A lot of X-Files episodes have been watched recently (with a Series 2 overview coming soon), and it’s made me think that it’s about time we had a new “unexplained” show. You know what I mean: UFOs, Bigfoot, Ghosts and Ghoulies. Because while Chris Carter’s creation set the benchmark for that kind of thing, it didn’t really follow through on everything. The UFO plots became more about colonisation than flying lights, and of all the “famous” phenomena they dealt with they never managed to pull off ghosts. There’s a hell of a lot of potential in cryptozoological stuff, inevitably squandered in substandard episodes about a swamp monster, the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil.

With this in mind, I’m certain a programme could be made that covers the same subject area while managing to be more than an X-Files rip-off. I’ve heard that JJ Abrams may be involved with something like that, hopefully more like Lost Series One than Lost Any Other Series.

It’s difficult to pin down this kind of thing in genre terms. Horror’s the most obvious tag for the monster type things, while anything alieny is going to be SF. I think I prefer tagging it as Weird Fiction (WeiFi?). While a lot of X-Files episodes are explicitly horrific (there’s some seriously vile stuff towards the end of the second series), the “unexplained phenomena” vibe strikes me as different to zombie/monster flicks, or anything that’s all about the gore and body parts. In fact, I can’t think of anything off hand that has the right feel; The Mothman Prophecies, perhaps.

Thinking about it, the atmosphere of the latter is exactly what I’m talking about. Unexplained supernatural events that aren’t quite ghost stories but aren’t quite monster stories either. And the original book’s damned creepy too.