The X-Files director’s cut deemed ‘too scary’ will finally be released
The X-Files director’s cut deemed ‘too scary’ will finally be released
Isobel Lewis Wed, August 5, 2026 at 9:02 AM UTC
0
Nearly two decades after it was first released, a darker director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe – that was once deemed “too scary” – will finally see the light of day.
Released six years after the original series came to an end, the second X-Files film follows paranormal investigators Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they reunite after years out of work to look into a series of mysterious disappearances. Billy Connolly and Amanda Peet are also among the cast.
But series creator and director Chris Carter was forced to edit the movie to a PG-13 rating (equivalent to a 12A in the UK), with the finished product arriving in 2008 to poor reviews and underperforming in the box office.
Fans will now get to watch that R-rated version, as The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn comes to Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK on 14 August.
The R-rated director's cut comes to Hulu in August (Hulu/YouTube)
Speaking about the new horror movie-style version, the title of which features the Russian for Victor Frankenstein, writer-director Carter told Entertainment Weekly: “We set out to make a real-life Frankenstein movie, and due to a variety of factors, our Frankenstein never completely left the operating room. A chance to apply the electrodes again was a special thrill.”
Advertisement
The trailer, which was also released on Tuesday (4 August) shows Mulder and Scully uncovering the bodies of missing women buried beneath ice, with the footage featuring the jumpscares and screeching string soundtrack typical of contemporary horror films.
It also shows Scottish comedian Connolly as a shady-seeming former Catholic priest and convicted paedophile who claims to be experiencing psychic visions that can lead the pair to a missing FBI agent.
Carter first shared his plans to release the director’s cut of I Want To Believe last year on Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast, where he revealed he’d “just got the go-ahead” to re-edit the film.
Duchovny and Anderson, pictured promoting the film in 2008 (Getty Images)
“I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox. And they wanted a PG-13 movie, so we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie, and we thought, OK, we’ve satisfied their demands,” he told Duchovny, explaining that network television had turned out to be “more permissive” about what could and couldn’t be broadcast.
“The people who rate the movies said, ’No, it’s not a PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even further,” he said. “Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make. It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”
Hugely popular in its time, The X-Files followed former FBI agents Mulder and Scully as they investigated paranormal activity. The original series ran for nine seasons from 1993 to 2002, and has been revived many times since, including in a 1998 feature film and new seasons of the show in 2016 and 2018.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
