2026 has been an interesting year of independence and creativity for The X-Files creator Chris Carter. In August, Hulu released Carter’s Director’s Cut of his 2008 feature debut, The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, with the title and tone he always intended. And this month, he’s promoting the limited release of his second feature, the self-funded indie, Queens for a Day.
IGN attended a recent Santa Monica screening of the time-twisting, cautionary tale with a defiantly political message, Queens for a Day. Carter and the film’s screenwriter, wife Dori Carter, attracted a who’s who of former X-Files staffers including Darren Morgan, Glen Morgan, Annabeth Gish, Kristen Cloke, and Jeff Cahn.
After, Gish led a Q&A with Carter who confirmed that his 2025 recut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn dovetailed into preproduction for Queen, and even shared several X-Files collaborators like editor Cahn and production designer Mark S. Freeborn. Specifically, Vrach Frankenshteyn locked in December 2025. In early 2026, Carter relocated to his old X-Files stomping ground in Vancouver, British Columbia where he filmed over a tight 32 days. He then edited with Cahn, locking the final cut around October 9 with the most timely political topics he was able to include.
In an exclusive IGN chat, the recently-turned-70 Carter said it’s been a big year for him creatively, and that he’s pleased that he finally got to revisit The X-Files: I Want to Believe which initially wasn’t received well by the fandom.
“I just felt like I had made a movie and they made me change it,” Carter said of his initial disappointment with Fox’s cuts. “I wanted to make the movie a scary movie. It was a Frankenstein movie. No one ever appreciated, or got to appreciate it as Frankenstein. I actually got to put the title Frankenstein in it, so that was very important to me. We made sure it’s an X-Files movie that draws on the Frankenstein story and that’s what I tried to put back into it.”
Carter enthusiastically said he was happy with how his cut was received by critics and fans, though he acknowledges the Mulder/Scully shippers were not pleased with his cuts. “The relation-shippers were not happy that I took out some Mulder and Scully,” he said pragmatically. “But we also just did two [season] reboots and Scully learns that she is pregnant in the last one. So when I went back to do I Want to Believe, I had to keep that in mind, that if this is a movie I want people to watch now, that it doesn’t feel dated.”
He explained in the Q&A that the Queen for a Day screenplay was written 30-years ago by Dori, optioned but never got greenlit. Recently, he discovered the screenplay in a box during some housecleaning, so he encouraged her to update her Twilight-Zone styled story about an adult daughter, estranged from her traditional mother. When she gets into a car crash, the daughter wakes up in her mother’s body in the 1950s and gets to live her life literally in her mother’s shoes.
“I said to Dori, ‘I think you should do this in the political moment we’re living in, and you should make the character a right-wing newscaster like Jeanine Pirro who was on [Fox New’s] The Five,’ Carter said. “And that’s really the genesis of the project.”
In its current iteration in Queen, the daughter is Judge Jerri, a big, brash conservative MAGA news pundit (played by actress Erin Boyes) who goes through a journey of begrudging empathy, coming to understanding her mother’s struggles as a single mother and more generally a disappointed woman in an era that afforded her few independent options. She comes to see where her bitterness has poisoned not only her world, but helped do so in the broader toxic political discourse.
Carter said the finished film scared all the studios and distributors but he’s still working on securing one. “The reason we wanted to do this was not just to tell a good tale, but to raise our fists. We’re angry we are living in a world we don’t want to live in, and so this is our response to that. And I should say, this story owes to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge gets to see the past and present and the future, and what Jerri sees is the future that changes her life.”
He also agreed that Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was a big inspiration. “I just read something really interesting about Rod Serling, that he kept trying to write things that they wouldn’t let him put on television,” Carter told IGN. “And he finally figured out for The Twilight Zone, if you write things allegorically, you can actually put things on film that you wouldn’t be able to do.”
Queens for a Day is screening until October 22 exclusively at LaemmleRoyal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd. News on a wider release and more screenings for Queens for a Day can be found at their Instagram page: @queensforadaymovie
Tara Bennett is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering film and television. She has over 20 years of experience covering the film and television industries with bylines at SFX Magazine, Paste Magazine, and SYFY WIRE. She is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 official movie and TV companion books including The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water and The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Find @TaraDBennett on Twitter.
