Scary Monsters starts exactly how any really interestingly cruel horror should. Little suburban American kid can’t get to sleep cause he thinks there’s something under the bed, so daddy checks only to see a little reptile like creature scattering around - instead of screaming, he tells the kid to go back to sleep.

Upon hearing the kid scream, daddy holds the door closed so kid can’t escape, and kid dies! How deliciously evil of Chris Carter! Anyway, Scully is actually doing her job in the FBI Training Academy when good old X-File wannabe Leyla Harrison pops in to disturb her lunch. She thinks she’s found an X-File while working in accounting and tries to convince Scully to help.

Doggett, Reyes and Leyla head out to the house where the kid and father live, only to get trapped there by these monsters. They all witness a load of strange stuff but it turns out that the kids imagination is causing it so I guess it doesn’t really count as actually witnessing, regardless, Doggett thinks he falls into a whole and gets surrounded by loads of weird scorpion looking bugs, Monica has one burst out of her stomach, and Leyla’s eyes bleed.

Scully manages to work it out with the help of Leyla’s new potential boyfriend that all previous victims actually died from self-inflicted wounds so there are no monsters and Doggett calls the kid on it by pretending to set fire to the house. Still, as Leyla puts it - it was Doggett’s lack of imagination that saved the day.

We get many previous references to old X-Files featuring Scully and Mulder, and Monica and Reyes have a hard time trying to think what Mulder would do in certain situations, but still Leyla stands in the basement office and (rather arguably) states that this is where the magic still happens.

A point of interest: Scully has kept Mulder’s FBI badge in her apartment.