Supercut

The Truth of the X-Files Fan Edit.

By Magda Lena Griffel

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

Tessa LaFlamme was 14 when she made her first X-Files fan edit. If you beg her, she’ll show it to you. “It's violently bad,” she’ll preface. “I had a hip hop class where we learned a combination from the Backstreet Boys, and I thought, ‘this song’s great, how can I edit to it?’” The video is 30 seconds long, in 1:1 ratio, chaotic, and bouncy. There are way too many special effects, and the music crowds out the audio, but amidst the mayhem there’s an eye for comedic and dramatic timing—traces of her artistic signature. It was just the beginning: Since 2018, Tessa’s been a member of what is likely one of the largest and most expansive fan communities in the world, and, anonymously, is one of the internet’s foremost X-Files fan editors.

The X-Files is a generational obsession. Tessa grew up in Tennessee, where her mother required all her children to watch it—a literal rite of passage. For the uninitiated, The X-Files centers on a pair of self-serious FBI agents pursuing cases of supernatural and alien life, busy uncovering government conspiracies and ignoring their ridiculous levels of sexual tension. Watching the original seasons as they aired between 1993 and 1999, Tessa’s mother never missed a single episode. It might’ve been the gory sci-fi, sweeping score, or airtight mythos that kept her hooked, but more likely, like the rest of us, it was Special Agents Scully and Mulder, played by Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. As a teenager, she was a “shipper” (a term X-Files fans invented, along with its counterpart, “noromo”) and kept a journal full of handwritten MSR (or Mulder-Scully-Romance) fanfiction. Though there were networks of Usenet groups and sites dedicated to X-Files fanfiction in the ’90s, she never published her work, and the journal was lost in a move when she was 18. Lost to posterity, Tessa never got to read it.

But she carried the torch in her own way, and later, so did her younger sisters. When Tessa entered an online community of X-Files fan editors as a teen, she began gathering clips from DVD gag reels, piracy sites, and other editors to craft meticulously ordered videos set to songs. As she became more prolific, she invested in the editing tool VideoStar, posting across platforms. She won competitions judged by fandom-appointed editors who then admitted her into exclusive editor group chats to share tools and footage. Tessa has explained to me the various techniques and conventions of the art: the difference between the slow-motion, layering-heavy Instagram edits, the technical, mood-curated, TikTok edits, and the longer, earnest, narrative-based YouTube edits. There are insider symbols, cliques, and so-called “generations.” “This is so niche and weird,” Tessa laughed. “To know so much information about it. But it’s true.”

The X-Files is one of those cultural phenomena that is very difficult to watch casually. When I, for one, finish an episode, I emerge dazed, primally craving more. Merely watching and listening isn’t enough. I want to eat it, want it to enter my bloodstream and flow inside my veins, to fill my lungs and stick there like cigarette tar. Fan edits attempt to satisfy that craving. They amplify emotions, slow down every glance and gaze, ruthlessly break our hearts and, with the perfectly overlaid lyrics, piece them back together again. Logically, these gimmicks should make fan edits feel like exaggerated, melodramatic distortions, but they don’t: They are attempts to match the way we perceive and interact with the original, affirming the truth in our subjectivity. The truth, after all, is out there. Creators of fan content, spanning fanfiction, fanart, crack videos, short-form fan edits, and half-hour-long narrative edits, feel that truth too. All characters and fan clips are considered stolen and are demonetized across all platforms. And still, these artists feel called to fulfill this need, to bridge the gap between our obsessive experience of the show and reality. Both making these videos and appreciating them is to say, yes, I feel it too. 

According to Tessa, most editors routinely delete their accounts when they have too big a following, so that they can start from scratch under an unknown username and accrue followers again. It’s the ultimate way to prove that, above all, their art and the impetus behind it—not the algorithm—is what garners them a following. Today, most of Tessa’s content is wiped from the internet, with a faith that if she were ever to start again, the videos would be just as popular.

On YouTube, some of her work remains, betraying her signature style and—if you know her–her essence. While other editors, like her younger sister Clara, are devoted to romantic and earnest MSR content, the truth that Tessa taps into is the show’s underlying goofiness and absurdity. She insists that the beauty in The X-Files’ production is that it doesn’t take itself as seriously as one would expect. She posts crack videos, a genre characterized by a series of achronological clips stitched with precisely placed memes, thought bubbles, sound effects, and discordant music. Creating them, Tessa says, is like writing an essay. There’s a hook, body paragraphs, a conclusion—a controlled method to the seeming madness. Over a scene where Mulder and Scully crash a car through a forest, for example, she plays the gentle click of a seatbelt and the slow mournful cords of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license.” She screen-records other videos for inspiration and plays them back in slo-mo to see all the effects. If she isn’t willing to watch a clip 15,000 times, she doesn’t keep it in. These videos have reached over 18,000 people on YouTube alone, and that’s only a small fraction of the views she has on other platforms. Her popularity is accidental: “The crack videos that I made were for my sister. I didn't really make them for everyone to watch.”

Tessa is now a 22-year-old actor, juggling school, auditions, voice and dance training, film shoots, and a job at a midtown record store. She is mostly retired from X-Files editing, but has hinted at an eventual return to the form (her season three crack video was promised but is still tragically hidden in her drafts). Still, it’s difficult to overstate the impact the fandom has had on her life. “The X-Files got me into acting, which is why I moved to New York in the first place,” Tessa told me. As a teenager, she watched Gillian Anderson’s performance as the strong, level-headed, fiercely independent Dana Scully in awe, and, as an editor, watched the show’s gag reels and began to understand acting as a real job that normal, silly people like her could do. “I don't know if I can pull it off as well as Gillian Anderson did,” she confessed, “but I would like to try.” 

The phenomenon of Anderson and her character has been studied—not just as an inspiration for artists like Tessa, but for women in STEM who were influenced by the so-called “Scully Effect.” Women who watched Scully, a skilled medical doctor as well as an agent, in the ’90s were more likely to seek out jobs in STEM fields, which are majority-male across the board. Less studied, but obvious to anyone in the fan community is Anderson’s inexplicable impact on queer people, particularly women—not just in coming to terms with their sexuality, but also in expressing it as freely as she does, and finding community in a shared admiration of her skill and beauty. (In Tessa’s words: “She’s hot!” in the actor Kate McKinnon’s: “Gillian, you are perfect … call me,” and, to quote Graham Norton, “I mean, the lesbians do love you. They just adore you.”) 

When I asked Tessa again why she thought the show attracted such a strong queer fanbase, she had a serious answer. She conceded that Scully’s attractiveness is “kind of an incentive to get into the fandom,” but once fans are there, it’s the show’s levels of irony and silliness that tug at people like her. The X-Files’ tongue-in-cheek self-awareness attracts fans who want to expose the underlying motivation—in queering it, tapping into a queerness already there. Agent Krycek being gay, for example, is canon now, and there are debates over classifying Scully and Mulder a “functionally lesbian relationship” based on the stereotype of prolonged, unspoken, mutual pining. 

Scully and Mulder spend all 11 seasons religiously pursuing the truth within a dominant narrative. If the show is gay, the practice of fan editing is even gayer. The gesture of the fan video— insisting on the truth of our perception and construction of reality—holds an aspect of queer life and existence. Where the historically heterosexist, transphobic version of reality has denied queer experience as really real, it is the gesture of queer imagination, combined with a general determination to live life passionately and freely, that defends and insists on its truth. It’s an exhaustive, constant practice, but inside this niche it never wavers: demonetized and anonymous, editors still create. Since 1993, in this UFO, MSR, GA-riddled corner of the internet where Tessa, her mother, and the rest of the X-Files editors live and have lived, the gesture is perfectly captured.