X-Files Creator Chris Carter: ‘Vrach Frankenshteyn’ Director’s Cut Is More Horror, Less Romance
Exclusive: The X-Files creator Chris Carter says his director's cut of I Want to Believe isn't a romance and it isn't Saw—it's a Frankenstein story.
The 2020s are shaping up to be a good decade for fans of The X-Files. In the years following the mixed reception of the two revival seasons in 2016 and 2018, fans felt like Fox Mulder himself, relegated to empty corners of pop culture, all-too-aware that nobody else cares that we know about the Flukeman and Clyde Bruckner. But things are starting to change. Not only is Ryan Coogler producing a relaunch of The X-Files, with Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel in the leads, but creator Chris Carter is getting to fix one of the series’ worst mistakes.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe—Vrach Frankenshteyn comes to Hulu and Disney+ on Friday, August 14, offering a director’s cut of the beleaguered 2008 movie. For Carter, the difference between the cuts has everything to do with understanding the essential nature of the show… a show that isn’t about the romantic relationship between Mulder and his skeptical partner, Dr. Dana Scully.
“The first movie, 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, made money, but the producers weren’t necessarily fans of the show. So they wanted us to hit the relationship between Mulder and Scully really hard,” Carter tells Den of Geek. “I felt like the relationship took away from the horror of the story.”
Audiences who saw I Want to Believe in 2008 did certainly get some horror, as the FBI pulls Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) out of retirement for a special assignment. Mulder and Scully reunite at the request of agents Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and Mosley Drummy (Xzibit) to help them work with disgraced former priest Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a sex offender whose psychic visions may lead to a missing agent.
In both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut, it’s Scully who coaxes Mulder out of hiding. But where the theatrical cut spends more time dwelling on the duo’s romantic attachments, the director’s cut gets right into the horror. In fact, Carter foregrounds the new cut’s emphasis on horror with the subtitle Vrach Frankenshteyn, Russian for “Doctor Frankenstein.”
“The movie begins with a search party following Father Joe and he digs up a hand in the snow. That was an ambiguous beginning to the movie, unless you know that it’s a Frankenstein story,” Carter points out. “But once you know that, it draws you in to the story. This cut is really the Frankenstein story we set out to make.”
Confusion around the severed hand was just one of the things in the theatrical release that has irked Carter since 2008, but he never really allowed himself to entertain the thought of a director’s cut. “Even after people running 20th Century Fox movies said we should do a director’s cut, I never thought it was going to happen. I just assumed they’d come up with a reason we couldn’t do it.
“But it was full-speed ahead from the moment we showed them the trailer we cut. They were over the moon about it, and with this subtitle I’ve added, Vrach Frankenshteyn. I think it helps viewers into the movie in a way they couldn’t before. We wanted to make a Frankenstein movie, but the theatrical cut only had a passing reference at the end, just a newspaper clipping.”
Carter may have wanted to make a Frankenstein movie. But when the studio heads at 20th Century Fox saw his original cut back in 2008, they associated I Want to Believe with a very different, and far less reputable, type of horror film.
“We screened it for the studio, and when the lights went up, they were outraged,” recalls Carter. “They said, ‘This is not the PG-13 movie you promised us. This is torture porn!’ They talked about it as if it was part of the Saw series or a slasher movie. And this was after we gave it to the MPAA and already cut it down to get a PG-13 rating.
“Now the executives were asking us to cut it more, and that was a hard criticism to take. We made a good, scary X-Files story, and this wasn’t what we intended. Today, people have so much access to virtually anything that’s been made, including the Saw franchise. People are somewhat inured to the horror genre and to science fiction, so the gore is less shocking than it was in 2008.”
Of course, Carter also has the advantage of real life being stranger than fiction. He got the idea for the movie’s organ-swapping villain Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie) from real-world events.
“I read about a doctor who transplanted the head of a monkey on to another monkey. My antennae are always up for things that sound like X-Files territory, and that was an X-Files story. I actually flew to Cleveland, Ohio, to meet with him. He told me how he did it and how it was a successful transplant.
“That experience made its way into the show. We played with those ideas, and with issues of faith and medical science. Those are all elements of a good X-Files story.”
What isn’t an element of a good X-Files story? The relationship between Mulder and Scully. At least, not as a primary concern. “We never thought about the relationship first,” declares Carter. “The show’s mythology was a great way to explore Mulder and Scully’s relationship because it was so personal for him, because of his sister Samantha and the very reason for the X-Files to exist.”
“If something about the relationship made sense in the story we were telling, then we would explore it,” he continues. “We’d look at the relationship in so many different ways before it was consummated. That was part of the fun of the series. Even in a newer story, where Mulder and Scully are sleeping together, they’re bound by the story.
“In the theatrical cut of I Want to Believe, I felt like the relationship was in competition with the actual case that Mulder and Scully were investigating. The movie put a lot of weight where we didn’t need it. But now, we’ve had two extra seasons of the show, and that gave the audience a lot of the Mulder and Scully relationship. So, for Vrach Frankenshteyn, I just focused on making a good, scary movie.”
These days, with his intended version of I Want to Believe now available, Carter is focusing on a new movie called Queens for a Day, “a horror fable/odyssey” in his words, which he hopes to have out this fall. Shooting Queens for a Day in Vancouver has also brought Carter close to The X-Files again—but not too close.
“Ryan Coogler was up there making the new show,” Carter reports. “He’s been really secretive about this version he’s doing, and I appreciate that. You don’t want to let the cat get out of the bag. But we had one crew member who had worked on the show with him, and I would get little secrets and tidbits. They’re always exciting, but that’s really as much as I know about what he’s doing.
“I’ve made a point of not reading the script because I want to watch it with everyone else,” he says with a smile. Of course, that’s made easier by the fact that Carter isn’t necessarily done with Mulder and Scully, should he be given another chance to revisit the characters. “I have a big story to tell, whether as a series or as another movie,” he teases.
Just don’t expect it to be a Scully and Mulder romance.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe—Vrach Frankenshteyn streams on Hulu on Friday, April 14, 2026.