What would Mulder and Scully make of a case that brought them face-to-face with “the strange and awful truth” of existence? “Crampton”, an unproduced screenplay for The X-Files, offers a clue: co-written by cult horror author Thomas Ligotti in 1998, the script plunges our detective leads into a world of illusion, suggesting conspiracies of a different kind.
Ligotti wrote his X-Files script with Brandon Trenz, his colleague at a reference-book publisher. The script that he and Trenz concocted, concerns the death of an FBI agent from an apparent heart attack, after a man walks into the bureau unchallenged and fires a joke-shop gun in his direction. When some nearby feds tackle the assassin to the ground, they find he has transformed into a mannequin. Enter Mulder and Scully, who follow a trail to the sinister backwoods town of Crampton, where things take a turn for the truly bizarre.
“Crampton” is plenty weird by X-Files standards. An early clue this won’t be your standard monster-of-the-week fare comes when Mulder and Scully examine the body of the FBI agent, Larry Johnson. After the disturbing discovery that Johnson’s pupils contract when a torch is shone on his eyes, the scene cuts to an eerie POV shot from the cadaver itself, causing the viewer to wonder what, exactly, is doing the looking.
The episode culminates in a horrifying magic performance, which allows Mulder and Scully a peek behind the curtains into a roaring black void – the Nietzschean abyss that stares back, perhaps – which the episode has been hinting at all along. It’s strong stuff, but Ligotti bristles when [the author of this article] suggest the scene tips the episode into the realms of the surreal – the key image, of a man lashed to a cage having impossible things done to his body, evokes something out of a Francis Bacon painting. “You’re right in that our ending was a bit more complex than that of the average X-Files plot,” says Ligotti, “but I wouldn’t say it was surreal or confusing in any way... Ultimately, the viewer knows more than Mulder and Scully about the resolution of the episode’s plot. That’s the unusual aspect of our episode. But it wasn’t, like, some artsy ‘What-the-hell-was-that?’ conclusion. Its narrative was solid all the way.”
In the end, Ligotti and Trenz’s attempts to get the script produced came to nothing, as the show’s makers did not accept submissions from outside contributors, with the odd noteworthy exception (Stephen King and William Gibson were both tapped to write episodes for the fifth season). The pair reworked their script into a feature-length treatment unrelated to The X-Files, but abandoned the idea after failing to find backing.
Full article + Interview: Dazed
Script version of the unpublished X-Files episode: Crampton
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Gibson's idea about haunted website failed based on Chris Carter's disagreement.
Jeffrey Reddick (Final Destination) revealed his version of unused The X-Files script, Flight 180.
List of unmade X-Files episodes: Wikipedia
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Gibson's idea about haunted website failed based on Chris Carter's disagreement.
Jeffrey Reddick (Final Destination) revealed his version of unused The X-Files script, Flight 180.
List of unmade X-Files episodes: Wikipedia