Squeeze

The X-Files: One Shot

Aug 01, 2020

(Director of Photography: John S. Bartley)

Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison)—the body-contorting, liver-eating mutant in the series’ first Monster of the Week installment—peering out from a sewer grate (you may have to squint slightly). Even at this early stage, Bartley was playing with levels of darkness, experimenting with the unnerving suggestiveness of a visual void. “Squeeze” additionally utilizes the square and circular shapes of objects and architecture (at times via immensely expressive dissolves) to heighten the threat of a villain for whom such rock-solid structures are no obstacle. The other characters often seem trapped, as much by their own biases (in Scully’s case, ones that she’s gamely attempting to push past) as by an elastic-man killer with a taste for human foie gras. Rhyming with this image, the penultimate shot is a rectangular door slot through which white light and eventual escape beckon.