Forgotten Monsters: X Files Flukeman

By Owen Quinn author of the Time Warriors and Zombie Blues

IPhotos copyright Fox and IDW

I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.

In the second season of the X Files, we were introduced to one of the show’s most disgusting and creepy monsters ever that only appeared once. However, many years later, the Flukeman returned in a two part comic story in the IDW season 10 run.

There is no one on the planet that isn’t revolted by the thought of something in their guts that shouldn’t be there like tapeworms or parasites. The thought of something coming up your throat after gestating inside you is horrific. We have all seen videos of medical procedures to remove tapeworms from the body. We’ve seen spiders hatch from someone’s arm and worms burrowed into the skin being extracted. It’s invasive and chills us to the very core. Your body is supposed to be your castle but when there’s something else using you as a host without your knowledge, it’s scary.

The Host plays on the old urban legend of alligators in the sewers. As one character says, you never know what has been breeding down there for the last one hundred years. Sewers are a bacterial playground where animals can thrive. With climate change and radiation levels rising due to nuclear accidents and detonations out at sea and in deserts, environments are mutating along with the creatures that inhabit them. What this episode does well is play on those to create a spooky story that revolts the viewer but keeps them hooked to the very last minute.

When a decomposed body is found in the sewers, a disgraced Mulder is assigned the case by Assitant Director Skinner. Disgruntled, Mulder sees this as another punishment to the point he confesses to Scully he is thinking of leaving the FBI. It is Scully who persuades him to let her look at the body first. In the meantime a sewer worker is attacked by what they believe is a python. Mulder visits him and sees the unusual bite mark on the man’s back. It is a curious four pronged bite the doctor has never seen before but thinks it may be a snake. As he says, people flush all sorts of unwanted pets down the sewers.

Horror levels jump as a flukeworm emerges from the body as Scully examines it. It is a moment that makes the audience recoil and works perfectly. The audience is privy to the knowledge that the episode opened with a Russian sailor being pulled into a tank by something which is then flushed out to sea. We know there’s a monster out there and so does someone else as Mulder is told that this case is vital to restoring the X Files to the FBI. This becomes apparent when Mulder travels to the main sewage treatment plant where he comes face to face with a humanoid flukeworm trapped in the mechanisms.

The design of the creature is freaky to evoke discomfort in the hapless viewer. It is humanoid with no genitalia at all. It has a human like face but its mouth is like a leech, its scolex, with four prongs that match the bite mark on the sewer worker’s back. That sewer worker is killed horribly when we see first hand what happens when something that shouldn’t be in your body wants out. He cannot get rid of a bad taste in his mouth, His mouth bleeds when he brushes his teeth, literally devouring toothpaste. While in the shower he gags. A flukeworm forces its way out of his mouth and goes down the shower drain back to the sewer leaving his lifeless body behind.

The Flukeman attacked him in order to reproduce so that means there is at least one other larvae in the sewers that will grow into its parent.

The FBI decides to try it as a murderer despite the fact they cannot label it as animal or man. While being transported in an ambulance, it escapes killing the marshall and returning to what it thinks is the nearest sewer. It is in fact a chemical toilet and it is sucked into a transport truck and ends up back at the treatment plant. It gets into the sewer where it is trying to get to the sea. Mulder manages to kill it by slicing it in half with a sluice gate. But as the upper part of the torso sinks beneath the water, we all know what happens when you cut a worm in half.

It is Daniel Sackheim’s brilliant direction that burns the Flukeman played by Darin Morgan into the audience’s minds. Close ups and muted lighting along with its raspy hiss make it a firm fan favourite. The initial shot of its face behind the sewage tank’s glass in the orange liquid is spooky and the shot of it slipping down a chemical toilet are left indelibly on the memory. In the overall arc of the show, the Host not only had to reinstate Mulder and Scully to continue thir work on the X files but keep the audience hooked with a memorable monster to maintain the success of the first season. This was achieved by the real world revelation that the Flukeman was somehow created by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. If the radiation created him, what else did it create out there? That question is still being asked and investigated to this very day.

It seems that we are the real monsters through our superior attitude when it comes to our ability to master forces bigger than us that are primal in nature.

Many fans wanted a rematch in the show but it was never to be. However when IDW decided to do a season 10 in comic form, the Flukeworm Man was back along with a few friends. Now their Chernobyl origins have been reworked and changed. Not the smartest move to be sure given how brilliant and impactful that revelation initially was.

Here a Russian named Grigori was trapped in a worm infested tank which filled with contaminated water, His friend saw it but fled to America where he became a sheriff in Martha’s Vineyard changing his name to Michael Simmons. The original Flukeman has been taking women from Martha’s Vineyard and using them to breed. This smacks of Roger Corman’s Humanoids from the Deep and dilutes the sheer originality of the Flukeman into a B movie monster. Very sorry IDW but this attempt to update the Flukeman fails miserably. Simmons saves Mulder from his old friend and it is too much coincidence that the man and monster converge in the same place Mulder grew up. Contrived storytelling smacks of laziness.

To this day the original episode stands as a perfect piece of horror that sticks in the memory forever securing the reputaion of the show as scary and unnerving.