X-Files - Alpha

From Blogger Pictures

“I’ve ignored the symptoms for years. I’ve always felt more like a wolf than a person.”

            - Karin Berquist “Alpha” (1998)

This was another episode that freaked the shit out of me when I was younger… roughly around the same age and time when I saw “Agua Mala.” This episode was about an extinct animal that shape-shifts known as the Trickster Dog.

I remember watching this episode and getting so scared that I wanted my dad to sleep next to me so that I didn’t have to get eaten first. As terrible as my intentions were, it’s how that episode made me feel. Afterwards I had such a morbid fear of dogs that I wouldn’t go near them. What made it worse was we had a dog that was like that one in our neighborhood named Kufeld.

The scene that I remembered so vividly was when this shadowy looking man transforms into the dog and attacks a night watchman. What was so scary about this episode was that this dog was a man, he was a shape shifter who was aware of it and yet he continued to kill people. He acted like a dog.

I did some research and there is no known cryptid that is the Wanshang Dhole. This episode gave a whole new outlook on the werewolf ideology and mythology. People have complained that this episode was stupid and that it was littered with “lame dog jokes, such as ‘you get a biscuit Skully,” and was “an obvious rip off of ‘Cujo,’” People have also complained that it made no sense and that this was one of the weakest episodes out there… I can’t agree with this because I am not going to nitpick through mundane details like this when the horror aspect of this episode was so strong for me.

People need to stop critiquing things like that to the bone… even I don’t do that when it comes to bad movies.