X-Files: I Want To Believe has an unexpected new director’s cut from Chris Carter. But does it change the movie? Here’s our review.

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This piece talks about plot points from the original The X-Files TV series.

It isn’t a bad time to be a fan of The X-Files right now. Ryan Coogler is mounting a brand new take on the show for Disney and the original creator of the series, Chris Carter, has returned to the well of his cinematic contributions to provide a director’s cut of his 2008 movie sequel, The X-Files: I Want To Believe.

I’ve written about this film before along with the background elements to the context around The X-Files’ second film at this point, and some of the backstory that led to its production, so allow me to skip past that in looking at Vrach Frankenshteyn, the sub-title moniker Carter has given to what is clearly a passion project. He’s taken an edit he believed at the time to be flawed and working to craft the X-Files movie he really wanted.

As Carter explains when he joined me to discuss the cut on The X-Cast podcast:

I can tell you that network television was more permissive than the sensors to get that PG thirteen rating. So I always felt like it had been somewhat neutered and that it wasn’t the scary movie we set out to make. Also because of that I felt that Fox didn’t really promote the movie and it just it sort of came and went … the production values are big screen values, but I think that they didn’t get it because it was a standalone story and a smaller budget movie. I think that it didn’t get the love and attention that it might have otherwise.

You can listen to the whole conversation below where Carter and I discuss numerous tweaks, additions and changes to the project, but the primary impetus as he says above was to craft the picture he felt 20th Century Fox had refused to allow him to make.

Also, I Want To Believe had a powerful contender to battle on opening weekend, the all-dominant The Dark Knight, and ended up lost in the shadows of the Batman sequel.

Many fans of the TV show also considered the film too little, too late.

Vrach Frankenshteyn is a means of Carter re-dressing the balance, as many directors go on to do with renewed or extended cuts. It’s possible Disney has only allowed this indulgence given Coogler’s impending reboot (albeit one that has only shot a pilot, and rumours abound it could end up as a solo ‘third’ X-Files movie), and with a wider awareness of The X-Files to come.

It is, appreciating the two brief revival seasons that followed I Want to Believe, one of the few major pop culture properties from the 1990s not to be mined relentlessly. Fans remain divided on whether they do or don’t want that to change.

As to Carter’s director’s cut of his second film, the truth is that Vrach Frankenshteyn changes little.

Carter describes in our conversation that his changes are ‘subtle’, to which this fan agrees. His aim was to punch up the horror in a story he always envisaged to be akin to one of the scarier, darker episodes of The X-Files, a show with the elasticity to span numerous genres across its 200+ episodes.

The first movie, Fight the Future, was a bigger budget science-fiction conspiracy thriller, whereas I Want to Believe was designed more in line with Carter’s darker, earth-bound series about crime and occultism, Millennium.

Credit: Disney

Due to the sanding off from Fox, the film ended up being a somewhat confused medley of creature feature, Frankenstein-retelling (a story, as the series bears out, that Carter is hugely influenced by), treatise on science vs faith through a sub-plot around a dying boy, and indeed a spiritual anxiety around Billy Connolly’s paedophile ex-priest, Father Joe, who may or may not be receiving messages from God.

Many of these are aspects The X-Files has explored in detail and at length but in Vrach Frankenshteyn, Carter is keen to dial more directly into the scares and core themes present in the film.

It means few changes to the direct plot and a loss of between seven or eight minutes of footage, making this a leaner cut, with one of the biggest changes most likely to court the greatest controversy with the fanbase: the near complete eradication of the romantic aspects to main characters Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).

Cutting a very long story short, they moved from platonic colleagues to close friends to eventually a rather tortured, angsty romance as Mulder was variously abducted by aliens, went on the run, and ended up almost being executed by the military. They also had a son, but didn’t, because he ended up being the biological child of Mulder’s biological father, who was also their arch nemesis.

It’s… complicated, okay.

Anyway, Carter chooses to cut scenes that displayed romantic affection, and alluded to or mentioned William, their son, whose presence hovers over the original film, given he was placed into adoption to protect him at the end of the series.

By removing these elements, Carter is keen to return audiences to the paradigm some fans believe should never have been sacrificed: Mulder and Scully as partners who work brilliantly together. He can’t erase all of those elements—they’re both still sleeping in the same bed—but their romantic history and the knotty mythology elements around their son are excised for people who might be returning to or finding I Want to Believe for the first time.

Moreover, he dials back on certain other network notes, where the script emphasises backstory elements such as what Mulder (who, along with Scully, are out of the FBI and not working on the actual X-Files in this film) did before, and mythology points such as what happened to his sister Samantha, abducted by aliens when he was a child (again, it’s complicated how that all ends up, but Mulder knows she’s dead by the point of the movie). All that is gone to further streamline the story and allow the themes and scares to become more apparent to audiences.

Carter hopes, however, not too many elements were chopped away that people enjoyed: “I’m really trying to make a piece of great horror genre entertainment. And I feel like with the two reboots that we got a whole lot of Mulder and Scully and so going back into it, I felt like we didn’t necessarily need as much.”

While he takes away certain beats that stuck out even then (such as a comedy beat about George W. Bush which falls very flat) and makes some interesting musical changes to diegetic and non-diegetic sound in the film, he does also add one or two moments.

One that impacted was Scully displaying visible emotion on being told a young boy she is caring for medically might die, and even shorn of the references to her biological absent son, it works to emphasise the humanity and vulnerability of the character amidst the darkness.

In the end, Vrach Frankenshteyn doesn’t necessarily improve a film which, while flawed, was unfairly written off by many fans at the time. It sharpens certain aspects, and does emphasise horror elements, but I Want to Believe isn’t left a scarier or better film as a result of Carter’s tinkering.

Instead, it is a relatively similar viewing experience. What it perhaps does is remove the film from being too deeply centered in 2008, or in the wake of plot elements dangling from the end of the ninth season, and allows I Want to Believe to stand as a largely standalone, strange, dark fusion of ‘monster of the week’ and true crime murderer tale, albeit one that doesn’t justify a cinematic canvas.

Chris Carter has managed, however, to finally release the movie he truly wanted to make. If that doesn’t make this edit worthwhile, I’m not sure what does.

You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts (including The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast) and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.