![‘The X-Files: I Want To Believe’: Chris Carter On His 2008 Recut, Cutting A Mulder-Scully Kiss & The Story He Still Wants To Tell [The Discourse Podcast]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/13212739/X-Files-IWTB_TA_L178_3840x2160.jpg "‘The X-Files: I Want To Believe’: Chris Carter On His 2008 Recut, Cutting A Mulder-Scully Kiss & The Story He Still Wants To Tell [The Discourse Podcast]")
After multiple films and revival seasons, “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter finally got another shot at his often misunderstood film, “The X-Files: I Want to Believe.” The new R-rated cut restores disturbing imagery, reshapes the music, and even strips away some of the Mulder-Scully relationship material. It also commits what a certain corner of the fanbase may consider the ultimate R-rated act: Carter cut the Mulder-Scully kiss. But don’t expect a “Snyder Cut” here. This cut is surprisingly shorter, with mostly very subtle changes for eagle-eyed fans.
Now titled “The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn,” Carter’s new version pushes the standalone thriller closer to the horror film he and co-writer Frank Spotnitz originally made. The movie reunites David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, years after they left the FBI at the end of Season 9, when a missing-agent case and a disgraced priest’s psychic visions pull them into a grotesque experiment involving stolen bodies and severed parts.
On the latest episode of “The Discourse Podcast,” Carter joined host Mike DeAngelo to dig into what changed, why he traded some romantic material for bigger scares, and whether fans might ever see the larger Mulder and Scully story still sitting around in his head. He also discussed the unfinished business of Season 11, his conversation with Ryan Coogler about the “X-Files” reboot, and the horror fable he and his wife have made, “Queens for a Day.”
During the conversation, Carter said the film that reached theaters in 2008 had already been cut not once but twice: first by the studio, then by the ratings board.
“We made the movie, we shot the movie that we wanted, and we edited it together,” Carter said. “We showed it to the studio, and they said, ‘This isn’t the PG-13 movie we were expecting. This is an R movie. This is too scary, too horrifying,’ all the things that we wanted to make it. And so we cut it back to satisfy them. Then we showed it to the censors, and they said, ‘Nope, this is not a PG-13 movie. This is an R-rated movie. You’ve got to cut it back.’ And we did cut it back again.”
The irony was not lost on him. “I could have made a scarier movie for network television than I could for the PG-13 rating,” Carter added. “I was always disappointed with that. I always thought that the movie had been kind of neutered a bit.”
The new version restores several of the images that gave the studio pause, including the more explicit death of Agent Dakota Whitney, a disembodied head coming to life, and previously unseen footage of a headless body in the makeshift Frankenstein lab.
“Those were two of the big ones,” Carter said of Whitney’s death and the reanimated head. “We just laid into it in subtle ways. You see the headless body in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, and that is footage that no one ever saw. It makes it, for me, a little racier and a little more horrifying.”
Some of the most noticeable changes have nothing to do with blood. The cut opens with Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” a wonderfully nasty joke for a movie built around bodies being taken apart. That choice came from editor Eleanor Infante, who worked with Carter on the revival seasons.
“On the reboots, we worked with an editor who is fantastic,” Carter explained. “I like to think of her as part of the ‘X-Files’ family now because she was so integral to the success of the last reboot. Her name is Eleanor Infante, and she took a swing at the director’s cut. That was her addition, and I thought it was, as you say, darkly ironic.”
When “I Want to Believe” originally arrived, audiences had gone six years without Mulder and Scully. By the time Carter returned to it, two revival seasons had filled in much more of their relationship. The controversial final kiss no longer felt essential to this version.
“The choice was simply, in 2008, we hadn’t seen Mulder and Scully for about six years. But in doing this director’s cut, we had just seen them in the reboot,” he said. “And so we got a whole lot of Mulder and Scully relationship. Some people would say we got more than we needed and more than we bargained for.”
“We didn’t need as much,” Carter continued. “And so those were things that were sacrificed for making it a good, scary movie, and not so much a story that didn’t serve the scariness.”
The original film’s scale and standalone mystery frustrated viewers who had spent six years waiting for another “X-Files” movie and hoped to see the alien mythology advanced. Carter hopes time, along with the revival seasons that followed, has cleared enough space for the film to be judged on its own chilly terms.
“I hope they come back to it and appreciate it,” Carter said. “It certainly is closer to the vision that we all had, Frank and I had, way back when. I’m really proud of the movie. The production values are fantastic. My feet are still cold from that shoot. I could not warm my feet up. We spent so much time in snow and ice. I think I went through nine pairs of boots trying to find warmer boots, and my feet were still not warm by the end of it.”
This particular stretch of “X-Files” history remains unfinished. Season 11 closed with Scully revealing that she was pregnant, a cliffhanger Carter wrote before learning Anderson intended to step away from the role.
“Gillian announced sometime during that final episode that she was taking off her Scully clothes, never to be worn again,” Carter recalled. “It came as a shocker to me. I didn’t know. I had written that finale not knowing that she was going to pull the rug out from under me.”
He has since spoken with Anderson, although he stopped short of saying she would return for him or the upcoming Ryan Coogler-produced reboot, in which Carter has surprisingly little to no involvement, even though he spoke with Coogler before the project began.
“We just spoke more about why he wanted to do it. It was his mother’s favorite show,” Carter said of Coogler. “It was really one of those, ‘Good for you,’ and ‘Make something great,’ as he’s capable of.”
Even so, Carter still has unfinished Mulder and Scully business of his own. Asked whether he might pursue a separate story with the original agents if Coogler’s series succeeds, he was unambiguous.
“I have a story to tell that involves Mulder and Scully,” Carter said. “And if I come back, or if we come back, if we’re so lucky to come back, I have a bigger story to tell.”
Carter has never regarded tidy closure as the franchise’s obligation.
“Someone said to me, ‘I didn’t give the audience what they wanted.’ When I heard that, I thought, ‘Did we ever give the audience what they wanted?’” he said. “We always pulled the rug out. We were never satisfied with just giving you what you wanted. We wanted to leave you wanting more. I’m hoping that’s what at least the second reboot did. It left you wanting more, and upsettingly so.”
Carter’s next project is “Queens for a Day,” a two-hour horror fable he made with his wife, which he hopes to bring to theaters within the next few months.
“I’m hoping I can rally ‘X-Files’ fans to come and see it and let me know what they think,” Carter said. “It’s called ‘Queens for a Day,’ queens plural. Hopefully, it’s two hours of great entertainment.”
“The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn” premieres August 14 on Hulu. Eighteen years later, Carter finally gets to send his Frankenstein out into the snow with the sharp edges put back in. Listen to the full conversation below.
The Discourse is part of The Playlist Podcast Network, which includes Deep Focus, Bingeworthy, and more. We can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and most places where podcasts are found. You can stream the podcast via the embed within the article. Be sure to subscribe and drop us a comment or a rating, as we greatly appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Also, remember to subscribe to The Playlist Newsletter for more conversations, reviews, and film and TV coverage.
Mike DeAngelo is a film writer, podcaster, and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and beyond. He is the host of The Playlist's podcasts The Discourse and Bingeworthy.
