By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The X-Files is a show that gave us some of the most chilling visions in television history. For example, anyone who grew up watching Eugene Tooms using his Mr. Fantastic powers for evil is probably still scared of escalators thanks to the episode “Tooms.” However, bringing such monsters to life was just another day at the office for the production team, and their nightmares usually hit much closer to home. For example, the Season 1 episode “Darkness Falls” was reviled by almost everyone behind the camera because this X-Files episode’s outdoor locations and terrible weather often made filming nearly impossible.
Darkness Falls Is An X-Files Nightmare
For reference, “Darkness Falls” is an X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully must contend with cranky loggers, deadly insects, and new life forms, all of which are running around the Olympic National Forest in Washington State. Two different Vancouver forests were used to bring the famous American forest to life, and the episode looks so good that you’d never know it was haunted by production difficulties. However, the outdoor shoots caused no end of headaches, starting with the fact that all of the extra travel time for scenes meant the crew could only shoot six pages of script a day rather than their intended eight.
It wasn’t just the exterior locations of “Darkness Falls” that slowed down the X-Files production crew. There was also a very specific road access problem. The crew had a work camp that could only be accessed by a dead-end road that only allowed for single-lane traffic and essential vehicles. Therefore, they had to spend obscene amounts of time transporting actors and crew from a public parking lot that was a whopping 200 yards away.
Now, that would have made “Darkness Falls” difficult enough to film, but the X-Files crew also had to fight the elements. Heavy rain kept causing delays, a problem compounded by just how much of the episode was shot outside. Executive producer R.W. Goodwin later estimated that “Out of eight days of shooting, six of them were in the forest,” making for seriously soggy days and nights of laborious work.
The weather was so bad during the filming of “Darkness Falls,” and rain was only one obstacle faced by the X-Files crew. Director Joe Napolitano complained that it rained every day and that the crew was worried that a nearby dam would break due to the weather; furthermore, guest star (and David Duchovny’s childhood friend) Jason Beghe said that “the conditions for filming couldn’t have been worse,” saying “it was raining, snowing and freezing up there.” In Goodwin’s words, all of this added up to “a logistical nightmare” in which simply seeing what was in front of them “was like trying to see through a waterfall.”
While “Darkness Falls” was completed and aired, the version we saw on TV was very different from the one the X-Files crew originally envisioned. Intended shots had to be scrapped because rain made certain camera shots and placements impossible, and production stalled out because the weather made tasks like recording clean audio almost impossible. The weather even made filming daytime scenes impossible at times because, as befitting such the episode title, the clouds surrounded everyone in darkness.
Credit where credit is due, though: “Darkness Falls” is a very solid early X-Files episode, and none of these production difficulties are visible onscreen. Now that we know how hard it was to film, though, we’ll never look at this classic episode the same way again. Mulder tried to tell us that “the truth is out there,” but it turns out that what we really needed to look out for was the rain.
Leave a Reply