This is one of the weaker eps of Season 7, though it has its good points.
Good stuff: - Sexy coats! - More sexy coat! Now that I think about it, Mulder in leather means he's not wearing a suit. He looks oddly informal in this ep as a result. Almost like they're not a case together, but rather just out for a drive. - Loved the parallel scenes of the two different churches, showing the two ministers reading from the same Bible passage and interpreting it in completely different ways. The actor playing Enoch O'Connor does a phenomenal job. - The Gracie-giving-birth part was horrifying but extremely well done. I liked the detail afterwards of the snakes' leaving slithery tracks in the blood on the floor.
Bad stuff: The ending. A guy with a snake inside him? Whatever. I seem to recall some behind-the-scenes commentary saying how hard it was to get the CGI snake to line up properly with the guy's mouth in that shot.
A boom mic operator is visible on the left hand side of the screen wearing a white t-shirt, beige shorts, and sneakers. I never noticed this guy before. He's easy to miss, just sort of blends into the scenery. This vid points him out for those who missed him. I wonder why they didn't redo the shot? Was Kim Manners asleep behind the camera?
Fun Facts: - Not all the snakes in "Signs & Wonders" were real. A puppet snake was used for some of the tight closeup scenes.
- When he could not find an appropriate gospel song for the snake-handling sequence, producer Paul Rabwin wrote the song "Sweet Lord Protect Me and Take Me to the Light".
- A fake Mulder snake-bite arm was recycled from the sixth season episode "Dreamland".
Back Story: "Kim Manners is deathly afraid of snakes. So is David Duchovny. John Shiban would not go near the set when the episode was being filmed.
'Signs & Wonders' was looking promising. On the surface primarily an exercise in pure horror playing to people's very real fear of serpents, 'Signs & Wonders' also worked as a religious allegory, in which the concept of good and evil, in a classic X-Files twist, was stood on its head.
'Signs & Wonders' was the brainchild of X-Files staff writer Jeffrey Bell, who was dying to do a down-and-dirty X-Files horror episode and who had also long been an informal student of Appalachian snake handling religious practices. 'I thought anything involving snakes would be scary and I saw the church stuff as something that would be really fascinating,' says Bell, who also wrote the Season 6 animal attack episode 'Alpha'. 'I wanted the snake church people to end up being the good guys. The big trick was going to be how we were going to hide the real bad guys. The way the show usually works out, Mulder is the one to figure out who the bad guys are. So I went into the story meeting with the idea of having Mulder being wrong. Because Mulder believes so strongly it's the other guy, it helped to hide the true identity of the bad guy from the audience.'
As Bell worked to complete the 'Signs & Wonders' script against the typical short deadline, the X-Files production staff turned to casting the backwoods population of the fictional Blessing, Tennessee. And the specter of live rattlesnakes slithering around the actors was a major consideration."
"Frank Spotnitz remembers the rather unorthodox casting process. 'Kim Manners told me, 'When we cast this thing, I don't want the actors to say they're not afraid of snakes, get to the set, and then find out that they are.' So we had a snake wrangler come into the casting office the day the actors were reading and, after they read, he would take a rattlesnake out of its cage and the actors would have to hold the rattlesnake as part of their audition. And the funny thing was that the actors couldn't wait to hold the rattlesnake. They were thrilled at the idea ... but we were still nervous.'
And so a series of safety meetings was set up prior to the start of filming. Among the items on the agenda, according to makeup effects coordinator John Vulich, was the distance to the nearest hospital in case somebody was bitten. During one of those meetings, the production company's collective snake phobia was accidentally tested. John Shiban remembered, 'When we were prepping the show, the snake wrangler brought his snakes to Kim Manner's office and they were talking and showing the snakes to everybody. At one point, the snake wrangler said, 'Hold on, everybody, one of the snakes is not in the box.' One of the snakes had gotten loose in Kim's office.'
The snake was eventually found, coiled behind Manners' desk, but the incident served to emphasize the fact that rattlesnakes would be a constant potential threat on the 'Signs & Wonders' set. However, using the snakes was critical to the verisimilitude of the episode. The snakes' lips were sutured shut so that they could effectively perform while cutting down the chance of the unexpected happening.
'But the threat on those sutures could break,' cautions Spotnitz, 'and we had to be very careful how the actors held them because if they got agitated, they might get loose.'
Not surprisingly, the tension was thick as the actors and reptiles began filming the episode. And despite assurances that all the human actors had passed snake muster, a Gillian Anderson stunt double panicked during the shooting of an insert scene in which Anderson's hand was thrust into a box of snakes. The on-set snake wrangler had to step in and do the shot.
A potential problem developed midway through the filming over a scene where a rattlesnake is thrust into the camera frame as part of an attack sequence. Paul Rabwin recalled that the production people were at a loss as to how to shoot the sequence until visual effects coordinator Bill Millar stepped forward with the creative suggestion that they reverse the sequence on a fiber optic camera. 'So we shot the scene with the snake's mouth on a fiber optic camera and rolled the camera on the snake snapping back from the camera, reversed the shot, and we had our snake attack,' explains Rabwin."
"According to stunt coordinator Danny Weselis, there were anywhere between six and fifty snakes on the set at any one time. Fifteen snakes were involved in the truly horrifying sequence when Mulder is attacked by an army of rattlers who crawl inside his clothes. Duchovny was not within blocks of that scene. 'We doubled David,' reveals Weselis with an evil grin. 'We just dumped fifteen snakes down the stunt double's pants and had them crawl out of his pant legs. It was disgusting, but it turned out to be a great shot.'
Separate body parts were a definite part of the 'Signs & Wonders' equation. John Vulich relates that his company brought to the table a number of silicone arms that the snakes would attack and, in the sequence where Gracie gives birth to snakes, a false stomach whose mechanics simulated the disgusting vision of live snakes wriggling around inside her stomach.
'Signs & Wonders' turned out to be easily one of the most viscerally horrifying episodes of the season. The primary expected response from viewers was one of true, nightmare-inducing terror. However, executive producer Spotnitz hopes that audiences got the underlying theme of the episode, which, he claims, is scary in its own way.
'The theme of the episode was that intolerance can be good. That the snake charmer-preacher turned out to be the good guy turned the expectations totally on their head.'
The general impression in the production company was that network Standards and Practices would be all over this snake-infested episode. However, Spotnitz laughingly recalls that just the opposite was true.
'We thought we'd get all kinds of notes but we didn't. Ironically, the only thing they objected to was in the very last scene of the show. In the background of the preacher's office was a very famous painting of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. The only note we got was that they could see the genitalia on the figures in the painting.'"
[Source - All Things: The Official Guide To The X-Files, Vol. 6, pp. 116-117, Copyright 2001]
Good stuff:
- Sexy coats!
- More sexy coat! Now that I think about it, Mulder in leather means he's not wearing a suit. He looks oddly informal in this ep as a result. Almost like they're not a case together, but rather just out for a drive.
- Loved the parallel scenes of the two different churches, showing the two ministers reading from the same Bible passage and interpreting it in completely different ways. The actor playing Enoch O'Connor does a phenomenal job.
- The Gracie-giving-birth part was horrifying but extremely well done. I liked the detail afterwards of the snakes' leaving slithery tracks in the blood on the floor.
Bad stuff:
The ending. A guy with a snake inside him? Whatever. I seem to recall some behind-the-scenes commentary saying how hard it was to get the CGI snake to line up properly with the guy's mouth in that shot.
A boom mic operator is visible on the left hand side of the screen wearing a white t-shirt, beige shorts, and sneakers.
I never noticed this guy before. He's easy to miss, just sort of blends into the scenery. This vid points him out for those who missed him. I wonder why they didn't redo the shot? Was Kim Manners asleep behind the camera?
Fun Facts:
- Not all the snakes in "Signs & Wonders" were real. A puppet snake was used for some of the tight closeup scenes.
- When he could not find an appropriate gospel song for the snake-handling sequence, producer Paul Rabwin wrote the song "Sweet Lord Protect Me and Take Me to the Light".
- A fake Mulder snake-bite arm was recycled from the sixth season episode "Dreamland".
Back Story:
"Kim Manners is deathly afraid of snakes. So is David Duchovny. John Shiban would not go near the set when the episode was being filmed.
'Signs & Wonders' was looking promising. On the surface primarily an exercise in pure horror playing to people's very real fear of serpents, 'Signs & Wonders' also worked as a religious allegory, in which the concept of good and evil, in a classic X-Files twist, was stood on its head.
'Signs & Wonders' was the brainchild of X-Files staff writer Jeffrey Bell, who was dying to do a down-and-dirty X-Files horror episode and who had also long been an informal student of Appalachian snake handling religious practices. 'I thought anything involving snakes would be scary and I saw the church stuff as something that would be really fascinating,' says Bell, who also wrote the Season 6 animal attack episode 'Alpha'. 'I wanted the snake church people to end up being the good guys. The big trick was going to be how we were going to hide the real bad guys. The way the show usually works out, Mulder is the one to figure out who the bad guys are. So I went into the story meeting with the idea of having Mulder being wrong. Because Mulder believes so strongly it's the other guy, it helped to hide the true identity of the bad guy from the audience.'
As Bell worked to complete the 'Signs & Wonders' script against the typical short deadline, the X-Files production staff turned to casting the backwoods population of the fictional Blessing, Tennessee. And the specter of live rattlesnakes slithering around the actors was a major consideration."
[Continued...]
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"Frank Spotnitz remembers the rather unorthodox casting process. 'Kim Manners told me, 'When we cast this thing, I don't want the actors to say they're not afraid of snakes, get to the set, and then find out that they are.' So we had a snake wrangler come into the casting office the day the actors were reading and, after they read, he would take a rattlesnake out of its cage and the actors would have to hold the rattlesnake as part of their audition. And the funny thing was that the actors couldn't wait to hold the rattlesnake. They were thrilled at the idea ... but we were still nervous.'
And so a series of safety meetings was set up prior to the start of filming. Among the items on the agenda, according to makeup effects coordinator John Vulich, was the distance to the nearest hospital in case somebody was bitten. During one of those meetings, the production company's collective snake phobia was accidentally tested. John Shiban remembered, 'When we were prepping the show, the snake wrangler brought his snakes to Kim Manner's office and they were talking and showing the snakes to everybody. At one point, the snake wrangler said, 'Hold on, everybody, one of the snakes is not in the box.' One of the snakes had gotten loose in Kim's office.'
The snake was eventually found, coiled behind Manners' desk, but the incident served to emphasize the fact that rattlesnakes would be a constant potential threat on the 'Signs & Wonders' set. However, using the snakes was critical to the verisimilitude of the episode. The snakes' lips were sutured shut so that they could effectively perform while cutting down the chance of the unexpected happening.
'But the threat on those sutures could break,' cautions Spotnitz, 'and we had to be very careful how the actors held them because if they got agitated, they might get loose.'
Not surprisingly, the tension was thick as the actors and reptiles began filming the episode. And despite assurances that all the human actors had passed snake muster, a Gillian Anderson stunt double panicked during the shooting of an insert scene in which Anderson's hand was thrust into a box of snakes. The on-set snake wrangler had to step in and do the shot.
A potential problem developed midway through the filming over a scene where a rattlesnake is thrust into the camera frame as part of an attack sequence. Paul Rabwin recalled that the production people were at a loss as to how to shoot the sequence until visual effects coordinator Bill Millar stepped forward with the creative suggestion that they reverse the sequence on a fiber optic camera. 'So we shot the scene with the snake's mouth on a fiber optic camera and rolled the camera on the snake snapping back from the camera, reversed the shot, and we had our snake attack,' explains Rabwin."
[Continued...]
Reply
"According to stunt coordinator Danny Weselis, there were anywhere between six and fifty snakes on the set at any one time. Fifteen snakes were involved in the truly horrifying sequence when Mulder is attacked by an army of rattlers who crawl inside his clothes. Duchovny was not within blocks of that scene. 'We doubled David,' reveals Weselis with an evil grin. 'We just dumped fifteen snakes down the stunt double's pants and had them crawl out of his pant legs. It was disgusting, but it turned out to be a great shot.'
Separate body parts were a definite part of the 'Signs & Wonders' equation. John Vulich relates that his company brought to the table a number of silicone arms that the snakes would attack and, in the sequence where Gracie gives birth to snakes, a false stomach whose mechanics simulated the disgusting vision of live snakes wriggling around inside her stomach.
'Signs & Wonders' turned out to be easily one of the most viscerally horrifying episodes of the season. The primary expected response from viewers was one of true, nightmare-inducing terror. However, executive producer Spotnitz hopes that audiences got the underlying theme of the episode, which, he claims, is scary in its own way.
'The theme of the episode was that intolerance can be good. That the snake charmer-preacher turned out to be the good guy turned the expectations totally on their head.'
The general impression in the production company was that network Standards and Practices would be all over this snake-infested episode. However, Spotnitz laughingly recalls that just the opposite was true.
'We thought we'd get all kinds of notes but we didn't. Ironically, the only thing they objected to was in the very last scene of the show. In the background of the preacher's office was a very famous painting of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. The only note we got was that they could see the genitalia on the figures in the painting.'"
[Source - All Things: The Official Guide To The X-Files, Vol. 6, pp. 116-117, Copyright 2001]
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