. It has one of the most perfect endings of any episode in the series, with Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) dancing to Cher’s rendition of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis.”

Season 7 brought with it the mash-up episode no one saw coming: The X-Files and Cops. “X-Cops” finds Mulder and Scully investigating what the former believes is a werewolf loose in Los Angeles the same night Cops is filming in the city, and the FBI agents become part of the reality show. The X-Files heroes eventually learn the monster is something much more terrifying than a shapeshifting man-wolf.

This episode of The X-Files belongs on this list sole for, if for no other reason, the fact the monster is played by Bruce Campbell (Army of Darkness). You find out in the very first scene that a demon is killing babies in a small community. While Campbell’s character is involved and Mulder suspects him early on, as usual, things aren’t as simple as the obsessed special agent believes.

No, this The X-Files episode’s monster has nothing to do with the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux. Mulder is investigating a series of what appear to be paranoid threats when telemarketer Gary (Brian Markinson) takes his co-workers hostage at gunpoint. Gary rants that his boss Mr. Pincus (John Apicella) is a monster who is killing off his fellow workers and turning them into zombies.

The telemarketer is so crazed that not even Mulder believes him, but things get a lot more complicated when the FBI agent starts seeing what Gary sees.

In The X-Files monster of the week episode “Detour,” Mulder very literally goes looking for trouble. Purely in the hopes of avoiding a team building conference, Mulder inserts himself into a local investigation about a missing hunter. He’s just as shocked as everyone else when he finds himself looking into a bonafide X-File involving perpetrators inexplicably able to camouflage themselves.

Mulder and Scully are joined by a team that, one by one, falls victim to the same monsters responsible for the missing hunter. The team includes Anthony Rapp, the future star of Star Trek: Discovery.

The X-Files‘ very first monster of the week episode introduced who would prove to be one of the only recurring villains in the series who had nothing to do with aliens. The yellow-eyed and centuries-old Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchinson) is introduced in “Squeeze,” the third episode of The X-Files. Able to contort his body in impossibly thin shapes, Tooms is able to get places no one else can get, and murder his victims while leaving the police baffled.

The eponymous villain returns before the end of Season 1 in “Tooms.”

“Home” survives as the most infamous episode of The X-Files, with some of the most disturbing violence, and monsters reminiscent of 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The episode has Mulder and Scully investigating a family known in their rural community for decades of in-breeding, and that long history of incest has produced three young, brutal men who are essentially super strong cavemen who are near impossible to kill.

“Home” is so disturbing and violent that it proved to be the only episode of The X-Files to receive a TV-MA rating.

With “Bad Blood,” The X-Files not only gave viewers a great monster of the week episode, but one of the funniest stories in the series. The episode opens with Mulder putting a stake through the heart of Ronnie Strickland (Patrick Renna of The Sandlot fame), who he believes to be a vampire. That scene ends with the darkly hilarious reveal, that Ronnie was in fact wearing fake, plastic vampire teeth.

Most of the rest of the episode reveals the events leading up to Ronnie’s death, from both Mulder’s and Scully’s perspectives. The intriguing points of view let us see the cartoonish ways the two agents see each other. Scully sees Mulder as inconsiderate and completely unappreciative of her efforts, while Mulder sees his partner as completely dismissive of his theories and apathetic toward their work.