‘The X-Files’ Was Inspired by a Vampire Hunter, and It’s Got the 411 on OCD Vamps
When The X-Files made its series premiere on this date in 1993, few at-home viewers who were not of the ‘70s generation probably would’ve guessed that the show was influenced by the exploits of a Vegas vampire hunter named Kolchak. In a 1997 print interview with Rolling Stone magazine, X-Files creator Chris Carter stated outright:
“The show that inspired The X-Files was called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He was a reporter who investigated a monster of the week.”
It wasn’t until season 5 of The X-Files that the series successfully let its vampire flag fly with a great monster-of-the-week episode entitled “Bad Blood,” featuring Luke Wilson as an intermittently buck-toothed small-town sheriff.
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This was followed shortly by another interesting one-off episode called “Travelers,” which delved into the origin of the X-Files and enlisted Darren McGavin, the actor who played Kolchak in The Night Stalker TV movie and series, as a guest star.
It's FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) who first seeks out McGavin’s character, Arthur Dales, the father of the X-Files. Dales returned in the season 6 episode, “Agua Mala,” where he finally got to meet Mulder’s partner, my girl, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), in the middle of a hurricane in Florida.
By the end of the episode, even McGavin/Dales/Kolchak would be forced to concede that his own canceled show might have lasted longer if he had a partner like Scully, someone to counter the wide-eyed believer’s perspective with that of a level-headed skeptic.
Watch for falling spoilers ahead…
From Night Stalker to “Pilot”
McGavin’s first appearance as Arthur Dales in “Travelers” is set in 1990, three years before “Pilot,” the series premiere of The X-Files, where Scully meets “Spooky Mulder” for the first time in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The story of “Pilot” purports to be “inspired by actual documented accounts,” but Mulder warns, “In most of my work, the laws of physics rarely apply.”
Not for nothing, but this first episode — the entire X-Files series — opens with a scene where a woman is left dead in the woods of Oregon with two red marks on her back.
“Can you ID these marks?” Mulder asks.
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“Needle punctures, maybe,” Scully says. “An animal bite? Electrocution of some kind?”
Mulder’s theory, characteristically drawn from the realm of the fantastic, is that the marks might have something to do with extraterrestrials. To me, they look plainly derivative of vampire bite marks, as if The X-Files wanted to begin with a visual homage to The Night Stalker, which first aired as the ABC Movie of the Week in 1972 and soon became the highest-rated TV movie in history (pre-Roots).
Sure enough, as Mulder clicks through projector slides in the basement, we see that more bodies with similar marks have been found in South Dakota and Texas, just like in The Night Stalker when they start popping up all over town in Las Vegas.
Chupacabras and “Bad Blood” Science
“Bad Blood” wasn’t the first attempt at a vampire episode of The X-Files, but it’s the most sure-footed, with the poorly reviewed season 2 episode, “3,” being another one that highlights the importance of Scully—through her absence. The season 4 episode, “El Mundo Gira,” again flirted with the concept of vampires through an unexplained death, superstitious talk from migrant workers, and explanations like this:
"It's a Mexican folktale. El chupacabra, the goatsucker. It’s a small, gray creature with a big head and a small body and big, black bulging eyes."
Yet the episode quickly dismissed the goatsucker idea and went in a different direction. Which leaves us with “Bad Blood” as the first and only X-Files episode to really get vampires right, and in a funny way.
The episode opens with Mulder driving a stake through the heart of pizza delivery driver Ronnie Strickland (Patrick Renna), only to realize that his fangs are fake. Oops.
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“Bad Blood” then features a heavy dose of the Rashomon effect, whereby memories differ as characters give conflicting accounts of what exactly happened before this.
Scully, a medical doctor, offers credible, science-based explanations for the “series of nocturnal exsanguinations” that have left several cows and one man dead in the big little town of Chaney, Texas. She talks about “a psychological fixation called haematodipsia, which causes the sufferer to gain erotic satisfaction from consuming human blood.” Then, she mentions “genetic afflictions, which cause a heightened sensitivity to light, to garlic.”
“Porphyria,” she says. “Xeroderma pigmentosum …”
Mulder counters all of this with his own right-brained explanations based on folklore.
Mulder’s Accumulated Wisdom on the Vampires of the World
If you’ll permit me to quote at length from Fox Mulder:
“Vampires have always been with us, from ancient myths and stories passed down from early man. From the Babylonian Ekimmu, to the Chinese Jiāngshī, the Motetz Dam of the Hebrews, the Mormo of ancient Greece and Rome, right down to the more familiar Nosferatu of Transylvania.
“There are as many different kinds of vampires as there are cultures that fear them. Some don’t even subsist on blood. The Bulgarian Ubour eats only manure. To the Serbs, a prime indicator of vampirism was red hair.”
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Ronnie Strickland, it should be noted, sports a curly red head of hair. He also shares the arithmomania, or compulsion to count, of Sesame Street character Count von Count. And he’s further likened outside the vampire genre to Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant in Rain Man. This positions him as a victim of othering, the very real social phenomenon that, back in the old country, might leave anyone who was different hated, feared, and ostracized as the village vampire.
Yet within the text, Mulder has good reason to fear Ronnie. His suspicions aren’t unfounded but rather grounded in empirical proof. Sure, Mulder is a bad tipper. He gives the guy his legitimate two cents, then puts fifty in the massage bed for himself. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
Witness how Ronnie’s shadow reappears at the motel window, and he moves back into the room, his eyes glowing green, as the drugged pizza he gave Mulder takes effect.
Mulder’s Sunflower Seeds vs. Ronnie Strickland’s Arithmomania
What we have here with Ronnie, Mulder tells us, is clearly “a guy who’s watched too many vampire movies but happens to be a real vampire.” Ronnie doesn’t have the teeth, but he has the tongue to feel for when his fake fangs are missing.
Fortunately, Mulder comes armed with plenty of knowledge about how the brain of a bloodsucker like Ronnie works. He shares some of this knowledge with Luke Wilson’s Sheriff Lucius Hartwell, saying:
“Oddly enough, there seems to be one obscure fact, which, in all the stories told by the different cultures, is exactly the same. And that’s that vampires are really, really obsessive-compulsive. Yeah, you toss a handful of seeds at one, no matter what he’s doing, he’s got to stop and pick it up. If he sees a knotted rope, he’s got to untie it. It’s in his nature. In fact, that’s why I’m guessing that our victim’s shoelaces were untied.”
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As he slips into unconsciousness in his motel room, Mulder employs the desperate tactic of scattering sunflower seeds on the floor, thereby distracting Ronnie, whose OCD does manifest as genuine arithmomania, compelling him to count every last seed.
And it works! Score one for vampire hunter ingenuity.
While we’re on the subject of sunflower seeds, if an alleged “person” refuses the offer of a seed, that’s a major red flag. Vampire alert!
Luke Wilson Has Green Vampire Eyes
“We pay taxes,” insists Sheriff Hartwell. “We’re good neighbors.” As a Texas vampire, he believes in keeping a low profile, whereas Ronnie is more inclined to go for the jugular. Mulder tries to sit on top of Ronnie’s coffin while reading him his Miranda rights, and the kid puts up such a fierce struggle that Mulder has to handcuff the coffin closed.
Though I wasn’t technically alive when it first aired (and am not now, nor have I ever been, undead), I’d say “Bad Blood” remains a standout X-Files episode overall, with the only low point being a forced joke where Mulder — upon regaining consciousness in his motel room — breaks out in extended song with the “Theme from Shaft.”
At best, that joke lands like a whiff from a white boy who’s not as funny as he dared to dream he was in front of the mirror at home (or around the table in the writers’ room, wherever). At worst, it’s downright cringe-inducing.
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Meanwhile, phrases like “staked out the cemetery” and “pulled up stakes” are delivered in dialogue without anyone making any puns. If you ask me, that seems like a real missed opportunity.
Personally, I say: show some more commitment to the bit (and the bitten). Raise the stakes, pun-wise … and drive them down into the hearts of vampires.
We’ve firmly established now that “Bad Blood” is a jolly good time, but if you have glow-in-the-dark eyes for it, the vampire-related X-Files fun doesn’t end there.
Crack open a couple more case files with me, will ya?
The Reverse Facehugger of “Travelers”
“How long you been in the Bureau?” asks Arthur Dales at the beginning of “Travelers,” as he stands talking to Fox Mulder through the crack in his chained front door. “Do you know what an X-File is?”
“Yeah, it’s an unsolved case,” Mulder says.
“No,” Dales retorts, “it’s a case that’s been designated unsolved.”
As the episode progresses, the frame story with McGavin as the retired Dales folds into flashbacks where we see his younger self, embodied by Fredric Lane, playing a reluctant part in the political witch hunts (as opposed to vampire hunts) of the 1950s Red Scare. It turns out the X-Files are called that because a secretary started filing unsolved cases under “X’ after she ran out of room under “U.”
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Real-life monster of the week Roy Cohn — the lawyer who unsuccessfully sued the government on behalf of Donald Trump and introduced him to Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch — is a character in this episode. He would later be played by Al Pacino in Angels in America. Here, David Moreland inhabits the role.
In the ‘50s, McCarthyism had everyone suspected of being a communist. What they did not know and what The X-Files teaches was that there were spidery aliens among them. “I still thought I knew who the bad guys and the good guys were,” Dales laments.
One alien nests inside Edward Skur (Garret Dillahunt) and comes crawling out of his mouth into the mouths of his victims. It’s like a reverse Facehugger from the movie Alien. At one point, “Travelers” even shows us a burst chest of sorts in an autopsy scene. It also refers to xenotransplantation (“the grafting of another species into the human body”), which brings to mind the “xenomorph” banter in Aliens.
Bloodsuckers and … Breaking Bad?
The X-Files catches up with Arthur Dales again in “Agua Mala,” where he’s living in a trailer park in Goodland, Florida. With the roads washed out and people’s windows boarded up, Mulder and the skeptical Scully head out into a hurricane to investigate a tentacled sea monster.
“I came down for the weather,” Dales tells Scully. “Don’t sneer at the mysteries of the deep, young lady. The bottom of the ocean is as deep and dark as the imagination.”
“All the nuts are down in Florida,” Mulder later quips.
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Speaking of “dark,” the lighting of this episode is as dark as some scenes in Better Call Saul, a show I’ve referenced here in the past and one that might not exist were it not for Kolchak inspiring Chris Carter, and Carter, in turn, giving Vince Gilligan his big break as a writer and producer, before Gilligan went on to create Breaking Bad and co-create Better Call Saul.
As /Film notes, The X-Files also served to unite Gilligan and Bryan Cranston, before Breaking Bad, in the season 6 episode, “Drive.” Hollywood: it’s a small world, after all, bitches.
If I were to put on my Tin Foil Brat Mulder hat, I might say that the Breaking Bad franchise, like the zombie sub-genre, is part of the same movie and TV family tree as vampires. No Kolchak, no Mulder, no Walter White, no Saul Goodman, maybe. And of course, all screen roads this year lead back to Count Orlok in Nosferatu, which is what the whole Vampire Movie Century is all about.
“Agua Mala” and Scully’s Importance
The monster in “Agua Mala” is described as a “waterborne parasite” whose M.O. appears to be chewing on the human neck, leaving sucker or stinger or bite marks all over it.
It’s as if some improbable Florida vampire went to town on the same throat, over and over, in different places.
The creature attacks Mulder, leaving him with his own neck full of wounds, which he later shows Dales. It’s a meta moment that winks at McGavin’s acting history and all the marks other vampire hunters have left on the genre since his performance as Kolchak in The Night Stalker.
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Referring to Scully, Dales says: “It takes a big man to admit this, but if I had had someone as savvy as her by my side all those years ago in the X-Files, I might not have retired.”
This is the show’s way of acknowledging how important Scully and her dynamic with Mulder was. If it weren’t for her — if The X-Files had been a one-man show — it might have also been a one-season show like Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Spooky Mulder, the guy with the “I Want to Believe” poster on his office wall, needed a more rational, scientific counterpoint to run around with him every week.
It found that in Dana Scully. She may not have recognized the existence of vampires in “Bad Blood,” but she offered an essential viewpoint for helping ease the audience into the conviction they were real.