In the last ten days, we’ve gotten a new director’s cut of the second X-Files film and the official wide release of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson’s new horror film. While I have… feelings… about Chris Carter editing out the fact that Fox and Dana had a son together at the end to the original series from the film which I’ll talk about when I get to reviewing the film later on when my blog gets to that point, I will say that I do still enjoy that film as a stand alone X-File even if people seemed not to like it when it came out. It’s a film I’ve revisited many times over the years. It’s stayed with me in a way that only a few episodes of the series did and that is saying something.
As for Gillian Anderson’s new horror film, it is easily one of my favorite new films this year and I highly recommend it. My favorite horror film, for sure. It’ll have you viewing fried chicken with dipping sauce in a whole new way, and that is just the beginning of the sexual tension in the film. Gillian Anderson is a force to be reckoned with. She’s been making me fall in love with her since 1993 and that kind of presence doesn’t happen often. The tension between her and Hannah Einbinder can’t be understated here and I think people will look back on this film as a jump forward for the slasher horror genre. You can read my official review here. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.
Do you remember what film or television project landed Bruce Campbell on your radar? Some of you will of course answer The Evil Dead or Army of Darkness. Maybe some of you knew him first from Xena or Hercules as he had recurring roles on both. Or did you catch him on the short-lived series The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. that aired in 1993 as the lead in to season one of The X-Files? I first remember seeing him in season six X-Files episode Terms of Endearment. For context, I don’t even remember The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. existing at all when I was thirteen, an insane revelation for me now since I was so obsessed with The X-Files then and the two shows aired back-to-back. I did not discover the Evil Dead movies until later in my college era and when I did, I didn’t put it together that it was the same actor as today’s episode.
In what ended up being a kind of reverse Rosemary’s Baby, Terms of Endearment follows a newborn baby stealing demon played by Campbell. The case was designated as an X-File but Agent Jeffrey Spender who still staunchly disbelieves in the paranormal refuses to look into the case and tries to destroy the file. Mulder and Scully manage to steal the case file so they can investigate it. At this point in the series, Agent Spender is still heading up the X-Files while Mulder and Scully are assigned elsewhere within the FBI.
Campbell plays Wayne Weinsider who learns during an ultrasound that the baby his pregnant wife is carrying has bizarre physical abnormalities. Those horns, guys. They mean nothing good. His wife, Laura, has a nightmare about a demon stealing her baby and at one point she bites the demon to protect her child. She wakes to find that she has miscarried. It is her brother, a local deputy, that reports the case to the X-Files division of the FBI where Spender shreds it. After putting the shredded paper back together, Mulder leaves to interview the family.
Wayne spins the narrative that she performed an illegal abortion on their child and that he destroyed all the evidence. Laura starts to believe him and ends up in jail after police find remains of their baby in an outdoor furnace. It isn’t until Wayne visits her in jail that she sees the bite mark on his neck in the same place she bit the demon in her dream. Wayne sucks out her soul to save himself and is shocked when an EMT is able to save her life even though she’s in a coma.
A simple background check tells Mulder that Wayne is really an immigrant named Ivan Veles. A widower multiple times who has another wife named Betsy. AND SHE’S ALSO PREGNANT. Sorry, I know I’m yelling. This episode is so much better than I remember and it was the reason I started rewatching Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
After Betsy confesses to Wayne that a sonogram picked up some abnormalities in their baby, Wayne realizes he has to do another demon spawn abortion. Betsy has the same nightmare that Laura had, but she recognizes the dream demon as Wayne. When Mulder and Scully arrive, Betsy is distraught about having lost her baby. The agents and police find Wayne in the back yard claiming he is digging up evidence, not burying it and he ends up shot. In the hospital where he shares a room with Laura, he returns her soul to her before he dies.
In a twist that I love, the agents dig up the backyard and find several human baby corpses with no abnormalities. Mulder now believes that Betsy is also a demon and can only have demonic offspring with another demon. She killed the normal babies Wayne was so desperate to have because she wanted a demon child so she framed Wayne for the other babies and drove away with her new demon child in Wayne’s convertible. The baby’s clawed hand is seen as well as her demonic eyes. End scene.
Fun Fact: This episode is the only episode throughout the series to have an actor pull out of starring in it because of the religious aspects of the show. The mother of one of the babies used was Catholic and did not her baby associated with the demonic aspects of this episode she and the baby left the production. I would have loved to see The X-Files really lean into the religious connotations that go with this episode by having this be the sixth episode of the sixth season and maybe have Campbell’s character have had six wives. Really give us a 666 treatment. But that wasn’t in the cards and this lands at episode seven instead of six. I guess my Catholic upbringing wasn’t as strict as the mother who left production with her baby.
Bruce Campbell really nails this episode. I’m not sure why he chose to stay within the B-Movie side of the industry, but the man can seriously act when he wants to. This episode suits him too because there is certainly a B-style to it. It isn’t serious enough to really be a dramatic episode and shares similarities with Buffy the Vampire Slayer as far as tone. Composer Mark Snow used Gregorian Chants in the score, aligning it with Occult films like The Omen. And I love the use of alternative rock band Garbage’s Only Happy When It Rains being used when Betsy drives away with her demon spawn. Such an invariably 90s ending to an episode released as the 1990s were on their way out. It was a whole mood then. In guess you had to be there on the precipice of the Millennium.
Campbell’s career started with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, a film that Stephen King dubbed “The most ferociously original horror film of the year”. The film is solidly in my rewatch cycle every October now as are Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, though I need to be in the right mood for the latter. The western series he starred in during the 1990s, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., is something I only just heard of when researching his career. Maybe I’ll check it out if I can find it streaming for free somewhere and the ads aren’t too annoying. He also directed and starred in several episode of Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess which, again, were some of the best syndicated B-style television series a nerd could ask for.
Bruce leaned into his B-Movie reputation with the hilarious and offbeat Bubba Ho-Tep and later in 2007’s My Name is Bruce which he directed and starred as himself. In Frank Darabont’s underrated The Majestic, Campbell had a cameo as an actor starring in B-movie films that played in the theater Jim Carrey’s character had restored. The cameo is something that Campbell has mastered appearing in multiple Marvel projects including all three of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films.
I have to mention his appearance in the 1995 film Congo – an adaptation of a Michael Crichton book. While it received mixed reviews, I found new love for this film in recent years for its insane story that somehow works thanks to the special effects that mostly still hold up today and the cast which included Campbell, Laura Linney, Tim Curry, and Ernie Hudson. Campbell’s role is small, but memorable. And that is the staying power of this man with the dark eyes and hair and mischievous smile. He’s in on the joke, but never willing to be the joke. Serious when he needs to be, not that he ever needs to be.
Most recently he starred in Burn Notice and the Evil Dead series Ash vs. Evil Dead. I’m in the middle of rewatching the latter and I have to say that I really enjoy this man in just about everything he does. This horror fan and movie nerd will be forever grateful for what Bruce Campbell has given the genre. As a middle-aged woman, I’ll fully admit to growing into finding this tall, dark, and often absurd man with the strong chin intensely attractive. Not that you all needed to know that.
Until next week, the truth is out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
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Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
In the last ten days, we’ve gotten a new director’s cut of the second X-Files film and the official wide release of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson’s new horror film. While I have… feelings… about Chris Carter editing out the fact that Fox and Dana had a son together at the end to the original series from the film which I’ll talk about when I get to reviewing the film later on when my blog gets to that point, I will say that I do still enjoy that film as a stand alone X-File even if people seemed not to like it when it came out. It’s a film I’ve revisited many times over the years. It’s stayed with me in a way that only a few episodes of the series did and that is saying something.
As for Gillian Anderson’s new horror film, it is easily one of my favorite new films this year and I highly recommend it. My favorite horror film, for sure. It’ll have you viewing fried chicken with dipping sauce in a whole new way, and that is just the beginning of the sexual tension in the film. Gillian Anderson is a force to be reckoned with. She’s been making me fall in love with her since 1993 and that kind of presence doesn’t happen often. The tension between her and Hannah Einbinder can’t be understated here and I think people will look back on this film as a jump forward for the slasher horror genre. You can read my official review here. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.
Do you remember what film or television project landed Bruce Campbell on your radar? Some of you will of course answer The Evil Dead or Army of Darkness. Maybe some of you knew him first from Xena or Hercules as he had recurring roles on both. Or did you catch him on the short-lived series The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. that aired in 1993 as the lead in to season one of The X-Files? I first remember seeing him in season six X-Files episode Terms of Endearment. For context, I don’t even remember The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. existing at all when I was thirteen, an insane revelation for me now since I was so obsessed with The X-Files then and the two shows aired back-to-back. I did not discover the Evil Dead movies until later in my college era and when I did, I didn’t put it together that it was the same actor as today’s episode.
In what ended up being a kind of reverse Rosemary’s Baby, Terms of Endearment follows a newborn baby stealing demon played by Campbell. The case was designated as an X-File but Agent Jeffrey Spender who still staunchly disbelieves in the paranormal refuses to look into the case and tries to destroy the file. Mulder and Scully manage to steal the case file so they can investigate it. At this point in the series, Agent Spender is still heading up the X-Files while Mulder and Scully are assigned elsewhere within the FBI.
Campbell plays Wayne Weinsider who learns during an ultrasound that the baby his pregnant wife is carrying has bizarre physical abnormalities. Those horns, guys. They mean nothing good. His wife, Laura, has a nightmare about a demon stealing her baby and at one point she bites the demon to protect her child. She wakes to find that she has miscarried. It is her brother, a local deputy, that reports the case to the X-Files division of the FBI where Spender shreds it. After putting the shredded paper back together, Mulder leaves to interview the family.
Wayne spins the narrative that she performed an illegal abortion on their child and that he destroyed all the evidence. Laura starts to believe him and ends up in jail after police find remains of their baby in an outdoor furnace. It isn’t until Wayne visits her in jail that she sees the bite mark on his neck in the same place she bit the demon in her dream. Wayne sucks out her soul to save himself and is shocked when an EMT is able to save her life even though she’s in a coma.
A simple background check tells Mulder that Wayne is really an immigrant named Ivan Veles. A widower multiple times who has another wife named Betsy. AND SHE’S ALSO PREGNANT. Sorry, I know I’m yelling. This episode is so much better than I remember and it was the reason I started rewatching Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
After Betsy confesses to Wayne that a sonogram picked up some abnormalities in their baby, Wayne realizes he has to do another demon spawn abortion. Betsy has the same nightmare that Laura had, but she recognizes the dream demon as Wayne. When Mulder and Scully arrive, Betsy is distraught about having lost her baby. The agents and police find Wayne in the back yard claiming he is digging up evidence, not burying it and he ends up shot. In the hospital where he shares a room with Laura, he returns her soul to her before he dies.
In a twist that I love, the agents dig up the backyard and find several human baby corpses with no abnormalities. Mulder now believes that Betsy is also a demon and can only have demonic offspring with another demon. She killed the normal babies Wayne was so desperate to have because she wanted a demon child so she framed Wayne for the other babies and drove away with her new demon child in Wayne’s convertible. The baby’s clawed hand is seen as well as her demonic eyes. End scene.
Fun Fact: This episode is the only episode throughout the series to have an actor pull out of starring in it because of the religious aspects of the show. The mother of one of the babies used was Catholic and did not her baby associated with the demonic aspects of this episode she and the baby left the production. I would have loved to see The X-Files really lean into the religious connotations that go with this episode by having this be the sixth episode of the sixth season and maybe have Campbell’s character have had six wives. Really give us a 666 treatment. But that wasn’t in the cards and this lands at episode seven instead of six. I guess my Catholic upbringing wasn’t as strict as the mother who left production with her baby.
Bruce Campbell really nails this episode. I’m not sure why he chose to stay within the B-Movie side of the industry, but the man can seriously act when he wants to. This episode suits him too because there is certainly a B-style to it. It isn’t serious enough to really be a dramatic episode and shares similarities with Buffy the Vampire Slayer as far as tone. Composer Mark Snow used Gregorian Chants in the score, aligning it with Occult films like The Omen. And I love the use of alternative rock band Garbage’s Only Happy When It Rains being used when Betsy drives away with her demon spawn. Such an invariably 90s ending to an episode released as the 1990s were on their way out. It was a whole mood then. In guess you had to be there on the precipice of the Millennium.
Campbell’s career started with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, a film that Stephen King dubbed “The most ferociously original horror film of the year”. The film is solidly in my rewatch cycle every October now as are Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, though I need to be in the right mood for the latter. The western series he starred in during the 1990s, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., is something I only just heard of when researching his career. Maybe I’ll check it out if I can find it streaming for free somewhere and the ads aren’t too annoying. He also directed and starred in several episode of Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess which, again, were some of the best syndicated B-style television series a nerd could ask for.
Bruce leaned into his B-Movie reputation with the hilarious and offbeat Bubba Ho-Tep and later in 2007’s My Name is Bruce which he directed and starred as himself. In Frank Darabont’s underrated The Majestic, Campbell had a cameo as an actor starring in B-movie films that played in the theater Jim Carrey’s character had restored. The cameo is something that Campbell has mastered appearing in multiple Marvel projects including all three of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films.
I have to mention his appearance in the 1995 film Congo – an adaptation of a Michael Crichton book. While it received mixed reviews, I found new love for this film in recent years for its insane story that somehow works thanks to the special effects that mostly still hold up today and the cast which included Campbell, Laura Linney, Tim Curry, and Ernie Hudson. Campbell’s role is small, but memorable. And that is the staying power of this man with the dark eyes and hair and mischievous smile. He’s in on the joke, but never willing to be the joke. Serious when he needs to be, not that he ever needs to be.
Most recently he starred in Burn Notice and the Evil Dead series Ash vs. Evil Dead. I’m in the middle of rewatching the latter and I have to say that I really enjoy this man in just about everything he does. This horror fan and movie nerd will be forever grateful for what Bruce Campbell has given the genre. As a middle-aged woman, I’ll fully admit to growing into finding this tall, dark, and often absurd man with the strong chin intensely attractive. Not that you all needed to know that.
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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