My Other Dad Is A Satanist

Whyyyyyyyyyy, out of all the truly disgusting and terrifying episodes of The X-Files available, do I find “Die Hand Die Verletzt” the MOST disgusting and the MOST terrifying of all? Like, I am so afraid of this episode that until today I had never rewatched it, and deliberately tried to avoid even hovering my mouse over the Netflix synopsis when I looked for other episodes to rewatch, and sometimes when I’m home alone I’ll remember the last scene and look over my shoulder to make sure that the devil hasn’t embodied a kindly substitute teacher in order to punish his wayward followers. Once I saw the actress who played said kindly substitute teacher on an episode of The Good Wife — she was interviewing for a job as Alicia’s secretary — and I had to fast-forward the scene because I was so upset. It is also, probably for the same reasons, my favorite episode of the entire series, and not just because of this incredibly excellent screenshot:

Ok, so let’s do my Trademark Wonky Paraphrase here: there’s this cute small town, with a cute high school, and the Parent-Teacher Association is made up of these cute lazy Satanists or something. Like they totally worship Satan but I don’t know what their religion actually is, and also they don’t really seem so into it anymore; one of the PTA guys is literally like “ugh do we HAVE TO praise our Dark Lord TONIGHT?! The game is on.” Dads, amiright. Anyway so some teens are just dicking around in the woods, reading from a witchcraft book, and one of the kids gets murdered in what looks like a Satanic ritual, and all the people in the town are like “oh yeah there are totally witches and cults here, that’s who murdered this guy,” but Scully is like uUuGhHhhhhHHh Satanic cult-related moral panics are so over. And there’s a new substitute teacher, who seems like this nice lady, but she’s stashing a human heart and a pair of eyes in her desk, so.

The substitute teacher starts casting all these spells to make kids say that their parents were part of the kinds of Satanic rituals that episodes of Dateline are made of, and then she actually gets the daughter of one of the PTA guys to kill herself, and it’s very, very sad and scary. The Satanists are like, oh fuck, this is probably the devil and he’s mad because we’ve been such lazy devil-worshippers, but let’s just get rid of these FBI agents and go back to being good devil-worshippers and the devil will be appeased and won’t hurt us. And the devil is like HA HA NOPE and the rest of the episode is just a series of worst nightmares come to life, culminating in a final scene that I would do anything to wipe from my brain forever. I won’t spoil it!! But it is so simple, and so creepy, and so perfectly unresolved, that I feel truly haunted from seeing it.

There’s a lot of reasons this episode is so ~freaky~ and I have a lot of feelings about all of them. Like the other so-called “Monster-of-the-Week” episodes, the parallels to contemporary fears and paranoia are really overt: religious laziness being some kind of justification for bad things happening to you or your family, along with the increasing prevalence of two-income households and a lack of trust in the professionals paid to watch your kids, were all part of the truly — in retrospect — unbelievable hold the myth of Satanic cults in American daycares held in the public consciousness of the 1980s. Like all witch hunts, we look back at those times and go man how could anyone have ever believed that?, but of course if the right nerves are touched at the right time, people can believe anything: the non-denominational but spiritually and religiously tinged belief that our lives and our world are part of some kind of balancing act that must, must be kept as close to level at all times, and that swinging too far one way or the other will lead to a kind of cosmic reckoning. Humans never stop finding inventive ways to punish themselves, and they are masters at projecting that tendency onto the universe: you didn’t get that job because you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get that person because you came on too strong, you didn’t have a good day because God is mad at you or because Mercury went retrograde or because you haven’t been worshipping the devil enough.

I forced myself to re-watch this episode just to write this article, and I got through it mostly ok, although I did start scratching my face and head wildly at the viscerally and gratuitously violent death of one the devil-worshippers; the things I do for this blog!! Perhaps it’s an exposure therapy thing; avoiding the episode made it seem a lot scarier in my memory, and I need to balance out the fear with the knowledge that, lol, this is a science-fiction show with a bunch of actors running around talking gibberish, there is no great cosmic force metering out a series of checks and balances except the personal tallies we all make in our heads, and a very bright and sunny October morning is a perfect excuse to confront the pop culture materials that scare you the most.

What’s YOUR favorite episode of The X-Files, and which one scares you the most?! Are they the same? TELL MEEEEEEEEEE.