Daniel. Dude Nurse.

Modern TV can sometimes look like a car commercial. Everything appears sharp, clean, perfectly lit. Then you rewatch Season 1 of The X-Files and remember how dark television used to be. The Vancouver seasons have this cold, damp and an almost dreamlike quality. A lot of that came from the way the show was photographed on 35mm film, and from cinematographer John Bartley's willingness to let darkness remain darkness. In some of his interviews, he talked about lighting the walls while leaving the actors in shadow, or lighting the actors while letting the background disappear. And also Vancouver's rain, mist and forests weren't just scenery. The crew used backlighting and steam to turn ordinary locations into something genuinely eerie. And honestly, that's much harder to replace than people think.