Here’s a fun Halloween trick: Mention the Peacock family to an unsuspecting “X-Files” fan and enjoy the reaction.
It’s likely to be some combination of a shudder, a squeal and a groan, a mix of delight and revulsion. (A reporter’s wife: “Please, God, not at the dinner table.”) The Peacocks are at the center of “Home,” an “X-Files” episode that originally aired in October 1996. Viewers complained that the tale about the murderous inbred clan was too disturbing and network executives apparently agreed. While “Home” appeared later on the cable channel FX, it was never again broadcast on Fox, save for a special Halloween airing in 1999; network ads at the time billed it as “an episode so controversial, it’s been banned from television for three years.”
The episode has since become a fixture on various “scariest shows ever” lists and endures as one of the most beloved in the series’s history. It’s available on Netflix and Hulu, and if you haven’t seen it, be warned that spoilers start now.Netflix describes “Home” as “the agents encounter a family of inbred animal-like brothers living on a farm,” which is accurate but also leaves out plenty. The episode begins, fittingly, on a dark and stormy night, as the hideously disfigured Peacock brothers bury a deformed baby in a field.
After a group of children discover the tiny corpse, Mulder and Scully arrive to investigate, and the brothers kill multiple townspeople in an attempt to preserve their way of life. Eventually the agents discover Ma Peacock, a ghastly, limbless torso, played by Karin Konoval, who lives on a rolling cart under a bed in the family home. She is the mother, lover and puppet master of the brothers (one of whom is also the father of the other two). “A boy will do anything for his mother,” she growls to Scully, not long before she and one surviving son escape with plans to start a new family.
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