With conspiracy culture now weaponised, can a revival of The X-Files really work today?

Nostalgia for the 1990s is currently a potent fuel, and news that plans for a revival of The X-Files are solidifying has excited fans who have elevated FBI agents Mulder and Scully to the realms of the mythic.

But glance at any early episode of the hit sci-fi drama about investigations into the otherworldly and it soon becomes clear just how much of a product of its time it is.

Aesthetically, it’s undeniable. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) conducts research not on Google, but by whizzing through a blur of microfiche. When her partner Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) frets about being under surveillance, it isn’t CCTV that concerns him, rather a bug on his landline phone. Photos are developed in darkrooms, not uploaded to Instagram. And evidence mounts in manila folders not online forums. But nothing dates the series so much as its slogan: The Truth is Out There.

To put that phrase into context, we must cast our minds back to 1993 – the year that the eerie whistle of The X-Files theme tune was heard for the first time. The date 9/11 was still a benign one on the calendar and Donald Trump merely a mega-rich hotelier who’d recently cameoed in the sequel to Home Alone. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama had us believing that we’d reached “the end of history”: liberal democracy had won, the Cold War was consigned to the past.

But then came along this weird little out-there conspiracy drama with its catchphrase of unease that flipped this sense of optimism. "The Truth is Out There” suggested that there was a perception gap between our lives of apparent contentment and the real answers that lay beyond our line of sight. What was being hidden from us? Who was keeping it concealed? And could these two investigators in their basement office fill in the missing parts to that occluded picture?

As it turned out, the truth in the case of The X-Files was that high-up suits in government had been colluding for malign purposes with aliens – a concept dreamt up by the show’s creator Chris Carter, who’d come of age in the era of Watergate and thus had his belief in institutions and authority tainted. He’d taken his personal trust issues and extrapolated them out into a grand science-fiction concept, feeding much of that wariness into the character of Mulder.

But this was conspiracy theorising of a high-spirited kind, the mythology of The X-Files being a tantalising puzzle to solve rather than a cry of nihilistic despair. When it came to discovering the secrets of The X-Files, viewers scented the thrill of the chase rather than anything more sinister. QAnon, “Globalist” puppet masters, 5G towers – all that lay in the future. The problem for The X-Files revival is that such polarising talk is now very much our present.

Ryan Coogler, the Sinners director who’s now bringing The X-Files back to our screens, said only recently that his version will feature “both monsters of the week and the overarching conspiracy”. Few will have a problem with the former, as many of the genetic mutants and folkloric creatures that populated the original run have lived long in the nightmares of ‘90s kids. For instance, it can be no accident that, of the many episodes it could have picked for its curated week of repeats, the UK broadcaster 5 has opted to include Squeeze, which saw the debut of limb-stretching serial killer Tooms, whose creepy elasticity has haunted a generation.

Coogler is free to go to whatever macabre extremes he chooses to scare us half to death, but when it comes to conspiracy culture, he ought to be more circumspect. For if he were to plot Mulder’s journey down a logical path, the FBI agent would, at the very least, be hosting a podcast called Trust No One, where no end of left-of-left field views would be being aired. But in the current climate, might he even have been among those storming the Capitol in 2021 in a horned helmet?

Obviously, this is just a joke (and a small provocation) when it comes to the possible fate of Mulder. But there can be no denying that in the decades since Duchovny and Anderson were propelled to fame, conspiracy culture has been weaponised to such an extent that democracies are now at risk of being destabilised. What once felt like spine-tingling fun has become political leverage, with real-world misinformation often feeling just as outré as anything found in an X File.

And thanks to the immediacy of social media, any conspiracy arc that Coogler depicts runs the risk of being corrupted faster than Tooms can scurry down a ventilation shaft. What was once fantasy escapism will become confirmation bias. In short, what hope is there for dramatised fears of an alien invasion when reality is far more paranoid?

The truth is no longer just out there. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Monetised and memed. In the 1990s, it was a playful invitation to the curious. In 2026, it unfortunately feels a yell from the aggrieved in the digital wilderness.

The X-Files is available to watch on Disney+. You can sign up to Disney+ from £5.99 a month now.

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