All-time scariest TV characters -- #6: The Peacock family

Here is the total number of full episodes I have watched of the X-Files: one. It's not because I thought that the writing was poor or the acting was worse than what's normally seen at a 5th grade play. No, it was because the episode I saw freaked me out so much that my initial thought was 'If they're all like this I'd rather watch paint dry'.

You can probably guess what episode I'm talking about. If not, let me refresh your memory. The episode was entitled 'Home' and it aired during the fourth season of the series. It started out fairly benign: Scully and Mulder are brought in to investigate the discovery of a newborn corpse with numerous birth defects that was buried in a shallow grave. As the episode went on, though, it got increasingly disturbing as we found out that the newborn was the result of generations of inbreeding from a family who wanted to reamain "pure".

What really gave me the creeps was the introduction of the inbreeding Peacock Family ... their mother in particular. Dear old mom lost all of her limbs during an automobile accident and now seemed to live on a rolling piece of board under the bed. The condition didn't stop her three sons from making a new member of the Peacock family with her.

You know, just writing this is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

In the end, two of the brothers were killed, but a third escaped with his mother. The final scene implied that, despite the loss of his kinfolk, the remaining Peacock son dutifully continued to attempt to sire another member of his family with the mother. As the screen went dark and the credits rolled I remember lunging for the remote and looking for anything remotely funny to get all of the images I saw out of my head.

From that point on I avoided The X-Files like a plague, flashing right past it in search for something light and fluffy. To this day I can still see the scene in the darkened farmhouse where the brothers are rolling their mother out from under the bed. When that happens I look to find an episode of Family Matters to numb my brain.

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