In both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut, it’s Scully who coaxes Mulder out of hiding. But where the theatrical cut spends more time dwelling on the duo’s romantic attachments, the director’s cut gets right into the horror. In fact, Carter foregrounds the new cut’s emphasis on horror with the subtitle Vrach Frankenshteyn, Russian for “Doctor Frankenstein.”
“The movie begins with a search party following Father Joe and he digs up a hand in the snow. That was an ambiguous beginning to the movie, unless you know that it’s a Frankenstein story,” Carter points out. “But once you know that, it draws you in to the story. This cut is really the Frankenstein story we set out to make.”
Confusion around the severed hand was just one of the things in the theatrical release that has irked Carter since 2008, but he never really allowed himself to entertain the thought of a director’s cut. “Even after people running 20th Century Fox movies said we should do a director’s cut, I never thought it was going to happen. I just assumed they’d come up with a reason we couldn’t do it.
“But it was full-speed ahead from the moment we showed them the trailer we cut. They were over the moon about it, and with this subtitle I’ve added, Vrach Frankenshteyn. I think it helps viewers into the movie in a way they couldn’t before. We wanted to make a Frankenstein movie, but the theatrical cut only had a passing reference at the end, just a newspaper clipping.”
Carter may have wanted to make a Frankenstein movie. But when the studio heads at 20th Century Fox saw his original cut back in 2008, they associated I Want to Believe with a very different, and far less reputable, type of horror film.
“We screened it for the studio, and when the lights went up, they were outraged,” recalls Carter. “They said, ‘This is not the PG-13 movie you promised us. This is torture porn!’ They talked about it as if it was part of the Saw series or a slasher movie. And this was after we gave it to the MPAA and already cut it down to get a PG-13 rating.
