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.
