“Neither innocence nor vigilance may be protection against the howling heart of evil.” – Fox Mulder.
THE CALUSARI [Standalone] Aired April 14, 1995
Episode: 2×21 / 45 Overall
Director: Michael Vejar • Writer: Sara B. Charno
The agents investigate when a young boy’s family is plagued by a series of tragic accidents.
Charno’s second script borrows heavily from films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) which challenge the traditional archetypal villain, in some cases the personification of the Devil, by having a child embody this evil. This can be highly effective at terrifying audiences, as the juxtaposition of innocence and purity, that we associate with a child, with the malevolent and destructive force of pure evil, can be very unsettling. At the same time however, this concept can easily become comical. The ‘evil child’ trope is often unsuccessful at being genuinely scary since the execution of the idea is riding so heavily on the performance of an often inexperienced actor. The question here is where does The Calusari fall in it’s attempt at dramatic horror? For the most part it sticks the landing and despite sometimes missing the mark it’s largely successful even though it’s wholly unoriginal. This was the only X-Files episode in the life of the series to receive a UK ’18’ rating for featuring the death of a small child and the overall disturbing nature of the premise. Joel Palmer returns once again to the series to play the ‘devil child’, he was featured in season one’s forgettable entry, Conduit.
The tightrope of comedy and horror that this episode traverses holds steady for the most part though there are a few slips here and there. One such moment that was written to be scary but comes of as funny is when Michael, Charlie’s twin brother who has materialized from the dead, says “What are you doing Mummy?” They pushed a little hard with this line and it comes off as a forced attempt at being creepy. Yet at other points in the episode Palmer is actually quite convincing, such as when he is violently resisting the exorcism or when his twin is about to stab Scully, he manages to pull off a credible menacing presence, no small feat for a child actor.
The opening and closing sequences are probably the two strongest moments in the show, and this helps carry some of the dead weight and loose ends that were not thoroughly explored during the course of the episode. Such as the grandmother’s claims that the father is the devil or a demon. This is never explored to any great length, we start to get a sense at one point that there may be some truth to this claim but it’s left wide open after his ‘accidental’ death at the hands of the garage door opener motor. The grandmother claims at one point that the boy is evil because the father is evil, but then later on we learn that the evil actually stems from the fact that Charlie’s twin brother Micheal died at birth and the proper soul separating ceremony was not performed. Supposedly this mean that death will now follow Charlie throughout his life. What, if anything, this has to do with her earlier accusations against the father is underdeveloped. A positive addition is that we’re treated to the first appearance of Chuck Burk (Bill Dow) whom Mulder will call upon at various times throughout the series for his unique take on all things paranormal. This is a character I always felt could have been given more screen time and was unfortunately under used.
An aspect that I enjoyed about the climax was that both Mulder and Scully witness equally terrifying and unexplained events. Mulder watches as the evil force is drawn from Charlie’s body as he thrashes around in the hospital bed. Looking for perhaps the first time genuinely frightened and confused by what he is witnessing. At the same time Scully enters the family home to find the mother pinned to the ceiling and Michael advancing upon her with a knife, only to vanish in to thin air moments later leaving behind a small pile of ash, or ‘vibhuti’ the residual sign of spiritual energy. There is a sense at the end of the episode that both agents have experienced something profound, they can neither can fully explain or understand it and both have been moved by the event. The fact that we don’t see a conversation between them were Scully tries to use science to justify the occurrence gives the impression that for once she can’t explain it in any rational sense. It’s about time.
★★★☆☆
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