Kory Grow
Contact Kory Grow on X View all posts by Kory Grow August 13, 2026
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in 'The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn.' Diyah Pera/Disney In 2008, when The X-Files: I Want to Believe came out, movie critics rolled their eyes, calling the film a tame version of a long “Monster of the Week” X-Files episode. The TV show’s creator, Chris Carter, who also co-wrote and directed the PG-13 film, agreed with them. “The movie that was released was not the movie I had intended to release,” Carter, 69, tells Rolling Stone now over Zoom.
What those critics and X-Philes saw onscreen, Carter says, was more what the movie’s financiers wanted than his vision. So now he’s releasing a gory director’s cut, retitled The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, which hits Disney+ and Hulu on Friday. This time, it’s rated R.
This version of the picture stays true to the plot, in which Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) come out of retirement to find a missing FBI agent, who is being held by a demented surgeon, with the help of a psychic pedophile priest (Billy Connolly); but it dials back the romance between Mulder and Scully and ratchets up the gallons of blood onscreen. And though it runs seven minutes shorter than the original cut, it contains more close-ups of scalpels piercing necks, teeth-gnashing surgery, and suspense that play to the new Frankenstein-inspired subtitle.
In a wide-ranging interview that includes Carter’s thoughts on Ryan Coogler’s upcoming X-Files reboot and reflections on the show’s final seasons, the filmmaker explains why this is how the movie was always supposed to be.
How did the director’s cut come together and why now? It came about because I was talking to the guy who runs the movie division of 20th Century Fox about something else, and I said, “Would you ever consider doing a director’s cut?” He had actually been a junior executive in 2007 when we made the movie, and he said, “Go for it.” They gave us all the time and money we needed to do the cut we needed, and it wasn’t extravagant. It was a labor of love.
Who was gatekeeping the gore with the original cut in 2008? It was the executives who had hired us to do a PG-13 movie. We’d signed a contract to make a PG-13 movie. We cut it to make it a scary X-Files, and they looked at it and they were outraged. They said, “This is torture porn. This is not the movie that we thought you were going to make.” And so we had to go back and cut it down to what we thought was a PG-13 movie. We showed it to the people who do the movie ratings and they said, “This isn’t a PG-13 movie.” So people took two slices out of it, and it was never the scary movie that I had hoped to make.
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What was your reaction to hearing the words “torture porn”? It’s not like we had done a Saw movie or a slasher movie. For me, it was just a good, scary X-File.
Is it weird to you now that Disney is on board with this version of the film? It is, but it’s actually kind of wonderful to me. My first job in Hollywood was at Disney. I had an office in the animation building. That I would find myself back at Disney 40 years later is bizarre to me.
When you were filming the original movie, did you think you were making a PG-13 movie? Yes. And I’ll tell you why I thought that: The television standards and practice people, who are effectively the censors in network television, were more permissive than the people who did the ratings and gave us the PG-13 rating. That “X-File” that you saw was not as scary as we could have made it for television. It’s a painful irony.
So what were the producers expecting? I really felt that they didn’t know the show. They knew it was a popular show. They knew that we had done well with the first movie. So they said to us, “Do something for a third of the price, and make us a good, scary PG-13 movie.” We thought we had done that. Then they wanted to lay heavily into the Mulder and Scully romance, and that’s because they didn’t know [that in] the show we would parcel that out.
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There’s not much romance in the director’s cut. Why is that? We made the reboot Seasons, 10 and 11, between 2008 and now, and I thought people had gotten their fill of the Mulder-Scully romance, so cutting that back felt natural. It felt like it put the weight on the proper things in the storytelling.
What inspired the gorier aspects of the movie’s plot in the first place? It was inspired by something I had read about a doctor who had transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey, and he had done it successfully. It was the first head transplant that I had ever heard about. So what did I do? I flew to Cleveland to hunt this doctor down.
He was kind enough to sit with me, explain to me what it entailed. It was successful [at first] but ultimately the monkey died. But I thought, “That’s X-Files territory right there.” And it’s a great Frankenstein story.
I find it very interesting in 2026 when you have tech bros now talking about living forever and, beyond looksmaxxing, the idea that you might be able to live forever by transplanting your head onto a younger body is something I find interesting in a new and modern light.
Were you ever happy with the 2008 cut? I always felt that they forced me to shoehorn that Mulder-Scully relationship in there and that it took away from the scares. When we did the X-Files series, the relationship is something we always touched on in passing; it was part of the storytelling, but it wasn’t the object of the storytelling. I was always unhappy with the way that I was forced to do that.
I was just re-reading the 1996 Rolling Stone story where you told our reporter that the cover image of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in bed was not of Mulder and Scully but of the actors. Did you ever see the one where David and Gillian and I are in bed together? It was the center spread. And then what was so funny is that you guys decided to put that picture on the card that falls out of the magazine that asked you to subscribe to the magazine. So that entered many a wastebasket subsequent to the reading of the Rolling Stone.
Or maybe people thought, “Yes, I want more of this,” and they subscribed. So what did you make of the critical reaction to the movie? I felt it was tepid. The really disappointing thing was not only that we didn’t get to release the movie that we wanted to, it was not promoted. It’s like they just sent it out there hoping fans would find it — and fans did; it actually was a theatrical success in that it made some money. But it didn’t reach a wider audience.
Do you worry fans will think you’re pulling a George Lucas, messing with it too much, or do you think they’ll like it? It’s essentially the same movie with emphasis on the X-File, the thing that might be pulled out of Mulder’s file cabinet, which is front and center now. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think that we’re meddling. The only thing people might think we’re meddling with is we took two kisses out of the movie.
David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, and Chris Carter rehearse a scene for The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Diyah Pera/Diney What kind of feedback have you gotten from David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on the director’s cut? I haven’t had a chance to show it to Gillian. I showed it to David. He said, “Can you put this in film festivals? I think people should see it on the big screen again.” Of course we can’t, because film festivals are about new movies, but it was high praise I took from him and he liked the cut.
Now that a decade has passed since you rebooted the series, how do you feel about Seasons 10 and 11? By and large, I thought it was very successful. I set out to do something that was somewhat audacious and largely misunderstood. I did season openers and season finales that all related to one another [with Monster of the Week episodes in between].
At the end of Season 11, the final season, I revealed that Agent Scully is pregnant and it went over with some people liking it and some people hating it. And so it was all part of a bigger idea, and it was all part of my idea to make either a Season 12 or another movie. And not only is it a big idea but maybe the biggest idea ever in The X-Files. So yeah, I think they were successful in setting up an idea that may or may not ever see the light of day.
Well, it all ended on a cliffhanger with a character you thought was dead reemerging. That was all by design. If you look at where we usually put “The Truth Is Out There” in the main title, it is replaced by two words “Salvator Mundi,” which is a reference to Da Vinci. I’m sorry. That’s all important to knowing where we’re going.
I thought it was bold that you’d gone back to doing “Monster of the Week” episodes and stretching out the mythology considering how TV storytelling became so linear after The X-Files ended. It sort of happened. Before we gave the pilot to the network and studio, I had done a marketing package and told them what kind of stories we’d be telling and the genres we would be mining and that there would be an ongoing story which had to do with Mulder’s search for his sister and for the truth about extraterrestrials. They bought it and we went with it.
Have you ever felt tempted to collate the mythology episodes into one long story? Yeah, it is of interest to me. We went to great pains to make all those puzzle pieces fit. It would be a thrill to put those puzzle pieces together.
Are you jealous of how TV showrunners today worry about making only eight episodes instead of dozens per season like you did in the Nineties? I was just talking to the Duffer brothers, the guys who [made] Stranger Things, and they did 42 episodes over 10 seasons. We did 49 episodes in the first two seasons.
I don’t regret having to do what we did, because it was a chance of a lifetime to tell these stories in this pressure cooker. It made for the show that you see.
When you have to start shooting a new show every eight days, it’s a test of your stamina. It’s a test of your sanity. It’s a test of your creativity and your ability to work together with a large group of people. It takes hundreds of people to put a TV show on the air. And if you can get those people all working together, it’s a feat in itself at the pace we were doing it. While making television is creative and it’s visual and it’s performance, in many ways, you are on a production line, and I think that’s something that goes unappreciated when you’re making 25 episodes a season.
How involved are you in Ryan Coogler’s upcoming reboot of The X-Files? I am not involved. My name is on it, but I by choice didn’t read the script because I want to sit on the sofa and with a bowl of popcorn and watch it like everyone else.
Surely you had conversations with him about it, though. I had a phone call with him. That is the sum total of my involvement in the picture.
I can tell you that my wife and I were making a movie up in Vancouver while they were shooting the [new] X-Files. And so every once in a while, somebody who had done a day call on the Coogler version would come and say, “Hey, you should see what they’re doing. They’re shooting with these cameras.” So I had Spy vs. Spy information, but that’s sum total of my involvement.
I have to tell you that my wife and I are making a movie that X-Files fans will really love called Queens for a Day. It’s a horror fable fantasy odyssey. And we’re very excited to put it out before the midterms, which should tell you something about its political bent.
