On the press tour for his The X-Files: I Want To Believe director’s cut, creator Chris Carter reveals he’s made a new horror film, Queens For A Day.

X-Files creator Chris Carter has revealed that he’s secretly made a new horror film.

The legendary showrunner is currently on the marketing trail for the director’s cut of his 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankensteyn, and broke the news about this separate project exclusively on the Film Stories Network podcast, The X-Cast.

Called Queens For A Day, Carter wrote the film with his wife of nearly 40 years, Dori Pierson. She, along with her husband, has nursed the idea for many years – and having produced it under the radar, the pair hope to release it in cinemas this autumn.

“It is a horror fable,” Carter explains. “And we hope to have it in theatres before the midterm elections.”

For those not in the US, the 2026 elections will take place in early November – so we could see Queens For A Day emerge in a matter of weeks.

“It’s about someone who time travels and goes back and has to walk in someone else’s shoes,” was all Carter would reveal when pressed on the plot. It suggests something decidedly more whimsical in nature than his previous work.

While it appears Queens For A Day has wrapped and is now awaiting a release window, this isn’t the first time a Carter has touted a project outside The X-Files. He was developing a detective thriller called Unique in 2009, and he shot a pilot for Amazon called The After in 2014, based on the work of Dante, which failed to go to series.

His biggest unreleased work, however, remains Fencewalker. A coming of age, semi-autobiographical piece with no supernatural elements, it was filmed between 2008 and 2009 – just after I Want to Believe – and starred Natalie Dormer, Katie Cassidy and rapper Xzibit (who had also just appeared in the second X-Files movie). It quietly disappeared, however, even from IMDb, and Carter has remained quiet about what happened to it in the years since

We can only hope for more success with Queens For A Day, especially given this appears to be just as much a passion project for his wife as it is for him.

With Carter talking up his hope that – separate from the Ryan Coogler-developed X-Files reboot – he might get to finish his original X-Files story to his satisfaction, we might just be on the cusp of a renaissance for one of TV’s key figures.

To hear the full discussion on Queens For A Day, Vrach Frankenshteyn and more, check out the latest episode of The X-Cast below.