In what could stand as one of The X-Files’ most profound mysteries, Chris Carter’s series never across its entire run embarked upon a Halloween-focused episode.
What became the unofficial spin-off series from that show, Millennium, instead turned and embraced the spookiest of holidays head-on with ‘The Curse of Frank Black’ (S2, Ep6), producing not just a visually striking and atmospheric hour of television but, in the grander framework of Carter’s series, a mythological homily to the legend of Samhain.
Millennium never matched the runaway, zeitgeist-baiting success of The X-Files but it provided three extremely distinct seasons filled with episodes that built off the true-life work of criminal profilers in the U.S. and how they caught some of the most heinous killers in history, not to mention the fiction of writers such as Thomas Harris, but arguably informed works of art in a similar vein to come, in particular Bryan Fuller’s Harris adaptation Hannibal and David Fincher’s Mindhunter.
