'The X-Files' creator Chris Carter says new director's cut of 'I Want to Believe' is 'the horror movie that we really wanted to make' (interview)

Eighteen years later, it still gives me a jump scare, even though I know it's coming.

Agent Mulder, hot on the trail of a group of murderers who are harvesting their victims' organs, breaks into a makeshift laboratory in an attempt to save an abducted woman.

He finds a gruesome scene of bodies on ice and surgeons, scalpels in hand, preparing to transplant the villain's head onto the abducted woman's body.

Mulder turns and — there it is! The villain's severed head on ice! And it opens its eyes .

It sounds less like a scene out of a science fiction mystery series and one more suited to a horror film.

And that's precisely why Chris Carter, creator of " The X-Files ", is revisiting the 2008 film "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" in a new R-rated director's cut coming to Hulu on Aug.

14.

Space.com got the chance to speak with Carter about the upcoming director's cut and the inspiration behind revisiting the standalone "X-Files" film nearly two decades after its release.

"I wanted to make the scary movie that I always had intended to make, intended to direct, and this is more in line with that," Carter told Space.com.

"It gave me a chance to remember the making of the movie and what I had intended it to be, and how different it was from that original vision." The director's cut features a new addition to the film's title — "The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn".

Carter said the name at the end (Russian for "Doctor Frankenstein") is a way of alluding to the tone and themes that he intended to focus on in the original film.

"It's a Frankenstein story, and the original inspiration for it was a doctor in Cleveland, Ohio, who transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey, and I thought that is perfect X-Files territory," Carter said.

Chris Carter on the set of the 2008 film "The X-Files: I Want to Believe." (Image credit: 20th Century Studios/Walt Disney Co.) Carter's original version of the film was re-edited two times in order for it to be released with the PG-13 rating that 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios) insisted upon.

"When we first made the movie, we had a vision, and we tried to bring it to life.