For nearly two decades, one of the strangest mysteries surrounding The X-Files: I Want to Believe had nothing to do with the movie itself.
It was the werewolf.
This week, it was officially confirmed that Chris Carter‘s long-awaited R-rated director’s cut of the 2008 film will finally debut on Hulu on August 14.
Even more intriguing, it’s arriving under the title The X-Files: I Want to Believe: Vrach Frankenshteyn, with “Vrach Frankenshteyn” translating to “Doctor Frankenstein” in Russian… a fitting nod to the film’s body horror and surgical themes.
But that announcement immediately reminded me of one of the weirdest “marketing campaigns” I’ve ever seen.
Back in early 2008, before the movie hit theaters, a photo began circulating online showing Chris Carter on set holding what appeared to be the severed head of a werewolf. The image spread like wildfire, and naturally everyone assumed Mulder and Scully were about to investigate a genuine monster.
Then came WonderCon 2008.
When asked why there weren’t any werewolves in the trailer, Carter didn’t deny the photo. Instead, he leaned right into the mystery.
“Yes, you did see a werewolf photo on the internet,” Carter confirmed.
“You shouldn’t have seen that werewolf photo on the internet. We’re keeping the monster, if you will, is being kept a secret. So, don’t believe anything you see. Believe everything you see. My mantra has always been deny everything. I’m going to leave you with that. But the truth is out there.”
Looking back, it’s easy to see why fans bought into it.
Carter wasn’t dismissing the image. He was encouraging everyone to speculate.
Then the movie came out.
There was no werewolf.
Instead, I Want to Believe centered on a psychic priest, missing women, and a grotesque body transplant experiment involving Russian doctors. Whatever you think of the movie, it certainly wasn’t the monster movie many of us had convinced ourselves we were getting.
In fact, the werewolf photo appears to have been exactly what it looked like in hindsight: a deliberate piece of misdirection. Production notes later confirmed the crew intentionally photographed Carter with a fake werewolf head to fool fans into thinking the film featured one of the series’ classic “monster of the week” creatures.
But here’s why I’m thinking about it again.
This isn’t just another re-release.
According to Carter, this is the R-rated director’s cut Fox wouldn’t let audiences see in 2008. The theatrical release was cut back to secure a PG-13 rating, and this new version restores material Carter originally intended to include. Fans have long hoped it would deliver a darker, more frightening experience.
So… was that werewolf really only a publicity stunt?
Or was there, at some point during development, an abandoned sequence, hallucination, nightmare, or even an earlier version of the story that inspired the now-infamous prop?
To be clear, there’s still no evidence that a werewolf was ever actually part of the movie. Everything we’ve learned over the years points to the photo being an elaborate fake designed to keep the real plot under wraps.
Still, nearly twenty years later, with an R-rated cut finally seeing the light of day – and sporting the curious subtitle Vrach Frankenshteyn – I can’t help but think back to one of the greatest fake-outs in X-Files history.
Maybe the truth was never about the werewolf.
Or maybe, after all these years, there’s still one more secret hiding in Carter’s original cut.
