Mulder strikes me as someone who’d be read up on the original folklore, and thus would expect/want the real thing to be much more esoteric or “traditional”. Anyone playing up the modern Anne Rice sort of romantic/goth image would just look like a clueless wannabee in his eyes.

I wish I knew a bit more about the vast and complex realm of African drumming. Somewhere out there must be people who wonder, “Why the hell is this cannibal chase sequence scored to an Akan wedding dance from north-western Ghana?”

The joke is that the show just threw some random bits of alleged tribal culture into the story. It’s like the episode was just saying “Hey, here’s some African crap.”

It’s parody. Same as the comments about Navajos magicking up a white guy. Shaenon doesn’t really think that’s a thing that Navajos go around doing, but she was paraphrasing what the episode seemed to think.

My take on this is: The idea of a melanin-stealing vampire is not in and of itself racist. It’s the way the writers treated foreigners as exotic, that Mulder has an argument with a case worker in which he says “He ran away from the police! He must be doing something wrong!” and it turns out that he’s right and the case worker is wrong, the way that every black character is either a victim or a monster, the way that the victims have to be saved by white characters, and the general attitude of “Africa sure is exotic and spooky!” that make this episode’s depiction of race pretty problematic.

Oh, lord, those drums were the last straw for me too.

Like I said, random. I was going to give them a pass for effort (they made a point of casting actual Africans for the episode, for instance, rather than getting African-Americans to do unconvincing accents), but then they had tribal drums on the soundtrack and I was all no.

Mulder DOES believe in vampires (“Bad Blood”!), he just didn’t believe in the people who claimed to be vampires in “3”. Bear in mind that he was somewhat depressed by Scully’s abduction back then, though, so he might have not behaved like himself.