The X-Files basically cornered the market on creepy TV villains for most of the nineties and into the 2000s. Whether a Monster of the Week episode or related to the overarching government conspiracy, the bad guys always had a little something extra up their sleeves. Some were aliens; some had extraordinary psychic or physical abilities, and some were simply really evil people. Some were funny; some were terrifying, and some were ghosts or entities possessing other people.
We’re counting down the 20 creepiest villains ever to appear on The X-Files. Get ready to be unsettled.
20 Chinga - Season 5, Episode 10, “Chinga”
Stephen King contributed to the writing of this episode, so it’s perfect to kick off our creepy list. Polly Turner is a little girl whose fisherman father gave her a doll he found in a lobster trap shortly before his untimely and gruesome death. Polly’s mother Melissa has noticed that terrible things have been happening to people that Polly takes issue with, always preceded by Melissa having a premonitory vision of the ‘accident’ and a snide little comment from the doll, whom Polly has named Chinga.
Scully happens to be in the area vacationing and swoops into save the day, but you’ll never feel right listening to The Hokey Pokey again.
19 Gene Gogolak - Season 6, Episode 15, “Arcadia”
Kudos to Peter White for keeping up the creepy factor playing Gene Gogolak, on what was largely a very amusing episode. Mulder and Scully go undercover as Rob and Laura Petrie, moving into a home in a pristine planned community that might be hiding a sinister secret. Not only has a couple disappeared under suspicious circumstances, Gogolak, the president of the homeowners’ association, has a curiously strict list of rules for householders that seems linked to the disappearance.
It turns out that Gogolak has something called a tulpa, a mystical Tibetan thoughtform, in his employ to help enforce the rules of his utopian community. In the end, Gogolak can no longer control his tool, and after all, there’s nothing creepier than the suburbs.
18 John Lee Roche - Season 10, Episode 4, “Paper Hearts”
Tom Noonan is always good if you need a creepy villain, and he excels here as Roche, a child killer who may possess vital knowledge about the disappearance of Mulder’s sister, Samantha. It’s sort of a running trope, psychopaths who manipulate the agents into thinking they have information on personal mysteries (see Luther Lee Boggs, below) in the agents' lives, and it's sometimes a little surprising how well it works, but Roche’s history as a quiet, smooth vacuum cleaner salesman works, to the point that Mulder springs him from prison and almost enables him to carry out one final killing.
17 Leonard - Season 2, Episode 20, “Humbug”
Not to be confused with Leonard Betts, the slightly more sympathetic cancer-eating killed from Season 4, Episode 12, the Leonard in “Humbug” was the parasitic twin of the sweet, sad Lanny (Vincent Schiavelli). The twins live at a trailer park that caters to circus and ex-circus performers, and the agents are called to look into gruesome attacks dating back almost 30 years.
The horror comes when the agents realize that Leonard has been detaching himself from his brother’s body at night for years, going on the rampage, and now that Lanny has descended into a physically terminal state due to years of alcoholism, Leonard is looking for somewhere else to live. But in an episode about otherness and what is means to be normal, maybe it is the rest of us that are the creepy ones.
16 Eddie Van Blundht - Season 4, Episode 20, “Small Potatoes”
"Small Potatoes” is such an amusing episode that it’s really only after you’ve turned it off that you realize how creepy Eddie Van Blundht (Darin Morgan) is. A number of women using the same fertility doctor have ended up with babies with tails, which is traced back to a schlumpy janitor named Eddie Van Blundht who used to have a tail himself.
It turns out that not only is Eddie and not the fertility doctor the responsible party, Eddie also has the much more insidious talent of shape-shifting, and it was by making himself look like all of these women’s partners or fantasies that he was able to impregnate them with the tailed babies. He’s on the verge of seducing Scully in the guise of Mulder when the real Mulder fortuitously bursts in. If he hadn’t, who knows? Scully might have had a baby with a tail.
15 Warren Dupre/Jack Willis - Season 1, Episode 15, “Lazarus”
It’s a mysterious case of body-hopping that the agents are confronted with when an ex-flame of Scully’s, Jack Willis (Christopher Allport), is shot by bank robber Warren Dupre, who is shot by Scully. Attempts are made to save both men, but only Willis’ body is revived, albeit apparently with the soul of Dupre inside of him. Scully particularly is baffled by Willis’ behavior as he doggedly pursues Lula, Dupre’s partner.
Mulder suspects the truth, but Scully continues to trust Willis until he takes her hostage. There’s an interesting tug of war between Willis and Dupre, as Dupre’s tattoo begins to appear on Willis’ arm, but in the end, neither man can survive Willis’ diabetic need for insulin.
14 Wilson “Pinker” Rawls - Season 6, Episode 17
There’s no denying that Wilson “Pinker” Rawls (John Diehl) is a bad guy. We initially see him at a prison farm, nailing another inmate’s hand to a wall. After a devastating tornado hits the farm and a warden suffers a hideous fate, the missing Pinker is blamed, and strange structural damage to walls also oddly points to him.
Apparently being hit by lightning during the tornado has given Pinker the ability to move through solid substances, a diagnosis which doesn’t sit well with Scully. He’s also after the son his ex has tried to keep a secret from him, and he relentlessly chases the two of them down for a terrible, unavoidable dénouement.
13 Orell Peattie - Season 7, Episode, 14, “Theef”
The always-frightening Billy Drago was perfectly cast as West Virginia hoodoo man Orell Peattie, who turns up in California hell-bent on avenging the death of his daughter Lynette, who was given an overdose of morphine by a prominent doctor after she was terribly injured in a bus crash. He works his dark magic against those he feels are responsible with poppets and hexes, eventually exhuming Lynette’s body to take back what he believes is rightfully his. It’s a dark and chilling episode overall, cemented by Drago’s unnerving performance.
12 Virgil Incanto - Season 3, Episode 6, “2Shy”
Internet chat rooms were on the rise in 1995, and so was the fear of them, a fear that this episode played excellently on. The improbably named Viirgil Incanto (Timothy Carhart) said all the right things to shy, overweight women with low self-esteem, luring them into trusting him before he killed them, smothering them with a gooey substance that then dissolved their bodies.
His landlord, a single mother with a blind teen daughter, unfortunately falls into his web as well, believing they share a kinship as fellow writers. Incanto gets no sympathy from the audience or the agents, saying that in return for the body fat he needed, he made lonely women happy for a little while.
11 Cecil L’Ively - Season 1, Episode 12, “Fire”
An Irish arsonist is after the British aristocracy, picking up new identities as he goes along, burning his victims alive in what appears to be spontaneous human combustion. There is possibly a political element to his motives, but Cecil L’Ively (Mark Sheppard) also just seems to really enjoy setting people and things on fire, something he is able to do with no apparent flame or fuel source. L’Ively is just evil for its own sake, and even after he sustains horrific, normally unsurvivable burns, comically asks for a cigarette.
10 Michael Holvey - Season 2, Episode 21, “The Calusari”
There’s just something a little creepy about twins, and that ante is upped when they’re child twins, and one of them died at birth and is possessing the living twin. Charley Holvey’s little brother Teddy is killed in a suspicious accident at a carnival, and not only is Charlie not bothered, he’s got an unsettling Romanian grandmother hovering a little too closely for comfort.
It turns out that the stillborn Michael has been wreaking havoc in the family’s lives, and that the grandmother’s old country attempts to have him exorcised with the help of a group of mystics is the only thing standing between them and total destruction.
9 Samuel Mackey - Season 7, Episode 9, “Signs and Wonders”
The agents confronted religious fundamentalism at a snake-handling church after a young member of the congregation is killed in his car by rattlesnakes. It turns out he was the presumed father of a child expected by the pastor’s daughter, Gracie, who’d been subsequently tossed out of the church.
Strange signs and portents abound, with objects turning into snakes, and the pastor’s miraculous recovery from dozens of bites. As evil as the pastor seems though, it is the Reverend Mackey (Randy Oglesby) of another church that the agents had consulted who turns out to be the real villain, as well as the father of Gracie’s ‘child’, which also turned out to be snakes. Like the creepiest of villains, Mackey escapes and begins his life over elsewhere, with the same dark purposes.
8 Luther Lee Boggs - Season 1, Episode 13, “Beyond the Sea”
The casting is impeccable as Brad Dourif took on the role of Boggs, a leering Southern serial killer Mulder arrested years ago who claims to possess some psychic knowledge about the kidnapping of a young couple. In the course of questioning Boggs, Scully has strange visions of her beloved father, who has just died unexpectedly.
Does he really have a last message for Scully from her father or actual helpful knowledge about the kidnapping, or is he just toying with the agents for an extended stay of execution? Dourif will keep you guessing past the end of the episode.
7 The Eves - Season 1, Episode 11, “Eve”
What’s creepier than a little girl with violent psychic abilities? Two of them, who are being led by their just as creepy grownup versions. The fathers of two identical yet seemingly unrelated girls are killed in eerily similar circumstances, with the trail finally leading back to an in vitro fertilization clinic and a Dr. Sally Kendrick with a history of eugenics experiments.
Mulder’s contact Deep Throat clues him in that Kendrick is one of a number of super-soldier clones left over from a Cold War experiment, and the other “Eves” as the girls were known, are in mental hospitals or on the run. The girls were conceived by Kendrick as a continuation of the original project that also would fix its flaws, as evidenced by the clever killings of their fathers. The young girls reunite with two of the original Eves in an asylum, where you can tell they are up to no good.
6 Mrs. Peacock - Season Four, Episode 2, “Home”
This creepy villain comes as a surprise in one of the most notorious X-Files episodes ever. Mulder and Scully head to small-town America to investigate the discovery of an infant buried with a host of genetic abnormalities. They’re soon on the hunt for what they fear is an injured woman being held against her will in what must be a situation of unimaginable abuse. The truth is even more twisted: the ‘victim’ is one Mrs. Peacock, the matriarch of a family that’s rumored to have been incestuous since the Civil War.
Armless and legless after a car accident, she has continued to bear children fathered by her sons and feels herself in no need of rescue. Although critics and audiences were shocked by the graphic content at the time, it is now looked back on as one of the best episodes ever.
5 B.J. Morrow/Harry Cokely - Season 2, Episode 12, “Aubrey”
We’ve got another possession episode, this time it’s B.J. Morrow, a detective newly pregnant after an affair with her boss, who one night finds herself led to dig up the body of a long-missing FBI agent. This leads the agents to the serial killer the dead agent was investigating, a vicious rapist named Harry Cokely with a penchant for carving the word “sister” into his victim’s chests.
Morrow’s behavior begins to go violently off the rails, and it’s discovered that Morrow’s father was the product of one of Cokely’s rapes. Morrow eventually tracks Cokely down just before his death, but she ends up in a mental institution, unable to escape from her family’s dismal past.
4 Robert Patrick Modell - Season 3, Episode 17, “Pusher”, Season 5, Episode 8, “Kitsunegari”
If there’s such a thing as an iconic X-Files villain, it’s Robert Patrick Modell (Robert Wisden), aka Pusher. He has the uncanny ability to talk anyone into anything, even if it kills them, and he sets his sights on Mulder. After realizing that Modell’s talents of persuasion are caused by a terminal brain tumor, they locate him at a hospital, where he lures Mulder into a game of Russian roulette.
Modell’s character made such an impact that after being put into a coma when Mulder was able to resist at the last moment and shoot him in the head, he woke up two seasons later to appear in “Kitsunegari”, doing naughty things with cerulean blue paint.
3 Donnie Pfaster - Season 2, Episode 13, “Irresistible”
Donnie Pfaster (Nick Chinlund) is creepy right off the bat: we meet him at his workplace as a funeral home assistant, where he’s cutting hair off the corpse of a young woman and subsequently getting fired. Mulder and Scully are called in when several mutilated corpses are found, some freshly killed, some exhumed after burial, missing chunks of hair and fingernails, and necrophilia is implied (although Chris Carter was instructed not to mention it specifically).
Scully is especially disturbed by the details of the case, and of course, Pfaster ends up kidnapping her and planning on killing her with his usual fetishistic rituals before Mulder can track them down.
2 Eugene Tooms - Season 1, Episode 3, “Squeeze”, Season 1, Episode 21, “Tooms”
Not only is Eugene Tooms (Doug Hutchison) a highly creepy villain, but he’s also in the running for most disgusting. The newly-partnered agents are pretty confused by a series of serial killings that goes back to the 1930s, involving the removal of victims’ livers with apparently no tools other than human hands, and a perpetrator who can get themself into the tiniest slivers of space.
It takes a visit to a helpful ex-detective to pin it all on Eugene Tooms, an eerily quiet man, and genetic mutant who can hibernate for decades at a time in a repulsive nest made of bile, emerging every 30 years to stock up on human liver. He’s committed to an asylum at the end of episode 3, but released in episode 21, and the agents must find a way to stop him before he kills again.
1 Cigarette Smoking Man
The creepiest of creeps, the most evil of villains; the man whose name we don’t know until the 11th season: The Cigarette Smoking Man, played exquisitely by William B. Davis, and by Chris Owens in his younger days. We see him lurking in the background of the pilot (he was initially only intended as an extra), and he ended up becoming the show’s chief villain, the representation of the government conspiracy that loomed over the agents from the beginning and threatens the very existence of life on Earth. It’s hard to get creepier than that.
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The X-Files: The 20 Creepiest Villains in the TV Show, Ranked - MovieWeb
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