The version of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that premiered in 2008 was not exactly the movie co-writer / director Chris Carter intended to make. Carter wanted to bring agents Mulder and Scully back to the big screen with a grisly story about faith and the supernatural. But executives at 20th Century Fox felt that Carter’s ideas were too dark, and he was pushed to turn the project into a PG-13 feature. Now, almost two decades after I Want to Believe’s theatrical debut, Carter is back with a new director’s cut of the film for Hulu that’s much closer to his original vision.
“We got to tell a good X-Files story,” Carter said of the original cut during a recent conversation we had about the new release. ”We just didn’t get to tell it in the way that we had intended.”
The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn’s Russian subtitle is meant to clue you into how heavily the movie leans into the series’ monster of the week-style storytelling. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) find themselves unwittingly investigating a string of gruesome kidnappings with the help of a predatory priest (Sir William Connolly) who claims to have psychic visions. Neither of the agents know what to make of the man’s supposed abilities, but they can’t ignore the way he consistently leads the FBI to dismembered body parts hidden in the frozen, West Virginian wilderness.
The new cut of I Want to Believe puts an emphasis on its Frankenstein elements that almost makes it feel like 20th Century Studios wanted to tap into Hollywood’s recent fascination with reimagining Mary Shelley’s seminal sci-fi novel. But Carter told me that he thinks his version is actually exploring some of the real world horrors that are woven into people’s desperate searches for youth and immortality.
“There’s this tech bro idea that if you do the right things and eat the right things, you might be able to live forever and ever,” Carter explained. “But if you’re able to transplant your head successfully onto younger and younger bodies, who’s to say that’s not everlasting life?”
While writing I Want to Believe back in the early aughts, Carter was inspired by the work of Robert J. White — a neurosurgeon and bioethicist who successfully managed to transplant the head of one living monkey onto another’s body in the 1970s. Before White’s death in 2010, Carter met with him in Ohio to speak about his work, and their conversation informed some of I Want to Believe’s beats. With Vrach Frankenshteyn, Carter wanted to highlight the visceral sense of fear that might be felt by someone undergoing experiments similar to White’s. The new cut spends less time focusing on Mulder and Scully’s personal relationship, and puts more of its energy into making you feel the terror of its victim characters.
“You have these women who have been stalked, violently taken from their cars, and then trapped in boxes, where they witness these terrible medical procedures they’re going to be subjected to,” Carter said. “If the audience now comes into this movie thinking about head transplants and this title, plot details like finding an arm in the ice and snow brings them into this story in a different way.”
Though I Want to Believe was met with mixed reviews when it first hit theaters, the series continued with two revival seasons on Fox that ran from 2016 to 2018. Those seasons and the rise of digital streaming brought a new generation of viewers into the X-Files fandom. Carter told me that he’s regularly surprised to meet young people who feel a deep connection to the world he created even though they weren’t alive when the show was originally airing. Carter appreciates that, for those fans, The X-Files is something they’re experiencing for the first time, and it’s markedly different from the new generation of streaming sci-fi series.
Carter — who’s currently working with his wife, Dori, on a movie about a woman forced to live her mother’s life in the 1950s titled Queens for a Day — knows the pleasure of watching truly original and distinct stories unfold. That’s why he has tried to keep himself in the dark about what Ryan Coogler is cooking up with his own upcoming spin on The X-Files. That said, while shooting Queens for a Day in Vancouver, Carter couldn’t stop some of the members from his production crew from visiting Coogler’s nearby set. And while Carter insisted about being kept in the dark about any “secret inside information,” he has faith that Coogler is going to “bring his stamp” to the franchise.
“Ryan is a filmmaker I completely respect,” Carter said. “I’ve made a point of not reading [his script] because I want to watch it like everyone else. But I’ve got an inkling about what he’s doing with his approach and this diverse cast, and it’s very exciting to me.”
The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn is now streaming on Hulu.