Why The X-Files’ Freakiest Episode Was Banned Right After Airing (2024)

The X-Files never shied away from controversial topics. Part of the show's premise was an exploration of the fringes of science, ideas and humanity, as well as more down-to-earth issues such as government overreach. It may be unsurprising now that The X-Files dove into taboo topics like incest, but these episodes at the time proved wildly controversial. "Home," the second episode of Season 4, is perhaps the best known example.

Insufficiently described on streaming platforms as a monster-of-the-week episode with Mulder and Scully encountering a family of inbred brothers, the horrors of "Home" are hard to capture. The episode features three brothers -- one of whom is also the father of the other two -- defending their way of life from outsiders through murder. Mulder has his own suspicions about what's going on inside their house at first, but as the episode unravels, both Mulder and Scully discover truly insidious crimes that they didn't expect. Its deliberately shocking content touches some primordial hot topics. Small wonder the network didn't want to touch it.

Updated on March 12, 2024 by Robert Vaux: The early controversy around "Home" has remained a part of The X-Files' legacy, and the content has grown no less disturbing in the three decades since it originally aired. It's readily available for streaming and digital download -- Hulu and Amazon both carry the episode along with the rest of the series -- letting fans see for themselves what engendered such a firestorm back in the show's heyday. It easily retains its power to shock. The article has been further developed to discuss the details of the episode, and the formatting has been adjusted to meet CBR's current guidelines.

What Is The X-Files Episode 'Home' About?

Disconnected from the overarching plot of the fourth season of The X-Files, "Home" takes Mulder and Scully to the small, isolated town of Home, Pennsylvania, to work on another case. The FBI was called in after the body of a deformed newborn was found buried alive, with the suspects being the Peaco*ck family, who haven't left their house in a decade. The local sheriff insinuates that the Peaco*cks have a long history of inbreeding since the Civil War, but it raises the question of who gave birth to the baby since only men live in the house. To that end, Mulder and Scully begin to suspect the Peaco*cks kidnapped and raped a woman.

The Peaco*cks begin to attack local residents, such as the sheriff and his wife, so their secret won't be uncovered. When an autopsy reports that the baby shares DNA with the Peaco*ck family, Mulder and Scully return to the house to arrest the brothers. After fighting through booby-traps, the agents find the Peaco*ck brothers' mother, a quadruple amputee, underneath a bed. She was presumed dead years prior but has since been having inbred children in hiding.

The X-Files' 'Home' Relied on Human Horror

Part of what made "Home" so controversial was that it relied on human antagonists. Crimes were committed and people were injured and killed, but unlike most episodes of the series, it wasn't the result of supernatural intervention. There were no space aliens, ghostly incursions, hidden monsters or demonic tomes. Instead, "Home" was about all too real human evil. Inbreeding is a fundamental human taboo, which the Peaco*cks take to a horrifying extreme.

The incidents directly depicted in the episode are gruesome enough: including the Peaco*ck mother's unspeakable living conditions and the unsettling number of congenital birth defects in the murdered infant, on top of the very act of infanticide itself. But the most haunting detail is the way the Peaco*cks treat it with such normalcy. It's a part of their day-to-day life, which means it's been going on for generations unnoticed by the rest of the world. When the one surviving brother escapes at the end with his mother, the two seem eager to rebuild their family, suggesting that these horrors will only continue.

"Home" became the first network television episode in U.S. TV history to receive a TV-MA rating. The troubling concepts of incest and burying newborns alive certainly earned the warning for audiences. But even the increased rating wasn't alarming enough, and many viewers (and producers) thought that the episode had gone too far and created something truly gruesome. Interestingly, the episode contains only a few scenes of direct gore, and even the Peaco*cks' monstrous faces are often hidden in shadow. The implications are just as horrifying as the specifics, making the episode feel particularly intense.

The Inspiration Behind 'Home'

Former writers Glen Morgan and James Wong wanted to make a grand return to The X-Files by pushing boundaries on television. Considering a TV-MA rating was unheard of at the time, they certainly succeeded. The writers took inspiration from Brother's Keeper, a 1992 documentary focusing on the alleged murder of William Ward by his brother Delbert, who were just two brothers of four that were described as "barely literate." Like the eldest brother in 'Home,' Delbert escaped prosection by claiming he was tricked by police during interrogation.

Inspiration was also drawn from an anecdote in Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, which described a deformed and legless man Chaplin met while touring. Although Morgan misremembered the man (Morgan recalled him being without limbs at all), he used the image of the man to create the mother's character. In addition, the episode draws a good deal of energy from 70s horror classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, depicting horrific families engaged in taboo practices after generations of living in absolute isolation. Like "Home," those movies also generated controversy for their shocking content.

Why 'Home' Was Never Revisited

As a result, Fox refused to re-air the episode for three years after its initial broadcast. When they eventually did re-run it, the controversial nature and subsequent banning from the air waves became part of the promotional material, with Fox leaning heavily on the grotesque nature of the episode to draw in a larger audience. Some think that the episode is only remembered because of the controversy surrounding banning it, rather than the gruesome themes it depicts.

Viewers speculated that despite -- or because of -- its reputation, "Home" would be revisited in The X-Files revival in 2016. The fourth episode of the revived Season 10 was titled "Home Again," contributing to these rumors. However, the episode didn't return to the same controversial subjects, for better or worse, and The X-Files seems to have left "Home" in its past.

The Legacy of The X-Files' 'Home'

The episode, despite its controversy, has received critical acclaim from both fans and critics in later years. 'Home' has been rated as one of the scariest and best episodes of The X-Files, due to its horrifically realistic nature and unresolved ending that makes it stand out. Other shows have borrowed themes from "Home" to try to recreate the controversial and taboo episode. Supernatural, a show that relied heavily on The X-Files for content and themes, included human culprits mistaken for supernatural in the Season 1 episode, "The Benders." Similar plotlines are found in the first season of Torchwood, too. But these shows don't go quite as far as The X-Files did, and none reach an audience quite as unexpectedly.

And in many ways, the episode is a sterling example of the X-Files formula working at its best. Mulder and Scully are quite comfortable with each other, and their banter extends to interesting ethical territory. It's unusual in that it's Mulder who thinks there's nothing unusual going on -- convinced that it's a mundane tragedy -- and the normally skeptical Scully convinced that there's more going on beneath the surface. The episode also carries subtle references to a then-contemporary event, with the episode's finale echoing the FBI's raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX just a few years earlier.

Above all, it's a very scary episode, as director Kim Manners artfully mines tension and suspense from every shot. "Home" shocked viewers at its initial airing, but despite being banned from television for years after its release, it is easy to find and watch on streaming platforms now. Perhaps modern audiences have grown more accustomed to the types of horrors that The X-Files explored, but it's easy to see why "Home" wasn't revisited after it was aired; yet, it's still hard to see how they got away with airing it in the first place.

The X-Files is available to stream on Prime Video and Hulu.

The X-Files

Two F.B.I. Agents, Fox Mulder the believer and Dana Scully the skeptic, investigate the strange and unexplained, while hidden forces work to impede their efforts.