A Fox executive delivered a simple, two-word reaction to Glen Morgan after reading his initial script for “Home,” the only episode of The X-Files ever to be banned from network television: “You’re sick.”
With Halloween week upon us, Gold Derby sat down with the writer-producer for an in-depth discussion of his most frightening episodes from the Emmy-winning hit 1990s TV series: “Home,” featuring an inbred family; “Squeeze,” with its liver-eating mutant; and “Die Hand Die Verletzt,” and its demonic school teacher. Morgan received two Emmy nominations in 1995 and 1997 for producing the influential program, which starred David Duchovny as Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully, two FBI agents exploring unexplained phenomena. (We also reached out to Morgan’s writing partner, James “Jim” Wongbut were informed he was overseas working on a project.)
Read on as Morgan offers a behind-the-scenes journey of how his scary monsters came to life. He also reminisces about working with the cast and crew, and the lasting impact The X-Files has had three decades later. And yes, he definitively answers whether Eugene Victor Tooms is actually dead.
‘I have my family because of that show’
Table of Contents
First up: a history lesson. The original pilot of The X-Files was written by creator-showrunner Chris Carter. Morgan and Wong became co-executive producers starting with Episode 2 (“Deep Throat”), and the first one they cowrote was Episode 3 (“Squeeze”).
Morgan: Jim Wong and I had taken another show, another pilot. Peter Rothwho’s sort of a legendary executive at Fox, demanded that we watch The X-Files pilot and we’re like, “Eh, we’ll just do this for the hell of it.” And then, we were just blown away, and never looked back. It’s given me so many friends, and I have my family because of that show. That’s the first thing I think of.
From the get-go, it was Chris; Howard Gordonand Alex Gansawho went on to do Homeland; Jim and I; and Marilyn Osbornewho had been an executive over at Stephen J. Cannell Productions, where we started. Chris would’ve done UFO episodes every week. The network didn’t want that. They wanted a monster show. I remember being in the office late at night — which was like a box; it was just a dump on the Fox lot — and we’re just sitting there trying to think of ideas. Jim Wong goes, “What if a guy came through that air vent right now?” And that was the first monster episode. So then, Jim and I took the monster episodes, and Howard and Alex took the weird science episodes, and we just kind of rotated that way.
‘How they make foie gras’
Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison), a liver-eating mutant capable of squeezing into small spaces, comes out of hibernation every 30 years to claim fresh victims. In 1993’s “Squeeze,” Scully mentions that if they didn’t catch Tooms, they would have to wait until 2023 for another chance. When that anniversary came around and fans started sharing clips, Morgan felt “old” that three decades had passed.
Morgan: That episode in a lot of ways is a tough one to talk about, because of some of Doug Hutchinson’s behavior [being an alleged groomer] — but he is just extraordinary. His audition for that part was one of the most incredible things I’ve experienced in my career. He was great and he just did such a great job. And then we did a sequel with [director] David Nutterwho’s a great TV director.
Regarding the 30 years, my brother told me, “I think that you stole a Night Stalker. There was a thing where there was a guy who comes out every 30 or 50 years.” I’m like, “What?!” We loved that show with Darren McGavin. The episodes weren’t readily available until recently, so I don’t know if I lodged that in my subconscious. Chris had been in France, and he was fascinated by how they make foie gras, so that’s where it came about that Tooms ate livers.
‘He was a great monster’
The mutant apparently dies in the late-Season 1 sequel episode, fittingly titled “Tooms.” But with so many fans being excited by the possibility of his return on the 30-year markMorgan needed to confirm whether Eugene Victor Tooms was actually, definitively, 100 percent dead.
Morgan: I have the Eugene Tooms prop X-File with red-and-white borders. When Jim and I left the show, I went to the prop guy and I’m like, “Give it to me.” He’s like, “Oh, no, no, he might come back.” I’m like, “No, he’s dead. Give it to me.” So, it’s on my wall. And he’s dead.
Doug was great. He was a great monster. I was at the Thousand Oaks Mall out here, west of Los Angeles, and I’m walking around and I see these guys fixing an escalator. I walked over there, and there’s a hole, and you’re looking at the guts of the escalator. I’m like, “Oh, that’s creepy. I wonder if we should have a person living there.” Well, Tooms would live in there. And that’s where that came about.
‘Mitch would get really mad’
The “Tooms” episode is also famous for introducing Mitch Pileggi as Assistant Director Walter Skinner, and for giving the mysterious Cigarette-Smoking Man, played by William B. Davishis first line of dialogue. Morgan now explains why Skinner was a “needed” character, despite Mulder and Scully already having a superior early on in Charles Cioffi as Section Chief Scott Blevins.
Morgan: My memory is that we needed that character. Skinner was named after my mom’s friend. Mitch came in to read, and that episode already had Paul Ben-Victor [as Dr. Aaron Monte]who was follicly challenged, and we were casting, and everybody was like, “If they have no hair, they get the part!” And so, Mitch would get really mad, but he was just phenomenal and so he stayed.
I don’t really recall [why Blevins was cut]. Maybe Chris didn’t think that was working out, or something like that. Or maybe from the pilot to series, you have less of a need for that character. He was the boss who gave assignments, but then you found out that Mulder was really finding assignments on his own, so there was less of that character. Once it becomes conspiratorial, we need someone that is running a buffer for the Cigarette-Smoking Man. And that’s why the Skinner character arose.
‘I have a phobia’
Duchovny has declared that “Ice” was the first really cool episode of The X-Files. In the Season 1 outing, Mulder and Scully travel to Alaska and discover that a research team had unearthed an ancient ice core sample containing worms that cause their hosts to be violently paranoid. At one point, the FBI agents grow mistrustful and hold their guns on each other, in what is now an iconic image.
Morgan: At that time, every Monday came the Science News. It was a pamphlet and it had things that had happened in science, and one of them was that they had drilled down to an ice core in Greenland or something, and the stuff they were pulling up was 250,000 years old. I’m like, “Oh, there you go. But what’s in it?” When I was in biology in high school, worms and snakes, I hated ’em. I have a phobia. And I’m like, “Well, there has to be a worm in there.” It was also greatly influenced by the masterpiece that is John Carpenter‘s The Thing.
I want horror to be about people, not blood-spilling and stuff. And so, it was just taking it from there, and setting up who was who, and what their fears of each other might be. When I was a kid, there was an unknown movie called Report to the Commissionerand at the end of the trailer, the two people were in an elevator with guns on each other. That image had a big effect on me — so let’s do that!
‘Brad wanted too much money’
Season 1’s “Beyond the Sea” features a stand-out guest performance from Brad Dourif as alleged psychic Luther Lee Boggs. The episode doesn’t deal with monsters or mutants, but instead allows the audience to learn a bit more about Scully via Boggs. The hour also introduces Scully’s parents, William (Don Davis), who died in this episode, and Margaret (Sheila Larken).
Morgan: When the show started, and the writers were all at lunch, we’re like, “If they ever kiss, or she sees an alien, the show’s over.” Mulder was a little more fun — he told more jokes, he got to believe in weird stuff. But she was always going, “No, no.” And so, we wanted to introduce her to the possibility of a paranormal event. We felt that the one thing that people might be open to is wanting to see a loved one that had moved along. The experience has a great deal of watching my mom when my grandfather passed away.
Rick Millikanwho did casting, said in passing, “What about Brad Dourif?” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of my top five movies of all time. Brad wanted too much money, but we knew him doing this would make the show. Jim and I went to Chris, who then went to Fox, and we said that I would give my script fee to pay for Brad Dourif. And whenever you say you’ll offer up money, the executives freak out. And so, they did it and he was just phenomenal. You watch the dailies in your office and you don’t even realize that you wrote it.
Random piece of trivia: Morgan was responsible for killing off Scully’s dad in “Beyond the Sea,” and her mom in Season 10’s “Home Again.” What does he have against the Scully family?
Morgan: I just can’t stand them — they gotta go! [laughs] The mom was really tough because Sheila is producer Bob Goodwin‘s wife, and she’s a great actor and been around a long time. We said, well, we’re not coming back. And kind of oddly, if “Beyond The Sea” was about my mom’s dealing with my grandfather’s death, “Home Again” was about me and my mom. We all got to go.
‘Essentially with two flashlights’
Season 2’s “Die Hand Die Verletzt” was the last episode Morgan and Wong wrote before creating their own series, Space: Above and Beyondwhich ran for a single season on Fox. They returned in Season 4 only to depart again to work on Carter’s second series, Millennium. Susan Blommaert‘s Phyllis H. Paddock, a school teacher with demonic powers, was such a popular character, did the producers ever consider bringing her back, à la Tooms?
Morgan: Not that I know of. That was Jim and I, and we left after that. She’s a great actress, too. Dan Butler [as a faculty member]who was on Frasiergot eaten by the snake. Howard Gordon was like, “I don’t get this scary stuff.” I said, “You’ve got to do a snake eating a guy, like on National Geographic, where he does that thing with his jaw and he eats a deer.” He comes back and says, “No, I can’t do that. That doesn’t work.” Jim and I got mad at him and I wrote on an index card, “Snake eats a guy,” and Jim goes, “End of Act Three.” And that’s how that whole episode came about. I was such a fan of Dan’s, but I didn’t know he was terrified of snakes, so he’s not really acting.
Kim Manners [the episode’s director, who died in 2009] was a great filmmaker who went on to do Supernatural for a long time, and he was just unleashed. On that episode, John Bartley was the director of photography, and he lit that fourth act essentially with two flashlights, which were I think $3,000 each and the wire went up Duchovny’s coat. It was not done on TV where an entire act was just that level of darkness. He just passed away … it’s been a tough year. We lost [composer] Mark Snowand [art director] Graeme Murrayand [film editor] Chris Willingham.
‘Is nature moral?’
After Space: Above and Beyond ended, Morgan and Wong returned in Season 4 and wrote what many fans consider to be the scariest episode of the series, “Home.” It focuses on a grotesque, inbred family in Pennsylvania who attack anyone who enters their property. After its initial airing on Oct. 11, 1996, the episode was banned from being rerun on the Fox network, though it appeared years later on cable channel FX, and is currently available on streaming services — where it carries the show’s only TV-MA rating.
Morgan: I was shocked [when it was banned]. “Die Hand Die Verletzt,” to me, is still so much worse. Jim Wong and I had read a book called Dark Nature by Lyall Watsonand it was very much about, is nature moral? Otters and mallard ducks we all think are cute, but they gang rape. If a baby bird is not healthy, the mother just takes it out of the nest. We had this family that was behaving like animals in nature, and I always find it fascinating that people get upset over their behavior, because it’s what happens in nature all the time.
There was a documentary called Brother’s Keeper by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that my wife[[Kristen Cloke, guest star and writer on The X-Files]had suggested. It was about these four brothers who grew up in Onondaga County in central New York, where I’m from, and it was about a similar thing. They walked down the street in order of their age, and it just had a really big influence.
As for Scully thinking about motherhood, there’s a lot of great horror movies focused around that: Psycho and The Exorcist and The Omen. We merged all that together. When the head of production at Fox, Charlie Goldsteinread the script — and we were friends — he called me up and goes, “You’re sick,” and just hung up. I guess I did not know it would be that severe.
‘A little bit more monstery’
Morgan says he hasn’t watched “Home” in years. In fact, the only X-Files episodes he likes to rewatch are the ones written by his brother, Darin Morganthe Emmy-winning writer of “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and a two-time guest star who played Flukeman and Eddie Van Blundht. Here, Glen Morgan dives deeper into the Peacock family of “Home,” including their namesake.
Morgan: That episode was directed by Kim Manners, who Jim and I met on 21 Jump Street. The first thing he ever made was one of the original Charlie’s Angels episodes. Kim was always a great director, and was a blast. I think the actors got a little bit more monstery than was in my head, but that was Kim’s choice. The really great thing is the actress Karin Konovalwho played the mother, doing green screen with limb removal, which was not a thing you saw on TV very often.
My grandmother and grandfather, my mom’s parents, lived in Rochester, and they had a family next door who was a very nice family, maybe a little chaotic, named the Peacocks. I just thought, what a great name, and so we named [the “Home” family] the Peacocks. I have no idea if they even know that it’s based on them. My grandmother was worried that they would find out, but they weren’t a family of four inbred brothers, so they’re not going to take offense.
‘Affecting people’s lives’
After Season 4, the writing partners departed again to work on Carter’s second series, Millennium. Morgan returned to The X-Files for the revival seasons in 2016 and 2018 as a writer and a director. In Season 11’s “This,” the real name of fan-favorite character Deep Throat (played by Jerry Hardin) was finally revealed to be Ronald Pakula. He now reveals the origins of that name, and what it means to still be talking about the show after three decades.
Morgan: Well, director Alan J. Growing up is just an extraordinary influence on that show. On the Criterion Channel, they have a Pakula paranoia trilogy, which is Clute, The Parallax Viewand All the President’s Men. On The X-Fileswe’re doing what Alan Pakula did in that period with throwing the conversation, so I just wanted to honor him. I hope we did that. I always liked that the senator that was sponsoring Mulder was named Richard Matheson[playedby[playedbyRaymond J. Barry]because of the great writer. It was always a way to honor those who came before us — and who we were stealing from!
In interviews like this or at conventions, I’ve had Midwestern moms that said, “I took up writing because of you and Jim Wong.” I can’t even process that it’s affecting people’s lives. You’re just trying to get it done — you’ve got to turn it in, we shoot this in two days. And then, to have people say 30 years later how much it affected them? It’s meaningless without everyone that watches it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
