Unsealed: Alien Files

It's not often that you have television shows which debut new episodes at 2 in the morning. This is a show that's flanked on both ends by infomercials for chrissakes. But the peculiar schedule makes it all the more exotic and alluring. It's totally legit.

One night I fell asleep watching South Park and woke up watching Unsealed: Alien Files. For a moment I thought I had traveled back in time, to the late 90s or the early 00s, back when paranormal shows were creepy as fuck and stylish like the original chupacabra (the gargoyle, glowing eyed beast, not the neutered stray dog "chupacabra" that inhabits North America, what a crock.)

If not for the fact that Unsealed promotes their Twitter account in every episode, I would have actually thought this was an old show being re-aired. It perfectly emulates the tropes of classic paranormal shows like Sightings, Beyond Bizarre, and the broadcast version of Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. Even the content they discuss is so 1990s... Human cloning, Area 51, Bigfoot conspiracies...

Is it a cheesy, hokey show? YES. It's not factually accurate in the least, it extrapolates completely unbelievable theories which make even Ancient Aliens seem well-researched in comparison. And they re-use the same clips over and over again, each episode. And yet.... IT FUCKIN' WORKS. The sense of the theatrical, the willingness to be bizarre and creepy, the horror movie style, that's what made those old shows great, and Unsealed has it in droves. It's almost like found footage, it's obviously not truly real, but it's a really creepy story to imagine! They have these two stock clips of "the greys" that they use over and over again.... and they're ALWAYS fucking scary, no matter how many times I see them.

Sure, modern shows like Ancient Aliens have preposterous theories with absolutely no evidence behind them, like the classic shows did. But in the 90s we took it a step further than that. Or maybe ten steps. In the 90s people like Bob Lazar contended that Area 51 had something like 7 different alien species working there at the very time, while channels like FOX and UPN aired footage told us and pointe blanke it was of actual, real-life alien autopsies and abductions! And that's the kind of topic Unsealed traffics in.

The problem with all of the paranormal shows these days is, they err on the side us pseudo-science. They pretend to be unbiased and scientific, despite their obvious and enormous flaws, to the detriment of the theatricality and style of the production. Perhaps some people find it creepier when it's packaged with a less ridiculous sheen, but I'm not fooled, I'm not going to buy into it either way. What works for me is something creepy, like a movie, the way it was done in the 90s.

Unsealed is a true old school show. I'm in awe of randomly finding a show like this. It's been so long since I've seen a single one, I didn't think it was possible. I thought it meant I had grown up when alien shows stopped scaring me. Now I realize, it's just because alien shows lost their balls and stopped being scary. The scary ones, well... well they're still scary! O_O