The X-Files creator Chris Carter wanted to make a more horrific movie

Hulu’s new R-rated cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe is closer to the director’s original vision.

Hulu’s new R-rated cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe is closer to the director’s original vision.

The version of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that premiered in 2008 was not exactly the movie co-writer / director Chris Carter intended to make. Carter wanted to bring agents Mulder and Scully back to the big screen with a grisly story about faith and the supernatural. But executives at 20th Century Fox felt that Carter’s ideas were too dark, and he was pushed to turn the project into a PG-13 feature. Now, almost two decades after I Want to Believe ’s theatrical debut, Carter is back with a new director’s cut of the film for Hulu that’s much closer to his original vision.

“We got to tell a good X-Files story,” Carter said of the original cut during a recent conversation we had about the new release. ”We just didn’t get to tell it in the way that we had intended.”

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn ’s Russian subtitle is meant to clue you into how heavily the movie leans into the series’ monster of the week-style storytelling. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) find themselves unwittingly investigating a string of gruesome kidnappings with the help of a predatory priest (Sir William Connolly) who claims to have psychic visions. Neither of the agents know what to make of the man’s supposed abilities, but they can’t ignore the way he consistently leads the FBI to dismembered body parts hidden in the frozen, West Virginian wilderness.

The new cut of I Want to Believe puts an emphasis on its Frankenstein elements that almost makes it feel like 20th Century Studios wanted to tap into Hollywood’s recent fascination with reimagining Mary Shelley’s seminal sci-fi novel . But Carter told me that he thinks his version is actually exploring some of the real world horrors that are woven into people’s desperate searches for youth and immortality.

“There’s this tech bro idea that if you do the right things and eat the right things, you might be able to live forever and ever,” Carter explained. “But if you’re able to transplant your head successfully onto younger and younger bodies, who’s to say that’s not everlasting life?”

While writing I Want to Believe back in the early aughts, Carter was inspired by the work of Robert J. White — a neurosurgeon and bioethicist who successfully managed to transplant the head of one living monkey onto another’s body in the 1970s. Before White’s death in 2010, Carter met with him in Ohio to speak about his work, and their conversation informed some of I Want to Believe ’s beats. With Vrach Frankenshteyn , Carter wanted to highlight the visceral sense of fear that might be felt by someone undergoing experiments similar to White’s.