Production
Fox Mulder's abduction was devised by Chris Carter towards the end of seventh season as a way of allowing the actor to leave the series. Duchovny fulfilled his contractual obligations after the seventh season and felt that there was not much else to do with the character following the previous seven years.
Production designer Cory Kaplan explains how she was attracted to the idea of using primitive materials when she states, "We all see super-tech now, but the idea of low-tech was much more interesting to me, much more visual. So you take elements of rock and steel and chisel them interesting shapes." She also describes the creation of the set by stating, "I found the backdrop from Alien, and Bill Roe lit it very dimly and put it behind. And it was just this rotating platform with this humongous dental piece that could rotate around as well and pull his face apart." According to Makeup Supervisor Cheri Montasanto-Medcalf, Matthew Mungle helped in the creation of the alien torture machine by making the cheeks and putting the hooks in. The makeup supervisor adds that the hooks would actually stretch out and that David Duchovny "sat pretty good through all that."
Unusual filming techniques were also used. Visual Effects Supervisor John Wash recalls, "We devised a laser effect where a device is going into his mouth and some other weird lens effects that were going over the scene to give it an alien, other-world-like quality." On the subject of using not only a challengingly minuscule method of filming but also additional sound effects, supervising producer Paul Rabwin recounts, "I had to set up a very, very highly magnified lens to try to get this little device coming right at us. It was very, very scary. We ended up putting some really cool sound effects in there, little servos and motors."
The sequence in which multiple Alien Bounty Hunters appear involved the use of motion control, a method in which a motion-control camera on a computerized module is repeatedly run through the same motion while elements are continually added. The shot, according to John Wash, was one of the few times in the series in which the production crew was able to use motion control and therefore presented a slight challenge. In the filming of the sequence, both a blank plate, for just the set, and lighting elements, that were in the set, were shot before the production crew filmed five different passes, each one with the Alien Bounty Hunter in a different position. The production crew were finally able to clone the Bounty Hunter by blending all the passes together.
Read more about this topic: Without (The X-Files)
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