The X-Files Special Effect Everyone Couldn’t Stop Laughing At
Compared to other genre shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, fans don’t usually think of The X-Files as having many special effects. However, the show often used effects to bring various creepy aliens and monsters of the week to life, and those effects were usually top-notch. The X-Files episode “Fallen Angel” had a great special effect involving an invisible monster, but the goofy way this effect was created had everyone on the crew who saw it dying of laughter.
An Invisible Monster In “Fallen Angel”
First, we need to briefly recap the X-Files episode in question and how this special effect was used. “Fallen Angel” has Mulder trying to investigate a UFO crash, but he is initially foiled by the military personnel who are charged with securing the area. He finds an unexpected ally in the form of alien abduction survivor and conspiracy theorist Max Fenig, but that may not be enough to stop the show’s deadliest threat yet: a deadly alien whose invisible nature makes him nearly impossible to stop.
As you may have suspected, the invisible alien in this X-Files episode is the focus of the special effect we are discussing. Onscreen, the effect looked great, and all of the effects throughout the episode look impressively polished. They look especially good compared to the previous episode “Space,” where the closest thing to a decent effect was all the recycled NASA footage.
Enter: The Orange Blob
Why, then, did all of the X-Files crew laugh at the invisible alien special effect while working on this episode? To achieve the effect, the show had an actor in a big orange suit doing things like walking through the woods, and they removed him in post-processing to make the alien look suitably invisible. But those who saw the raw footage saw an armless orange blob traipsing through these scenes, which looks impossibly goofy…a bit like an Among Us cosplayer missing both arms and a face.
Raw Footage Translated Well On-Screen
Longtime X-Files producer Paul Rabwin is the first to tell everyone how silly the raw footage of this special effect looked for anyone who got a good look at it. On the season 1 DVD special feature “The Truth About Season One,” he declared it “one of the funniest sequences that we had to work on.” Clearly amused himself, he recounted that “I could hear laughter coming from different screening rooms, all across the lot.”
The Funniest Behind-The-Scenes Moment
If this X-Files producer heard laughter about this special effect from everywhere in the lot, he very likely heard production staffer and veteran show director R.W. Goodwin. In the book X-Files Confidential, Goodwin confessed that the effect was “the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.” Considering that he directed episodes of the show for half a decade and saw plenty of crazy things during production, it’s notable that he considers this walking orange glob to be the craziest thing he personally witnessed.
Truth Is Sillier Than Fiction
Having only recently seen the raw footage of this X-Files special effect, we can’t help but agree that it’s impossible to take the sight of the orange monster very seriously. However, it’s to this show’s credit that it can take something so inherently funny in real life and turn it into something so creepy onscreen. Mulder might remind us that “the truth is out there,” but this is one case where the truth was far stranger–and far sillier–than fiction.
