Chris Carter’s director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe — with the new subtitle Vrach Frankenshteyn — is seven to eight minutes shorter than the original version released theatrically in 2008. That’s not typical of director’s cuts, the TV veteran admits: “Director’s cuts are typically kitchen sink cuts where they throw everything back in.” However, he took this as an opportunity to give the movie’s core story “the proper weight” — by removing the parts of the movie which focused on the relationship between Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson).
I Want to Believe features the now-retired FBI agents getting dragged back into one more case, involving a mad scientist with an interest in transplanting heads in the quest for immortality. In terms of justifying the decision to cut scenes and even lines focused on the relationship between his two lead characters, Chris Carter said that Seasons 10 and 11 of the show, revived in the 2010s, gave X-Files fans “their fill of Mulder and Scully and their relationship. Scully reveals she’s pregnant at the end of Season 11, so you know they’re sleeping together, so that doesn’t need to be any great shocker in the movie.”
The Decision to Cut Scenes
In Seasons 10 and 11, Mulder and Scully are depicted as living independently from each other, with exactly one confirmed sexual encounter over the course of 16 episodes (included seemingly to set up that pregnancy reveal). But that appears to be the level of romance that Chris Carter feels is true to the core of the series.
“I always felt that the studio didn’t really know The X-Files very well when they greenlit this movie originally,” he says. “They forced us to put that romantic element in there, when it took away from the good X-Files story. In this cut, I simply wanted to take the weight off of the one thing and put it on the darker story.”
The cuts are pretty decisive, like removing the beginning of one scene, featuring Mulder and Scully in bed together. That scene began with Scully saying “I can’t sleep,” a line echoed later in the scene by Mulder saying “Now I can’t sleep.” The later section is kept (because it’s more story-focused), making Mulder’s line feel a bit out of nowhere. “It still works for me,” Chris Carter says when I mentioned it. “You know, it’s revealed that he’s in bed… It’s inference.”
Amplifying the Grotesque Elements
The other major edits featured in Vrach Frankenshteyn involved amplifying the more grotesque elements of the story, which Chris Carter had to trim originally to receive a PG-13 rating from the MPAA in 2008. The new version reflects what Chris Carter is pretty sure would have gotten an R back then — even if it’s not nearly as shocking as what we might see today on even network television. “This is the irony. I could have done more on a TV episode than I could do for a PG-13 rating for the big screen, which was always disappointing to me.”
The MPAA, Chris Carter says, took offense at “all the stuff in the lab, the bodiless head, things like that. That’s the stuff that they took offense at. And so I wanted to put that back in.”
German Titles and Inspirations
Chris Carter added the subtitle Vrach Frankenshteyn to underline this new cut’s focus on the monster-of-the-week story, which is not the first instance of him using German in titles. The show’s run featured episodes named “Die Hand die Verletzt,” “Herrenvolk,” “Unruhe,” and “Sein und Zeit.” Seasons 10 and 11 also included four episodes entitled “My Struggle I-IV,” which invokes the idea of Mein Kampf, though Chris Carter clarifies that the titles of those episodes are not a Hitler reference — they’re instead intended as a nod to the My Struggle novels written by Norweigian author Karl Ove Knausgård.
“Everyone’s always asking me about the German component. It really came as a result of [X-Files producer and I Want to Believe co-writer] Frank Spotnitz and my interest in Operation Paperclip. Although in the pilot episode [of The X-Files], there is a doctor who does regression hypnosis, whose name is Heitz Werber. That is a German name too. And I was told specifically when we did the pilot episode that he should not speak with a German accent, even though I never imagined that.”
Music and Future Projects
Talking about other core X-Files facts, composer Mark Snow scored every season of the series as well as the two movies, but sadly passed away in 2025. Chris Carter confirms that the new cut only utilizes the original score, but for one sequence he added “Theme from Harry’s Game” by the Irish group Clannad. “I think that’s a beautiful scene now, in a way it wasn’t in the original movie.”
Having been through the experience of this new cut, Chris Carter isn’t quite sure if there’s stuff he’d still want to fix, if he magically had the ability to do so. “It’s a good question. I don’t quite know how to answer it. We wrote a script. We were very happy with the script. They made us make some changes that I wasn’t happy with. I have gone into the cut and taken seven minutes of that out, and put the emphasis on the right things rather than the tangential things. So would I do anything differently? I have to say for this story, no. It is the scary story we set out to tell, for better or worse.”
Looking forward, Chris Carter is hoping to find a theatrical release for Queens for a Day, an independent movie he made with his wife Dori Pierson that he describes as “a horror fable fantasy odyssey” that he thinks X-Files fans will love. (He’s hoping the movie can hit theaters before the 2026 midterm elections, as “it’s got a political element.”)
Chris Carter is clear that he wants to stay out of the way of Ryan Coogler’s in-progress X-Files reboot, and hasn’t read the script for the project. “I don’t want to compete with it in any way.” However, he does still hope to one day pay off the story he was setting up with the “My Struggle” episodes of Seasons 10 and 11, as he feels those episodes “set up something very big… It may be the biggest idea that I’ve ever had for the show.”
He doesn’t know if this idea would work as a stand-alone movie, but “I love making movies and I love making two hours of something, rather than eight hours of individual hours of something.”
That said, even after over 30 years, “I just love it all. I love telling X-Files stories.”
The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn premieres Friday, August 14th on Hulu.
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