“The Calusari” sees The X-Files return to a more conventional register after the singularity of “Humbug.” It draws equally on It and The Omen and revolves around a Romanian-American family who start to suspect that their son might be possessed. This produces the first hint of a found footage aesthetic in the series, as Mulder introduces Scully to a colleague he describes as “the king of digital imaging” to parse a photograph of this boy just before his baby sister was run over by a train. The expert explains that photographs contain a great deal of information that we can’t see without specialist augmentation. In this case, as in so many subsequent found footage horror, that additional information turns out to be paranormal.

What ensues echoes Dracula as Mulder and Scully investigate a series of Romanian rituals embedded in American suburbia, drawn from the mystical Calusari cult. There are some really interesting plot points here. Just as found footage was on the cusp of perception in 1995, so was Munchausen by Proxy, one of the possible angles of the case, and for a while screenwriter Sara Charno seems to hesitate between what is more exotic – this condition or the paranormal. The episode also continues the series’ slippage between physical and digital space as we learn that the Calusari are capable of biolocating – shifting their energy from their physical location to another place. In effect, they are already inhabiting a virtual plane, or a digital body, especially since their biolocation produces a special kind of dust, “neither organic nor inorganic,” that materialises out of and contours emptiness. It’s the same granularity we see in The Matrix’s later imagination of the digital ether.

All that said, “The Calusari” is a bit of a generic possession narrative, especially when compared to “Humbug,” as Mulder and Scully find themselves chasing down an amorphous evil that has gone by different names: “Cain, Lucifer, Hitler.” Narratively, its most distinctive trait is its intensity rather than its narrative arc – the opening scene, in which the little girl is killed on the railway track, is genuinely brutal, while the climactic exorcism of her brother is one of the most harrowing sequences in the series so far.