The X-Files

The X-Files
Starring	David Duchovny Gillian Anderson
Production Company	20th Century Fox
Release date	September 10, 1993 – May 19, 2002
Country	United States
Language	English

The X-Files is a long-running American science fiction/supernatural police drama franchise created by Chris Carter which has been claimed by some to be Lovecraftian in nature. To date, eleven series and two full-length feature films have been produced, along with a host of associated media, such as novels, comic books, video games, etc.

Premise

The show follows two Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who are assigned to a branch of the Bureau which investigates unexplained crimes and phenomena. The overarching story of the franchise involves a government conspiracy to cover up their involvement with aliens, and the agents' attempts to find the truth hidden by the shadowy figures ranged against them.

Characters

• Fox Mulder: a brilliant psychological profiler who is driven to uncover the disappearance of his younger sister Samantha during childhood. Mulder has the tendency to believe in almost any paranormal activity unquestioningly.
• Dana Scully: a gifted medical doctor, Scully is a skeptic who is often used as a foil to Mulder's believer in earlier series. Later, however, she comes to accept that the world she lives in contains many inexplicable phenomenon.

Inspiration

Carter has repeatedly mentioned the Kolchak series, amongst a handful of others, as having had a significant impact on his creation of The X-Files .

Lovecraftian Themes

• The show frequently features themes of a greater knowledge lurking just out of sight, which is a very Lovecraftian concept.
• Some episodes, such as "Squeeze" and "Tooms" feature characters who will go to desperate lengths in order to extend their life spans. These recall stories such as "Cool Air".
• The two-part episode "Dreamland" features a case of body-swapping, which could be likened to the events of "The Thing on the Doorstep", although in The X-Files the story plays out in a far more lighthearted and upbeat way.

Trivia

• Issue #7 (December 1995) of the Topps comic book series The X-Files, titled "Trepanning Opera," opens with H. P. Lovecraft’s "correlated contents" quote from his novelette "The Call of Cthulhu."
• The Season 5 episode "Chinga" was co-written by expanded Mythos author Stephen King.
• In the comic story "Hallow Eve" (The X-Files Annual #1, 1995, Topps), Mulder and Scully travel to Arkham, Massachusetts, to investigate the death of a professor at Miskatonic University.
• In the story "E.L.F.s" from The X-Files Annual #2 (1996, Topps), the agents discover that a man who they are investigating as a possible alien abductee is in possession of a copy of Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials; the book contains an entry on the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness.
• Issue #13 (May 2017) of the IDW comic book series The X-Files features a mysterious Vietnamese amulet which Mulder (possibly half-jokingly) speculates may be "Lovecraftian" in origin.
• The Mythos anthology Tales of Cthulhu Invictus includes an homage to The X-Files in the form of the story "Tempus Edax Rerum" (a.k.a. "Time Devours All"), by Peter Rawlik. Set in ancient Rome, the story concerns a man named Vulpinius Pistorius (a name that can be roughly translated as "Fox Miller"; Miller in turn being the English equivalent of the Dutch name Mulder) and a collection of archives known as Bibliotheca X (the X being the Roman numeral 10, and referring to the Decemviri). The role equivalent to the Cigarette Smoking Man is played by the Ythian inhabiting the body of Titus Sempronius Blaesus from Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time, who here smokes the Black Lotus.