8 Hidden TV Monsters (And What They Really Look Like)
1. The Long-Clawed Alien - The X-Files
The X-Files, despite ostensibly being a show about aliens, very rarely actually featured any aliens. Across its 218 episode long run, the Monster of the Week trope saw us tangling with boogeymen, poltergeists, were-thingys, reverse vampires and all manner of beasties that go bump in both the night and overcast Washington afternoons. The overarching narrative about the apparently trivial alien conquest of earth though, was reserved for special occasions.
In fact, even when we did get a visit from the show’s Little Green Men (or this case, little grey men) they weren’t afraid from taking the spotlight. If anything ruining the mystery that normally accompanies visitors from other worlds. But making even rarer appearances still were The Colonists ancillary guises / cocoon forms; The Long-Clawed Alien.
Featuring prominently in only a solitary episode (“The Beginning”, which was the premiere of Season 6 and immediately followed the first movie), one of the creatures is barely visible as it hides out in a nuclear power plant. Killing an employee named Homer, just for good, boy-popping, easter-egg measure.
We get a solitary silhouette (as seen above) and a few glimpses of its claws, but production shots from the movie reveal the beast in all of it’s grizzly extra-terrestrial horror. Piercing black eyes, thick reptilian skin, and a permanent facial expression of ‘I’d like to see your space manager?’
[Adam Clery]