Doing things a bit differently today. I’m exploring two episodes, Revelations and Syzygy. The two episodes did not appear back-to-back as there is one episode in between them and they are wildly different in tone, but both relate to what I’ll be discussing today so I’m discussing them together.
The 1990s were that post satanic panic era when horror movies often featured aspects of religion as the villain in some capacity whether it was demonic possession or Satanic rituals, especially when some kind of cult is involved. In 1990, The Exorcist III – a.k.a Legion – gave us some of the most frightening demonic possession imagery in existence. Some would argue that it is scarier than the original. I am one of those people even if I admittedly didn’t understand how good it was until my thirties. That same year, The First Power starring Lou Diamond Phillips gave us a Satan worshiping serial killer who comes back from the dead. By 1996, there were two new Hellraiser sequels, horror comedy Demon Knight, and Christopher Walken starring in The Prophecy. Even The Omen franchise cashed in with a made for television sequel that you are better off skipping unless you want a good laugh.
It was in 1997 when Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino starred in The Devil’s Advocate that I began to take notice. Until the John Wick movies, I considered The Devil’s Advocate to be Keanu Reeves’ best performance. It also gave us a young Charlize Theron at the beginning of what would become a long and Oscar winning career.
Right around the time The Devil’s Advocate was released in theaters, I caught a rerun of Revelations. I had seen it once before when it originally aired in December of 1995, but now that religious horror was on my radar I could watch it with a more discerning eye. It wasn’t the first time the show used religious themes, nor the last, but it was the first time that Agent Scully was forced to reckon with her Roman Catholic beliefs.
Revelations
In Pennsylvania, Reverand Patrick Findley (R. Lee Ermey) fakes stigmatic injuries in his hands during a sermon. Afterwards, a man named Simon Gates (Kenneth Welsch) enters and strangles him. R. Lee Ermey only had five minutes of screen time but it’s a great five minutes. Mulder and Scully join the investigation then as it is the eleventh fake stigmatic to be killed.
Meanwhile, a boy in Ohio, Kevin Kryder (Kevin Zegers) starts bleeding from the hands and eyes. Afterwards, he is abducted by Owen Jarvis (Michael Barryman) who had done yard work for the family. He claims to be Kevin’s guardian angel claiming that God asked him to protect Kevin. He criticizes Scully for her lack of faith.
When Kevin arrives home, Simon Gates gives chase and kills Owen Jarvis for interfering. During the autopsy, handprints found on Jarvis’ neck belong to Simon Gates who is a rich and powerful executive and owns a recycling plant in Ohio. The image of the recycling logo is a recurring theme in the episode about things coming full circle, which comes into play later. Scully discovers that Jarvis’ body is not decaying which reminds her of ‘incorruptibles’ that she learned about in Catechism. Mulder warns her against letting her faith cloud her judgement. They argue at one point that Mulder is not capable of believing in religious based miracles, which Scully finds bizarre after everything they have seen.
After Kevin’s mother flees with him and dies in a car accident, Gates finally takes the child. Scully surmises that he probably took him to the recycling plant, but Mulder believes he is headed to the airport and that Scully believes she was chosen to protect Kevin. At the recycling plant, Gates tries to jump into a paper shredder with Keving because it will bring on a “New Era” but Kevin grabs onto the side of the industrial machine and Gates dies alone. Scully pulls Kevin to safety and when they say goodbye, he tells her that he will see her again.
The episode ends with Scully going to confession for the first time in six years. She is unsettled by things she witnessed and that Mulder has not seen them even though he is the believer. The priest says, “Sometimes we must come full circle to find the truth.” The recycling symbolism again. Scully wonders that if miracles really do occur, then it means that God is speaking but no one is listening.
This profound ending concentrates on faith, not on religion or Catholicism, since Scully was at odds with her faith because of her medical and scientific background. It mirrors the show’s overall themes as well, giving us a smaller glimpse of the struggles of seeing-is-believing vs. blind faith sight unseen. Often in religious themed horror films, the story will revolve around a child who is either possessed (The Exorcist) or Satan born again on Earth with the help of a cult or member of the church (The Omen). In this episode of The X-Files, Kevin’s character is the opposite, meant to bring a new era of peace instead of the downfall of man. Rosemary’s baby he is not.
The supporting cast has some recognizable faces. R. Lee Ermey had a military career before acting and parlayed that into roles that fit his personality and background. After his five minutes of X-Files, he would have many military-based acting roles until 2003 when he starred in the remake of Willard with Crispin Glover and the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which he played the memorable Sheriff Hoyt. As far as remakes go, these two are actually decent.
Kevin Zegers was only a kid when he starred in this episode but went on to have a long acting career. Most notably in the horror world, he was in an episode in Goosebumps and later appeared in Wrong Turn, The Colony, Frozen (not the Disney movie), and Zach Snyder’s best film, Dawn of the Dead.
Michael Barryman suffers from Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia which means he has no sweat glands, hair, fingernails, or teeth. His iconic, distinctive look helped him make a career out of horror films like Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes as well as Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Also in this episode, Kenneth Welsh is one of the many actors who starred in both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, as well as The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and Stargate.
Syzygy
Syzygy (noun): a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system, like when the sun, moon, and earth align during a solar or lunar eclipse or three planets in a solar system aligning.
The event is the center point of the episode thirteen, pronounced sys-a-jee. I’ll be completely honest. This episode is as confoundingly bad as Revelations is so very good.
It starts with two teenage girls getting a ride home from a eulogy with a jock, Jay DeBoom (Ryan Reynolds, yes, that Ryan Reynolds). They inform him that a satanic cult seeks a blonde virgin as their next victim and convince him to turn off the road. The next morning, he is found hanging of a cliff. The two girls, Terri and Margi, sit atop the cliff laughing.
Scully and Mulder arrive whilst arguing over who is driving (a joke inserted by Chris Carter because fans complained that only Mulder ever drove their rental cars). The agents spend most of this episode bickering rather ardently over everything happening in the episode, relevant to the case or not. It’s very jarring to watch even if Chris Carter intended this to be satirically funny. The agents disagreed before, but never like this.
The town is already in Satanic Panic mode believing that a cult is killing their children. They go all angry mob and storm the woods looking for a mass grave. They find a bag of bones that end up being dog bones. Meanwhile, during a basketball game, the two girls telepathically cause a basketball to go beneath the bleachers. When a player retrieves it, the bleachers close in on him. They also kill another teen in the bathroom by shattering glass from the mirror on her.
An astrologist informs the agents that the town’s crazy behavior is due to the alignment of Mars, Uranus, and Mercury and that anyone born on January 12, 1979, will have more cosmic energy than they will know what to do with. Guess who was born on that date? Terri and Margi.
The stark difference between this episode and the others this season is that the intended tone falls completely flat. I remember it for how awful and petty it made Scully look for how argumentative she is. Granted, her behavior, like the town’s, was due to the alignment of the planets, but this was not the Scully I had grown to respect and love.
Satanic Panic Post 90s
By the late 90s, the post satanic panic era films had waned until 1999 when both Stigmata and End of Days were released. Stigmata follows Patricia Arquette’s character as she begins to exhibit signs of – you guessed it – the stigmata. Gabriel Byrne is a priest sent to investigate. As with Revelations, it deals with the ramifications of the priest’s faith as well as the church itself. Upon rewatch recently, it is far better a film than I remember. It is certainly a product of its time stylistically, but Arquette and Byrne turn in heartfelt performances.
End of Days is a different type of beast. It also stars Gabriel Byrne as The Man (Satan) who comes down to earth to find a bride and takes over a human body to do so. Arnold Schwarzenegger is retired cop who is brought back into the fray to stop The Man from ending society once he finds his bride. This was the tail end of Schwarzenegger’s action career which excelled in the 80s and 90s and the film is unsure whether it is an action movie or a horror movie. Robin Tunney is great in it, though as the would be bride.
In 2001, Bill Paxton directed a horror film entitled Frailty. It starred Paxton and Matthew McConaughey and follows two brothers whose father believed God was telling him to kill evil people. When the boys grow up, one is a serial killer continuing God’s work and the film does an excellent job keeping the viewer on their toes. It too says many things about faith. About how seeing is believing. About the differences between good and evil, much in the way Revelations does.
Interest in these types of films waned until Blumhouse created The Conjuring series of films. The third movie, The Devil Made Me Do It, works better as a courtroom and investigative drama than it does a horror movie. I am one of the few who really like this film, if I think about it in those terms. It uses possession as a defense for having killed someone without the assailant knowing what they were doing. It was based on a real case.
Another possession movie that works better as a courtroom drama than a horror movie is Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It features some frightening visuals of actress Jennifer Carpenter’s possession scenes during which she contorts her body in grotesque ways.
Ari Aster’s Hereditary is one of the more brutal examples of cult behavior as a grieving family deals with horrific occurrences thanks to the matriarch promising the first-born boy in the family to be the living host for the Demon King – a.k.a. Satan. Gabriel Byrne stars in this one as well, but it is Toni Collette who gives an Oscar worthy yet overlooked performance.
Most recently, 2019’s Satanic Panic and 2020’s We Summon the Darkness really lean heavily into the fear and paranoia surrounding Satanic cults and ritual sacrifices. While neither of these rank among my favorites, they are worth mentioning if you’re going to do what I did after watching these two episodes and do a deep dive into Satanic Panic cinema. The X-Files often pulled inspiration from real world events and issues. These films are no different.
Until next week, the truth is out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
Doing things a bit differently today. I’m exploring two episodes, Revelations and Syzygy. The two episodes did not appear back-to-back as there is one episode in between them and they are wildly different in tone, but both relate to what I’ll be discussing today so I’m discussing them together.
The 1990s were that post satanic panic era when horror movies often featured aspects of religion as the villain in some capacity whether it was demonic possession or Satanic rituals, especially when some kind of cult is involved. In 1990, The Exorcist III – a.k.a Legion – gave us some of the most frightening demonic possession imagery in existence. Some would argue that it is scarier than the original. I am one of those people even if I admittedly didn’t understand how good it was until my thirties. That same year, The First Power starring Lou Diamond Phillips gave us a Satan worshiping serial killer who comes back from the dead. By 1996, there were two new Hellraiser sequels, horror comedy Demon Knight, and Christopher Walken starring in The Prophecy. Even The Omen franchise cashed in with a made for television sequel that you are better off skipping unless you want a good laugh.
It was in 1997 when Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino starred in The Devil’s Advocate that I began to take notice. Until the John Wick movies, I considered The Devil’s Advocate to be Keanu Reeves’ best performance. It also gave us a young Charlize Theron at the beginning of what would become a long and Oscar winning career.
Right around the time The Devil’s Advocate was released in theaters, I caught a rerun of Revelations. I had seen it once before when it originally aired in December of 1995, but now that religious horror was on my radar I could watch it with a more discerning eye. It wasn’t the first time the show used religious themes, nor the last, but it was the first time that Agent Scully was forced to reckon with her Roman Catholic beliefs.
Revelations
In Pennsylvania, Reverand Patrick Findley (R. Lee Ermey) fakes stigmatic injuries in his hands during a sermon. Afterwards, a man named Simon Gates (Kenneth Welsch) enters and strangles him. R. Lee Ermey only had five minutes of screen time but it’s a great five minutes. Mulder and Scully join the investigation then as it is the eleventh fake stigmatic to be killed.
Meanwhile, a boy in Ohio, Kevin Kryder (Kevin Zegers) starts bleeding from the hands and eyes. Afterwards, he is abducted by Owen Jarvis (Michael Barryman) who had done yard work for the family. He claims to be Kevin’s guardian angel claiming that God asked him to protect Kevin. He criticizes Scully for her lack of faith.
When Kevin arrives home, Simon Gates gives chase and kills Owen Jarvis for interfering. During the autopsy, handprints found on Jarvis’ neck belong to Simon Gates who is a rich and powerful executive and owns a recycling plant in Ohio. The image of the recycling logo is a recurring theme in the episode about things coming full circle, which comes into play later. Scully discovers that Jarvis’ body is not decaying which reminds her of ‘incorruptibles’ that she learned about in Catechism. Mulder warns her against letting her faith cloud her judgement. They argue at one point that Mulder is not capable of believing in religious based miracles, which Scully finds bizarre after everything they have seen.
After Kevin’s mother flees with him and dies in a car accident, Gates finally takes the child. Scully surmises that he probably took him to the recycling plant, but Mulder believes he is headed to the airport and that Scully believes she was chosen to protect Kevin. At the recycling plant, Gates tries to jump into a paper shredder with Keving because it will bring on a “New Era” but Kevin grabs onto the side of the industrial machine and Gates dies alone. Scully pulls Kevin to safety and when they say goodbye, he tells her that he will see her again.
The episode ends with Scully going to confession for the first time in six years. She is unsettled by things she witnessed and that Mulder has not seen them even though he is the believer. The priest says, “Sometimes we must come full circle to find the truth.” The recycling symbolism again. Scully wonders that if miracles really do occur, then it means that God is speaking but no one is listening.
This profound ending concentrates on faith, not on religion or Catholicism, since Scully was at odds with her faith because of her medical and scientific background. It mirrors the show’s overall themes as well, giving us a smaller glimpse of the struggles of seeing-is-believing vs. blind faith sight unseen. Often in religious themed horror films, the story will revolve around a child who is either possessed (The Exorcist) or Satan born again on Earth with the help of a cult or member of the church (The Omen). In this episode of The X-Files, Kevin’s character is the opposite, meant to bring a new era of peace instead of the downfall of man. Rosemary’s baby he is not.
The supporting cast has some recognizable faces. R. Lee Ermey had a military career before acting and parlayed that into roles that fit his personality and background. After his five minutes of X-Files, he would have many military-based acting roles until 2003 when he starred in the remake of Willard with Crispin Glover and the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which he played the memorable Sheriff Hoyt. As far as remakes go, these two are actually decent.
Kevin Zegers was only a kid when he starred in this episode but went on to have a long acting career. Most notably in the horror world, he was in an episode in Goosebumps and later appeared in Wrong Turn, The Colony, Frozen (not the Disney movie), and Zach Snyder’s best film, Dawn of the Dead.
Michael Barryman suffers from Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia which means he has no sweat glands, hair, fingernails, or teeth. His iconic, distinctive look helped him make a career out of horror films like Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes as well as Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Also in this episode, Kenneth Welsh is one of the many actors who starred in both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, as well as The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and Stargate.
Syzygy
Syzygy (noun): a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system, like when the sun, moon, and earth align during a solar or lunar eclipse or three planets in a solar system aligning.
The event is the center point of the episode thirteen, pronounced sys-a-jee. I’ll be completely honest. This episode is as confoundingly bad as Revelations is so very good.
It starts with two teenage girls getting a ride home from a eulogy with a jock, Jay DeBoom (Ryan Reynolds, yes, that Ryan Reynolds). They inform him that a satanic cult seeks a blonde virgin as their next victim and convince him to turn off the road. The next morning, he is found hanging of a cliff. The two girls, Terri and Margi, sit atop the cliff laughing.
Scully and Mulder arrive whilst arguing over who is driving (a joke inserted by Chris Carter because fans complained that only Mulder ever drove their rental cars). The agents spend most of this episode bickering rather ardently over everything happening in the episode, relevant to the case or not. It’s very jarring to watch even if Chris Carter intended this to be satirically funny. The agents disagreed before, but never like this.
The town is already in Satanic Panic mode believing that a cult is killing their children. They go all angry mob and storm the woods looking for a mass grave. They find a bag of bones that end up being dog bones. Meanwhile, during a basketball game, the two girls telepathically cause a basketball to go beneath the bleachers. When a player retrieves it, the bleachers close in on him. They also kill another teen in the bathroom by shattering glass from the mirror on her.
An astrologist informs the agents that the town’s crazy behavior is due to the alignment of Mars, Uranus, and Mercury and that anyone born on January 12, 1979, will have more cosmic energy than they will know what to do with. Guess who was born on that date? Terri and Margi.
The stark difference between this episode and the others this season is that the intended tone falls completely flat. I remember it for how awful and petty it made Scully look for how argumentative she is. Granted, her behavior, like the town’s, was due to the alignment of the planets, but this was not the Scully I had grown to respect and love.
Satanic Panic Post 90s
By the late 90s, the post satanic panic era films had waned until 1999 when both Stigmata and End of Days were released. Stigmata follows Patricia Arquette’s character as she begins to exhibit signs of – you guessed it – the stigmata. Gabriel Byrne is a priest sent to investigate. As with Revelations, it deals with the ramifications of the priest’s faith as well as the church itself. Upon rewatch recently, it is far better a film than I remember. It is certainly a product of its time stylistically, but Arquette and Byrne turn in heartfelt performances.
End of Days is a different type of beast. It also stars Gabriel Byrne as The Man (Satan) who comes down to earth to find a bride and takes over a human body to do so. Arnold Schwarzenegger is retired cop who is brought back into the fray to stop The Man from ending society once he finds his bride. This was the tail end of Schwarzenegger’s action career which excelled in the 80s and 90s and the film is unsure whether it is an action movie or a horror movie. Robin Tunney is great in it, though as the would be bride.
In 2001, Bill Paxton directed a horror film entitled Frailty. It starred Paxton and Matthew McConaughey and follows two brothers whose father believed God was telling him to kill evil people. When the boys grow up, one is a serial killer continuing God’s work and the film does an excellent job keeping the viewer on their toes. It too says many things about faith. About how seeing is believing. About the differences between good and evil, much in the way Revelations does.
Interest in these types of films waned until Blumhouse created The Conjuring series of films. The third movie, The Devil Made Me Do It, works better as a courtroom and investigative drama than it does a horror movie. I am one of the few who really like this film, if I think about it in those terms. It uses possession as a defense for having killed someone without the assailant knowing what they were doing. It was based on a real case.
Another possession movie that works better as a courtroom drama than a horror movie is Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It features some frightening visuals of actress Jennifer Carpenter’s possession scenes during which she contorts her body in grotesque ways.
Ari Aster’s Hereditary is one of the more brutal examples of cult behavior as a grieving family deals with horrific occurrences thanks to the matriarch promising the first-born boy in the family to be the living host for the Demon King – a.k.a. Satan. Gabriel Byrne stars in this one as well, but it is Toni Collette who gives an Oscar worthy yet overlooked performance.
Most recently, 2019’s Satanic Panic and 2020’s We Summon the Darkness really lean heavily into the fear and paranoia surrounding Satanic cults and ritual sacrifices. While neither of these rank among my favorites, they are worth mentioning if you’re going to do what I did after watching these two episodes and do a deep dive into Satanic Panic cinema. The X-Files often pulled inspiration from real world events and issues. These films are no different.
Until next week, the truth is out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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