X-Files fever is among us, with intense anticipation for Ryan Coogler’s prospective reboot and series creator Chris Carter’s R-rated director’s cut of the 2008 X-Files feature film, which arrived a decade after the franchise’s first movie and six years after the show’s original run had ended. Coogler’s project is not yet a sure thing (fingers crossed!), but Carter’s is coming to Hulu and Disney+ on August 14. Ahead of its release, io9 talked to Carter about The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, as well as his take on the eerily prescient series’ place in sci-fi history.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: The director’s cut is billed as being more horror-oriented than the original. But other things have also changed—the movie’s a few minutes shorter, some scenes are re-edited, and there are some musical swaps too. What was the process like as you decided what to change? Chris Carter: There were things I wanted to put back in to make it the scary movie I always imagined it [would be], but there are also things I wanted to take out. And I can speak to those things first. Between 2008, when the movie was released, and now, the audience—the hardcore fans, who are always first and foremost in your mind—has gotten a lot of the Mulder-Scully relationship story. And I felt that the movie was very heavy on that relationship story, and it felt a little bit like we were revisiting something we had just witnessed. So I cut back on the romance; I cut back on the relationship aspects of the movie in favor of the horror elements of the movie. And when I talk about horror elements, I’m realizing I keep talking about this as a horror movie. It’s really an X-Files horror movie. The original idea came to me when I read a story about a doctor in Cleveland, Ohio, who had transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey, and he did it successfully. I thought that’s X-Files territory right there. So I went and sought this guy out, and he explained to me how he had done it and the process … so [I Want to Believe co-writer] Frank Spotnitz and I set about trying to tell an X-Files story about this very thing