For nearly two decades, one of the strangest mysteries surrounding The X-Files: I Want to Believe had nothing to do […]
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.