Fox kept The X-Files episode “Home” out of its rerun schedule for roughly 3 years after its October 11, 1996, premiere. When the network finally brought it back on Halloween 1999, it came with a warning: “Only on Halloween would we dare air an episode so controversial.”
Season 4, Episode 2 begins with children playing baseball in Home, Pennsylvania, discovering a newborn’s body buried in a field. Mulder and Scully’s investigation leads them to the Peacocks, a family living in a deteriorating farmhouse with almost no connection to the outside world.
Inside are 3 brothers and their mother. The episode builds its horror around the family’s isolation, violence and physical deformities. Every threat comes from human beings, and the ending leaves surviving members of the family free.
Sheriff Taylor implied that the boys in that family were not really the type that could easily get dates.
“Home” became the first X-Files episode shown with a viewer discretion warning and later the series’ only episode rated TV-MA. Fox executives objected to what had aired, and the network subsequently rejected a proposed sequel featuring the surviving Peacocks.
Writers Glen Morgan and James Wong drew on rural horror, the 1992 documentary Brother’s Keeper and a passage in Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography describing a man with physical deformities kept beneath a bed. They wrote the episode on their return to The X-Files after leaving to create Space: Above and Beyond. Its title also referred to their own homecoming.
Kim Manners directed it, describing the script as “as classic a horror script as I’m ever going to see.” One of its most unsettling sequences pairs the Peacock brothers’ violence with a cover of “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Johnny Mathis refused permission to use his recording because of the episode’s content.
Despite Fox’s rerun restriction, “Home” eventually became available through syndication, DVD and streaming.
