The X Files | 1998

The stamping ground of the original TV series was Vancouver, where the first six series were shot (and you can find plenty of X-Files tours of the city), but the big screen version moved south to California.

The ‘Dallas Federal Building’, blown up at the beginning of the movie, was the old Unocal Building, now the LA Center Studios, 1202 West Fifth Street at Beaudry Street, downtown Los Angeles (which houses film location offices). The FBI lab was on the 26th floor.

The ‘bee domes’ in the cornfield are at Bakersfield, in the desert north of Los Angeles, as is the desert epilogue – supposedly in ‘Tunisia’ at Foum Tatouine – a jokey reference to the Star Wars desert location.

Mulder meets Kurtzweil (Martin Landau) in Casey’s Irish Pub, 613 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles (seen also in Michelle Pfeiffer weepie The Deep End of the Ocean and George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated Good Night and Good Luck, among other films).

Kurtzweil’s apartment, where Mulder discovers the cops already searching, is the Mira Monte Apartments in Los Angeles.

The ‘Somerset’ home of the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) is not in England at all, but in California, at 380 South San Rafael Avenue, Pasadena, the Tudor-style mansion seen in Bowfinger, Rush Hour, Dead Again and Topper.

But when he’s summoned to attend the meeting of elders, that really is London. The entrance is Queen Alexandra’s House, Kensington Gore, SW7, alongside the Albert Hall in Kensington (which you might recognise as the home of Control (John Hurt) in the 2011 film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)

The interior, however, is once more back in Pasadena. It’s the Athenaeum, the dining club of the California Institute of Technology, at 551 South Hill Avenue (a frequently used location, seen in Beverly Hills Cop and True Romance among others).

The railway crossing scene is at Soledad Canyon at Saugus, just north of Los Angeles, also the location for Steven Spielberg’s first feature Duel.

Mulder and the Well-Manicured Man drive by the Department of Agriculture Building in Washington DC.

While the Cigarette-Smoking Man watches, the unconscious Scully is loaded onto the plane at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The hospital is the St Mary Medical Center, 1050 Linden Avenue in Long Beach, to the south of Los Angeles (seen also in Michael Mann’s Heat).

The ‘Antarctic’ location is a glacier above the ski resort of Whistler, British Columbia.

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