session 9 movie review

31 Things We Learned from the Session 9 Commentary

Published August 10, 2016 Features , Movies By Rob Hunter Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

“It’s not a nice place.”

Brad Anderson ’s Session 9 has developed a healthy following since its premiere at the start of the new millennium, and its deserving of that ever-growing acclaim. A terrifically creepy descent into supernatural-infused madness, the movie’s greatest strength is the atmosphere created by the location itself ‐ an abandoned mental hospital with beautiful architecture masking the ugliness within.

The film is hitting Blu-ray from Scream Factory next week, and along with an improved picture and some new interviews the disc recycles a previously available commentary track.

Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for Session 9 .

Session 9 (2001)

Commentators: Brad Anderson (director/co-writer), Stephen Gevodon (co-writer/actor)

1. The opening image of the wheelchair with restraints in the empty hall was the first to come to Anderson’s mind while writing the script.

2. The casting of Peter Mullan and David Caruso was meant to show two men at contrast with each other. The former seems to encourage sympathy while the latter gives off a “more menacing” vibe.

3. The entire film was shot in and on the grounds of the abandoned Danvers hospital including a handful of sets they built on the property. There’s actually at least two exceptions to this including a brief shot later in the film of Phil (Caruso) at a bar back in town and the short scenes in front of Gordon’s (Mullan) house.

4. There really was “asbestos, mildew, and toxic substances” throughout the hospital that added to the occasionally difficult shoot.

5. The idea at play here is that “if you’re prone or susceptible to a kind of madness then this place, this building which is so haunting, will somehow allow those demons to come in.”

6. The clippings and images taped to the inmate’s wall were based on what they actually found on some of the walls as well as what they were told constituted some kind of art therapy. “What I was trying to go for here was this sort of creepy, sort of juxtaposition of images that represent happiness and joy with images of abject poverty, sadness, and tragedy, as a way to sort of allude to split personalities.”

7. Anderson was worried about Mullan’s Scottish accent, but happily few people seemed to see it as an issue. “He does sometimes do that Scottish slurring of words.”

8. Brendan Sexton III , who plays Jeff, was “wary of the mullet” his character sported. It’s a hairpiece, and he initially removed it after shooting but eventually grew tired of the process and just kept it attached throughout production.

9. The guard’s exposition regarding the hospital’s closing was based on the real scandals and issues that led the hospital to close its doors for good.

10. Anderson showed Mullan the brief shot of the spider attacking the insect in its web and told the actor that it defined his character’s path.

11. Test screenings resulted in strong suggestions to cut down the scene where Mike (Gevedon) tells the Satanic repression story. Audiences felt it went on too long, but happily Anderson ignored their requests. “We had in mind from the get-go this movie was gonna be a movie that took its time.” They weren’t interested in making an “MTV-style horror movie.”

12. Anderson believes this was the first film shot on HD 24p.

13. The library room where Mike listens to the session tapes was actually a coffee room for the hospital staff. They scoured the buildings for objects to populate the room.

14. They had discussions early on and through the editing as to how much of a supernatural edge to allow. The original script made things very clear and plausible as “very much a clinical interpretation of mental illness and insanity, but as we started to cut it together we realized audiences wanted it to be a little more spooky and ghostly.”

15. At its peak the hospital housed 4000 patients and staff. “At one point back in the ’30s and ’40s it was so overcrowded that they had patients sleeping in the subterranean tunnels.”

16. The actors had their own ideas as to what the film is ultimately about with Mullan’s being that it’s essentially an American tragedy. Anderson agrees and included the shot of the broken American flag window to accentuate the idea.

17. The two unnamed characters who Gordon sees talking to Phil originally figured into the film later, but the additional scene was cut. We still see him smoking the weed he purchased from them though.

18. The graveyard seen in the film was built by the production, but it’s modeled on the real one nearby. “It was just an anonymous, sort of pauper’s graveyard where they buried patients, awful, they never even identified them on headstones.”

19. Gordon was based on an actual incident in Boston involving an insurance salesman who returned home from work and killed his wife after discovering she had burned the ziti. “He went ballistic, killed her, proceeded to cut out her heart and lungs and stick it on a stake in the backyard, and then went back to work for a couple days.”

20. A cell phone rang while they were filming the confessional scene between Gordon and Phil. Rumors of Caruso’s short temper turned out to be false, perhaps in part because the phone belonged to Anderson. “Had it been a PA or something it could have been dangerous.”

21. The goal with Rob Millis ’ score (as Climax Golden Twins with Jeffrey Taylor) was to let it be “very experimental and sound montagy, and less sort of musical.” They crafted themes for different characters and events ultimately creating “layered motifs” throughout the film.

22. The image of the figure in the white hazmat suit being doused in blood was created on the spur of the moment when they found themselves with a spare ten minutes. Anderson’s assistant was the lucky guy splashed with Karo syrup.

23. The scene where Gordon, Phil, Mike, and Jeff are arguing in the stairwell and hear footsteps running across the floor above was originally part of a subplot involving a mysterious figure (a homeless woman) roaming the buildings. “When we lost that subplot in the final cut they now must be Hank ( Josh Lucas ), right?” Anderson thinks that’s not as “clean of a storyline” but says sometimes “you have to live with the inconsistencies.”

24. Gevedon was not originally a fan of the title Session 9 .

25. Gordon’s story is meant to parallel that of Mary Hobbs, the woman on the session tapes, and draw connections between the murders they commit, the memories they repress, and their need to wake up and remember.

26. It’s subtle, but when Phil calls Gordon on the radio at the end saying “We found the one, the one responsible,” it’s meant to be a ghost voice. The clue, in addition to it taking place after Phil has been murdered, is the lack of a walkie talkie squelch on Phil’s end.

27. “Caruso did six different versions of this scene,” says Anderson, referring to the scene where Gordon walks in to find Phil standing over Hank’s dad body. They tried it straight, over the top, underplayed, and campy. “It’s hard, because what is he, he’s a ghost!”

28. The awl going into Larry Fessenden’s eye is the film’s only CG shot.

29. They had an alternate ending (available on the Blu-ray) where Gordon dies, but they found the idea and image of him being the only living soul left in this building to be a haunting one.

30. Neither of them say goodbye or thank you to end the commentary ‐ both pretty standard sign-offs on these things ‐ and instead just disappear. It’s actually pretty fitting.

31. Filmmakers and films commented upon or referenced as inspirations include My Name Is Joe , Stanley Kubrick, Picnic at Hanging Rock , Don’t Look Now , 2001 , Plan 9 from Outer Space , 9 and 1/2 Weeks , and The Shining (obviously).

Best in Context-Free Commentary

“There’s something creepy about something horrific going down in broad daylight.”

“Every movie needs its midget in a red coat.”

“Caruso, alone, having a beer. No one likes him.”

“Strip off all your clothes and sit on this asbestos covered pipe and hang out here for a couple hours.”

Final Thoughts

This remains a terrific, understated, and frequently chilling film, and the commentary reveals the different thoughts as well as the trial and error that went into its production. Some people knock it for its decision to play fast and loose as to whether it’s supernatural horror or psychological thriller, but that’s both missing the point and beside the point. The movie works beautifully as both. If you don’t already own it on DVD this new Scream Factory Blu-ray is the way to go for the step up in picture quality as well as the new special features.

Read more Commentary Commentary from the archives.

Session 9 [Blu-ray]

Tagged with: Commentary Commentary Filmmaking Home Video

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Session 9 Reviews

Flawed but well-acted, arty and creepy supernatural thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 15, 2024

The lo-fi aesthetic make it feel less like a movie and more like a reality show, emphasizing the methodical descent into madness experience by the characters, while the running voiceovers will send chills down your spine.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 20, 2023

Session 9 leaps from slow-burn unease—you know something is festering, but you can’t quite put your finger on it—to a rapid-fire gorefest in which everything you’ve just seen is thoroughly explained.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2022

Slow burning and atmospheric, Brad Anderson's Session 9 has aged exceptionally well since it was first released back in 2001. This is because of its strong cast, well-honed characterisation and the atmospheric location work of the chiller's setting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2022

Effortlessly sinister without ever veering into over-the-top territory, Session 9 is a shining example of how to make a slow burn and a relatively light-on-scares story intensely menacing and uncomfortable.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2022

Session 9 will chill you to the bone.

Full Review | Dec 21, 2021

Session 9 is a highly atmospheric suspense yarn with a strong sense of place. In fact, Anderson has admitted that he had the setting for his film before he had a screenplay.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2020

Session 9 evokes an older sense of place, while confronting today's struggles to reconcile with the past in the face of modernity via a haunted asylum.

Full Review | May 1, 2019

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 12, 2013

Danvers State Hospital: a huge building, rotting from within... Session 9 without this building is simply inconceivable.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 2, 2011

Session 9 is heavy on mood and light on narrative substance, but the pervasive sense of dread that it sustains trumps the slightness of plot.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 9, 2011

A brilliant, morbid peek in to human psychology.

Full Review | Apr 29, 2009

Playing to a classier tune, the film is one that is immersive even in its understatedness, weaving a tale that is all the more effective because of how believable it is.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 9, 2008

One of the best horror films of 2001 ...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 18, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 14, 2007

We've been given a new and very scary movie and it should be appreciated accordingly.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Brad Anderson cria um forte clima de suspense e conduz o filme com segurança - até que, a 15 minutos do final, o roteiro entra em modo de auto-destruição.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 27, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 76/100 | Mar 16, 2004

Brad Anderson’s “Session 9”: The Little Leap From Comedy to Killing

Since its limited theatrical release in 2001, Brad Anderson ’s “Session 9” has slowly gained prominence among film fans as one of the great American horror films of the 21st century. With an impressive ensemble cast, unnerving soundtrack and unforgettable use of location, the film not only set the stage for the modern renaissance in independent horror films, it also established Anderson as one of the better genre directors of our time. Subsequent films like “ The Machinist ” (2004) and “ Transsiberian ” (2008) have only cemented Anderson’s reputation as the heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock in all on-screen matters related to guilt and paranoia. Now, thanks to a brand new Blu-ray release by the folks at Shout! Factory, people who slept on “Session 9” the first time around can finally experience it in a premium format.

Of course, as much as Anderson’s name may now be synonymous with psychological thrillers and atmospheric horror films, there was a time early in his career when he seemed more likely to become the next Steven Soderbergh than the next great genre director. Anderson’s first film, a micro-budgeted drama about turning thirty called “The Darien Gap,” played at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. But it wasn’t until two years later that Anderson burst onto the scene with the romantic comedy “Next Stop Wonderland.” Despite a budget of only about a million dollars, audience enthusiasm for the film sparked a furious bidding war at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, leading Miramax Films to pay more than six million dollars for the rights to distribute the film. According to The Boston Globe , then-Miramax president Harvey Weinstein and five of his staff locked themselves in a hotel room with producer Mitchell Robbins and refused to let him leave until a deal was done. In addition to the money, Miramax also agreed to distribute Anderson’s next two films, an arrangement that would fall through after “Next Stop Wonderland” failed to win Miramax back its initial investment at the box office.

Had Anderson continued to focus on the type of films that played big at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s possible that he could have supplanted David O. Russell as one of the more notable studio auteurs of the decade. Instead, Anderson’s next film set the stage for a very different focus as a director. A surface reading of “ Happy Accidents ” (which premiered at Sundance in 2000) places it a lot closer to “Next Stop Wonderland” than “Session 9” (released August 2001) in Anderson’s oeuvre. In “Happy Accidents,” Marisa Tomei plays Ruby Weaver, a New Yorker struggling to overcome a painful dating history and her own tendency toward emotional co-dependence. Ruby’s most recent unhealthy relationship is with Sam Deed (Vincent D’Onofrio), a hospice worker who claims his increasingly erratic behavior is a result of his recent travel backward in time. Despite her better judgment, Ruby begins to treat Sam’s delusions as a kind of private game between the two of them, causing their relationship to blossom despite the warnings of Ruby’s therapist not to enable Sam’s potentially destructive behavior. Before long, Ruby realizes that her own happy accident was falling in love with an honest and caring man.

The plot of “Happy Accidents” promises its fair share of independent film whimsy, and Anderson and his cast provide plenty of thirtysomething soul-searching along the way. But whereas “Next Stop Wonderland” is focused on the challenge of finding love in modern society, “Happy Accidents” has its finger on something decidedly darker. Anderson, in his twin roles as both writer and director, does not try to sweep both Ruby and Sam’s unhealthy behavior under the rug. Ruby speaks openly with her friends about the possibility that Sam may be suffering from a mental illness. Meanwhile, despite her ongoing therapy, Ruby is unable to come to terms with the self-destructive nature of her own behavior. Each character hits their nadir in a moment of violence. For Sam, it is an unprovoked assault on a random taxi driver that he thinks may accidentally hurt Ruby at some point in the future; Ruby is shocked to find that she has given Sam a black eye during a particularly bad fight.

And just as we become certain that “Happy Accidents” is headed toward tragedy—where Sam’s spiraling psychosis and Ruby’s manic-depressive behavior put one or both of their lives at risk—Anderson gently steers the movie back to safe ground. “Happy Accidents” favors science-fiction over domestic abuse in its final act. Sam really has traveled back in time from the future to save Ruby from a horrible accident. Ruby, for her part, is saved only because her co-dependent behavior allowed her to stick with Sam long after the point where most people would have walked away. Anderson’s script veers dangerously close to territory normally reserved for psychological thrillers, but Ruby and Sam get their happily ever after, and video clerks around the world shelved “Happy Accidents” in the drama or comedy section, blissfully unaware of how close the film came to being Anderson’s first true horror movie.

And then came “Session 9.” Anderson has always emphasized the importance of having multiple projects on the back burner in case one of them fell through; for years, this included various permutations of horror movie remakes and original psychological thrillers. Anderson described “Session 9” to Back Stage magazine as his response to the “vagaries of the industry,” a movie that he could shoot quickly and for a relatively low cost. With his eye on the abandoned Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, Anderson and his writing partner Stephen Gevedon set out to make their character-driven take on the classic haunted house movie. Anderson had become obsessed with the facility during his time in Massachusetts and wanted to make a movie that would make the most of its rotting interiors. In telling the story of a hazmat crew rushing to remove deadly toxins from a national landmark, Anderson and Gevedon stumbled on the perfect parallel between story and location.

The title refers to nine recordings, a series of interviews between a Danvers psychiatrist and a woman named Mary Hobbes, discovered by a staff member of a crew run by new father and small business owner Gordon Fleming ( Peter Mullan ). In her youth, Mary had murdered her family in their sleep and retreated between a series of alternate personalities who prevent her from facing the truth. The more the Danvers team picks at Mary’s buried memories, the closer Gordon gets to remembering his own tragedy. Gordon is not going crazy so much as he has already gone crazy, hurting his family in a moment of blind fear and rage. In a special feature on the new Blu-ray, Anderson and Gevedon describe the real-life inspiration for Fleming as a Boston insurance agent who murdered his family in a fit of rage and then continued going to work as if nothing had happened.

This places the protagonists of “Happy Accidents” and “Session 9” on opposite sides of the same coin. Paradoxically, both leading men are doing their best to prevent a future that already exists in their past. Sam says things that frighten those around him but is in his heart a well-meaning person; Gordon is the face of calm despite the fact that he is rotting from the inside out. Both men are driven to extremes by the woman he loves, and both men are left to carry the guilt of their actions—or inactions—throughout the course of the film. With “Happy Accidents” and “Next Stop Wonderland,” Anderson had spent his previous films exploring the power of love as a motivating force. That power is turned inward in “Session 9,” giving us a twisted, dark lead who, as Truman Capote might say, stepped out the back door just as Sam stepped out the front.

In hindsight, perhaps the screenplay for “Happy Accidents” even tipped Anderson’s hand as to how close he was to making the leap into horror. In one scene, Sam demonstrates the paradox of time travel by running his hand from Ruby’s waist to her foot. Since time flows in only one direction, Sam explains, it breaks all the fundamental laws of physics to reverse the flow of time and head back up to the top of the leg. “But what if time isn’t a rigid line?” Sam asks, bending her leg and placing her heel up against her inner thigh. “What if you could bend space and time so that the present lays side by side with the past? Then you really wouldn’t have to go back at all. You’d just have to make a little leap.” Screenwriting may not be the same as time travel, but the logic seems mostly the same: by bending his male characters so that love, guilt and obsession all swirl together, Anderson did not need to make a huge splash to move nimbly between comedy and horror. He only needed to make a little leap.

So there you have it: a career written in reverse. While many filmmakers choose to establish themselves within the relatively low stakes of the horror genre, Anderson instead built his reputation on one of Hollywood’s biggest stages before shifting his focus ever-so-slightly to the side of madness. “Session 9” was given a limited release by IFC Films on August 10, 2001; as luck would have it, “Happy Accidents” was finally picked up for distribution around the same time, hitting theaters a mere two weeks after “Session 9”’s theatrical release. “If people see both,” Anderson told The New York Times in August 2001, “they’ll think I’m schizophrenic.” As it turns out, history has been far kinder to the filmmaker than he originally anticipated.

“Session 9” is now out on Blu-ray via Shout! Factory. Click here to get your copy .

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Review: session 9.

It proves to be a remarkably spare journey into the confines of the mind and a unique evocation of just how terrifying it is to loose one’s mind.

Nicolas Roeg’s seminal thriller Don’t Look Now is a riveting study of couple’s frustrated sexual desire in the wake of their daughter’s death. Though the film’s mysterious, red-cloaked figure appears campy by today’s cynical standard, the film’s infamous sex scene is still remarkably audacious. Session 9 owes plenty to Roeg’s masterpiece and director Brad Anderson is more than willing to admit it. Anderson’s creeper is nowhere near as profound but the film’s old-fashioned pacing and revelatory camerawork bring to mind Roeg’s uniquely terrifying dreamworlds. Much of the film’s success rests on that which is unknown and that which is yet to be revealed. When five men from the Hazmat Elimination Co. try to clean an abandoned mental hospital of asbestos they slowly find themselves drawn into the building’s mysterious past. Mike (Stephen Gevedon) is slowly drawn to a series of nine audio sessions explicitly detailing the mental progress of a multiple personality case named Mary Hobbes, whose patient number makes creepy appearances throughout the film. When the ninth session is placed inside the audio player, the suspense is grueling. When Hank (Josh Lucas) discovers a collection of coins contained within the walls of the asylum’s basement, he hopes to make a break for Florida with his newfound fortune. The film’s trippy soundscape is both ominous and portentous. In one scene, Anderson’s camera pans through the wall to reveal that the coins are pouring out of what appears to be a crematorium. Hank remains oblivious. More remarkable than the film’s sheer terror is there’s actually very little violence on parade here. Session 9 is remarkably old-fashioned. Little happens during the film’s first half, bringing to mind Tobe Hooper’s claustrophobic terror mechanism The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . Save for the disappointing finale, Session 9 proves to be a remarkably spare journey into the confines of the mind and a unique evocation of just how terrifying it is to loose one’s mind.

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Session 9 Ending Explained: Where Is My Mind?

The state of the horror film improved drastically at the turn of the millennium . There were still plenty of uninspired slasher flicks cluttering multiplexes, but an up-and-coming generation of filmmakers who dearly loved the genre were spinning slow-burn tales of supernatural and psychological terror. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro Amenábar slithered under our skin with moody freakouts like "Pulse," "The Devil's Backbone" and "The Others." These weren't popcorn diversions; these movies lingered in memory long after you staggered out of the theater. And no movie left viewers more rattled — and with more eerily unanswered questions — than Brad Anderson's "Session 9."

It has an unforgettable wallop of a finale. The mental anguish inflicted on the five men toiling within the confines of the creepy, long-shuttered Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts has boiled over into murder. Peter Mullan's Gordon, the owner of the company hired to strip the asbestos out of the building, has evidently killed every single one of his employees, and, in a gruesomely devastating twist, his wife and daughter. What prompted this seemingly sane man to commit such heinous actions? Was it a demon, a suppressed compulsion, or the asylum itself? Anderson has left open the door to a supernatural explanation for the disturbing goings-on in his film, but it's not until the closing scenes that he commits to one interpretation.

What happens at the end of "Session 9" is clear. What it means is another matter altogether.

What you need to remember about the plot of Session 9

The star of "Session 9" is the very real asylum, a crumbling 700,000-square-foot edifice that once housed so many patients they had to stash some in the narrow subterranean corridors featured in the movie. It is a sprawling palace of pain, and it doesn't take long for its history to wreak havoc on the psyche of the men charged with scraping it free of fibrous toxicity.

Mullan's Gordon is the operator of an asbestos abatement company. He comes on as an apparently steady man who's taken the high-pressure, week-and-out gig to support his wife and newborn child. His employees are his nephew Jeff (Brandon Sexton III), the bitter Phil (David Caruso), degenerate gambler Hank (Josh Lucas), and law-school washout Mike (Stephen Gevedon). There are surface tensions (especially between Phil and Hank), but Gordon strikes us as a capable leader. He'll bring them through.

The asylum, however, has other ideas. Initially, we're primed for a haunted mansion yarn. There's a voice ominously calling out to Gordon, and a collection of nine reel-to-reel recordings of an interview conducted with Mary Hobbes (Jurian Hughes), one of the institution's previous inhabitants, who, suffering from dissociative identity disorder, murdered her parents and little brother. Mike takes an interest in these sessions, and, as his co-workers begin to unravel, we sense that Mary's malignant personality, Simon, might be driving everyone into a violent lather.

Anderson flirts with the supernatural element because Danvers, like the Overlook Hotel of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," looks like it was built to be haunted. When Hank disappears (after getting the outer wall of a crematorium buried in the structure's bowels to pay out like a slot machine), and reappears to Jeff as a babbling, zombie-like figure, we're certain there are chaotic spirits at play. Anderson does not dissuade us from this assumption, which makes the film's payoff all the more shocking.

What happened at the end of Session 9

After Jeff is assaulted and Mike goes missing, a distressed Gordon reenters the asylum to find Phil standing over Hank's corpse. Only it's not a corpse. Hank is alive, and he's got a lobotomy spike — which he discovered in the crematorium (thus suggesting many of the institution's previous inhabitants were subjected to this barbaric procedure) — embedded in his eye. He speaks to Gordon in a brain-damaged daze.

Gordon is shocked as the evidently psychotic Phil shouts at him to "wake up." This all goes down as Hank's replacement, Craig (Larry Fessenden), shows up to help the remaining workers to finish the job. Upon his appearance, Phil disappears into thin air (because he was never really there). Before Craig can make sense of the situation, Gordon wrestles him to the ground, Excaliburs the spike out of Hank's frontal lobe, and drives it into the new arrival's socket.

Gordon is the killer. But what possessed him to do this?

Earlier in the film, Gordon confessed to Phil that he'd struck his wife in fury after she accidentally splashed him with boiling water. He's had no contact with her since this incident. As Anderson reveals each of Gordon's victims, we realize he did far worse than this. Over a montage of family photos, an audio track makes it shockingly clear that Gordon's murdered his wife, child, and dog.

In the final moments, we watch a destroyed Gordon begging forgiveness from his wife into a broken cell phone. Anderson then cuts to a helicopter shot of Danvers, over which we hear old tape of the doctor asking Mary/Simon where they live. Their response: "I live among the weak and the wounded."

What the end of Session 9 means

Anderson doesn't give up enough about Gordon's family life, or Gordon himself, to allow us a full understanding of his psychosis, which is both fascinating and frustrating. Thematically, "Session 9" is an open-ended movie ( at least for now ). Given the esteem in which Gordon's men hold him, my very creaky-limb take here (devoid of deleted-scene analysis, 'cuz if it ain't in the finished film it ain't relevant) is that he's executed them out of pity. He's spared them a lifetime of blue-collar, bill-paying agony because he knows all too well that in every workaday man resides a violent inadequacy.

That's a bleak read, but "Session 9" is a relentlessly bleak movie. These Boston-area guys were raised to believe they were supposed to be more — be kings, even (or their own boss like Gordon) — and they'll only forever be on the precipice of nothing. They were born weak and wounded, and lack the education to do anything about it. The lobotomy is a formality.

What the end of Session 9 could mean for the franchise

The ending of "Session 9" closes the door to Gordon's story (because there's no coming back from killing your family), and leaves open questions about Mary Hobbes's story. Obviously, we know she was beset with a psychological disorder that manifested in the most hideous of ways, but if you're a true crime connoisseur you can't help but wonder what her family was like and whether they knew how dangerous their daughter/sister could be. Anderson and co-writer Gevedon wondered about this, too. In fact, in a 2021 interview with Fangoria , they let slip that they've worked up a prequel covering this very topic.

As Anderson told Fangoria:

"The general gist of the story was that it'd be about Mary Hobbes, the character in the original movie who's on the tapes and who has these alternate personalities and who would ultimately realize she killed her family on Christmas Day. Here we'd learn the entire Mary Hobbes story — how she went from being a fairly normal 12-year-old girl in 1959 and '58 to slaughtering her whole family, and why. Our story was gonna be kind of a portrait of madness through the eyes and the lens of that little girl in the late '50s, early '60s. It's called 'Session 1.' The movie ended with the first session, which would then become a series of sessions that this girl would go through, and ultimately would lead to 'Session 9.'"

Unfortunately, Focus Features, which now controls the rights to "Session 9" and any prospective spinoffs, isn't interested in financing a follow-up to a movie that tanked (due to poor marketing) during its theatrical release. So unless the company has a change of heart, consider "Session 9" distressingly settled business.

"Session 9" is available to rent on all major streaming platforms.

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The Wolf of Snow Hollow director-star Jim Cummings talks about his love for, and fear of, the 2001 horror movie.

Senior Writer

In filmmaker Jim Cummings' new thriller The Wolf of Snow Hollow the writer-director himself plays a small town cop investigating an unusual homicide case. "The movie is about this recovering alcoholic who is the son of the sheriff at a sheriff’s department in Utah," says Cummings, who previously wrote, directed, and starred in 2018's Thunder Road . "He is just a complete bulldozer and asshole and doesn’t listen to the people around him. That's how we introduce the guy. He's at AA and he sounds like a murderer. He talks about driving a forklift through his ex-wife’s house. He starts to believe that there is a serial killer in town and everybody else starts to believe that there’s a werewolf. He has to convince everybody in his circle that there’s no such thing as werewolves, which is something that he thinks should have gone without saying. And it becomes progressively more intense."

Also intense? Cummings' recommendation for the most terrifying film readers can watch this Halloween. The director's choice is Brad Anderson's 2001 chiller Session 9 , which stars David Caruso, Peter Mullan , and Josh Lucas, among others.

" Session 9 is one of my favorites," says Cummings. "It's about an asbestos-cleaning crew in an insane asylum in Massachusetts that has fallen into disrepair and is empty — quote, unquote. They go in to clean it out and strange things start to happen. There’s a 45-minute chunk in that film that is actually the most frightening thing I've ever seen. There’s this terrifying spooky inevitability in the film. It’s really neat."

Watch the trailer for Session 9 above.

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Session 9 (2001)

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Although aimed at restoring the psychological horror movie to full life after years of dormancy, “Session 9” is little more than an overworked exercise in jostling red herrings, and not particularly fresh herrings at that. In his fourth feature (third released), writer-director-editor Brad Anderson courageously strikes out here into a field far from the well-observed human comedy that characterized his breakthrough pic, “Next Stop, Wonderland.” Anderson’s soon-to-be-released comedy, “Happy Accidents,” made before “Session 9” (and which premiered at last year’s Sundance), may wipe away all memory of this bummer, destined for a brutally short theatrical existence before it comes back to life in the friendlier confines of widescreen video and DVD.

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The second release in less than a month (after “Jackpot”) to be shot with Sony’s CineAlta HD digital video cameras recording at 24 frames per second, “Session 9” is most noteworthy as part of the early wave of latest-generation digital cinema, deploying the technology to a low-budget scale that George Lucas is using for his upcoming “Star Wars: Episode II.”

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But while the new process eliminates one irritating factor that has long made the standard 30 fps digital video an inferior alternative to film — visible image flicker, especially noticeable during camera moves — it still has far to go aesthetically: True registers in the full color spectrum remain elusive, especially the all-important area of flesh tones . While absolute blacks and whites also are outside the range of these cameras, pic’s image in dark, shadowy corridors is perhaps the best yet in the new video age. However, what works most against this story is the video image’s artificial, “electronic” texture, hardly eliminated by the 24 fps innovation.

While the brave new world of digi-cinema is unimpressively cracking open, the pesky old-world problems of story, drama and character persist, and while pic works up a nervously eerie paranoia, it finally doesn’t know what to do with what it sets up. What begins with the deliberate unbalance of “Don’t Look Now” resolves as a low-minded shocker that Clive Barker might hand off to one of his sycophants.

Fresh premise intros asbestos-cleaning crew run by Gordon (Peter Mullan), who relies on his right-hand man, Phil (David Caruso). Gordon’s firm needs business, so he promises Bill (Paul Guilfoyle), municipal engineer for the town of Danvers, Mass., that his outfit can remove asbestos from the rotting insides of the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital in a week. The hospital facility is so massive that it requires aerial shots to take it all in; not even a team of five supermen could do the job in a week, so right off, there’s something clearly off about Gordon, which Mullan indicates with an itchy air of desperation.

And supermen these are not: Below Phil, there’s former law student Mike (co-writer Stephen Gevedon), blue-collar cynic Hank (Josh Lucas) and Gordon’s nephew, Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), who has never worked on asbestos cleanup before and, if that’s not enough, is afraid of the dark — a real problem, since the guys are about to sweep up one dark and gloomy place.

With interiors full of flaking paint, stagnant water and the enveloping sense of rot, it feels as if Gordon’s team has walked into a widescreen version of one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s clammy, sepulchral sets, like the murky spaces in “Nostalgia.” Actually, Mike seems to know all about what happened here, from endless tortures of mental patients to cases of supposed satanic ritual, and his account plants seeds of fear in everyone.

Hank already bugs all-pro Phil, but now it gets worse, and the men start sniping. Jeff can hardly seem to turn on a simple motor, Gordon starts sweating a bit, and Mike just happens to find the sealed evidence file on the satanic ritual case, containing hours of creepy audiotapes.

Like the evil sick ward of Lars von Trier’s “The Kingdom” and the malevolent Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” the complex holds so much human misery and horror inside of it that it touches anyone hanging around too long. Who it will touch the deepest, and how they’ll react, is the supposed suspense, but Anderson’s direction — and most critically, his own editing — give away the answers at an absurdly early phase, and any number of Maguffins thrown into the mix are hardly enough distraction.

Anderson’s and Gevedon’s script displays a healthy dislike of easy metaphysical explanations for the terrors that ensue, and pic delights in linking the crew with the unseen forces by purely visual and aural means. But the lack of imagination, especially in the final 30 minutes, makes even the attempts at genre credibility an empty gesture in the end.

Though the quality of ensemble chamber drama is a step above — for example, the group schisms of crews in the “Alien” series — thesps hardly distract us from wondering why guys who are apparently in the midst of a massive, impossible rush job have so much time to sit around and snipe at each other. With a supporting crew that is never possible to take seriously, Mullan and Caruso are asked to do the heavy lifting, and they are best at raising the paranoid temperature.

The synthetic quality of the high-definition image, even when transferred to film, leaves one wishing that pic’s extensive and relentless use of the decaying building as a central character had been captured on celluloid, but it doesn’t lessen designer Sophie Carlhian’s achievement in literally deconstructing a gigantic interior space. Lisle Houston Engle’s sound design turns the psychological screws, and the score by band Climax Golden Twins creates its own atonal mental soundscapes.

Production: A USA Films release and presentation of a Scout production. Produced by David Collins, Dorothy Aufiero, Michael Williams. Executive producer, John Sloss. Directed, edited by Brad Anderson. Screenplay, Anderson, Stephen Gevedon.
Crew: Camera (TM Laser Pacific Media high-definition video, Fotokem prints, Sony 24P hi-def video widescreen), Uta Briesewitz; music, Climax Golden Twins; music supervisors, Barry Cole, Christopher Covert; production designer, Sophie Carlhian; art director, Dr. Roger Danchik; costume designer, Aimee E. McCue; sound (Dolby Digital), Tom Williams; sound designer, Lisle Houston Engle; supervising sound editor, Jason George; visual effects, VCE.Com; visual effects supervisor, Peter Kuran; assistant director, Jennifer C. Blum; casting, Sheila Jaffe, Georgianne Walken. Reviewed at Clarity screening room, Beverly Hills, July 19, 2001. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 97 MIN.
With: Gordon Fleming - Peter Mullan Phil - David Caruso Mike - Stephen Gevedon Hank - Josh Lucas Jeff - Brendan Sexton III Bill Griggs - Paul Guilfoyle Voices: Lonnie Farmer, Sheila Stasack, Jurian Hughes.

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Universal Pictures

‘Session 9’ Is The Best Horror Film You've Never Seen, And It's Based On Real-Life Events

Released to little fanfare in 2001, Session 9 is an amazing and too-often-overlooked psychological horror flick that would feel right at home rubbing shoulders with today's modern slate of "elevated horror" pictures - just as much as it felt oddly out-of-place in a post- Scream 2001. To know what makes Session 9 stand out, you can start with the answer to the question, "Where was Session 9 filmed?"

Making extensive use of the abandoned Danvers State Hospital - a real hospital for the mentally ill that was in operation from the late 1800s until the 1980s - and drawing from real stories, Session 9 didn't have to add much to make things scary. Fortunately, it goes above and beyond, telling the tale of an asbestos abatement team who go into the eerie halls of the derelict hospital only to be slowly drawn into their own darkness. Is it because of the hospital itself? The ghostly echoes of its former patients? Or is someone in the building with them?

As the men all begin to fragment, one of them finds a series of taped interview sessions with a former patient whose story has a chilly parallel with events taking place within the walls. This eerie gem from 2001 might just be one of the best horror movies you've never seen.

'Session 9' Oozes Dread From Every Frame

From the very first frame of the movie - an image of a lone chair, sitting in a beam of light in a decaying hallway, the whole frame turned upside-down - Session 9 sets out to make the audience ill-at-ease. Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly , said of the film's unremittingly unsettling tone that director Brad Anderson, who was a newcomer to horror films, "seems to be bending over backward to stretch his wings."

"Stretching his wings" in this case translates to "freaking the audience out." Gleiberman went on to refer to Session 9 as a " marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere ." The director put it another way: "We weren't going for jolts (things jumping out of closets and stuff) as much as we were creating an atmosphere of dread or menace that lives with you."

Anderson and his crew had an able partner in that enterprise in the form of the film's setting - the decaying hulk of the abandoned Danvers State Hospital which, just as in the movie, had housed the mentally ill for more than a century, until it was closed down in the 1980s . But the building alone could only do so much, and the film's roving camera and ominous soundscape take over from there, showcasing the contrasting beauty and isolation of the location and creating a sonic landscape that heightens tension at every turn.

Session 9 does a lot with very little. There are few special effects. Instead, we get eerie images of the abandoned hospital, recordings of an interview with a patient that turns increasingly chilling, portrayals of human psyches fracturing apart in ways that make it seem like any one of them could be behind the strange goings-on within the walls, and in one particularly effective sequence, a series of images of insects crawling on grass set to a monologue about the hospital's sordid history.

The Movie Was Filmed On Location At The Abandoned Danvers State Hospital

Originally built in 1874, the abandoned Danvers State Hospital is basically the perfect location for a horror movie. Not only is it a derelict hospital for the mentally ill with a litany of unsettling stories associated with its long history, but it was actually built on the spot where one of the judges in the Salem Witch Trials once lived. Hard to get a more perfect horror movie pedigree than that.

The hospital is also said to have been the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitarium, which in turn, lent its name to the infamous Arkham Asylum where Batman's rogues gallery spend much of their time. According to the cast and crew of Session 9 , the hospital more than lived up to its eerie reputation.

"It was a terrifying location ," actor David Caruso said of the hospital. "It was a place we never got comfortable in. It wasn't like it was day three and you were throwing water balloons because it was so much fun to be there. It was always scary, and you could really feel the pain of the people that were at Danvers. It's a rough environment. But, I mean, it's on the film. You can see. They didn't have to dress any sets or anything, all that stuff was already there."

The crew were only able to use a small part of the hospital because much of it was unsafe. In the film, the man who is hiring the crew to remove the asbestos describes the building's Kirkbride Plan, an architectural and philosophical approach to constructing such hospitals, in a suitably gothic manner, comparing it to a giant bat. Today, what remains of the Danvers State Hospital has been converted into pricey apartments and condos - for those brave enough to live there.

It Was A Horror Debut For The Director, Whose Previous Credits Were Romantic Comedies

Technically, director Brad Anderson's debut was a 50-minute short filmed on Super 8 in 1993 called Frankenstein's Planet of Monsters! According to B.C. Sterrett of the Lost Media Archive, it was " ultra low budget and the costumes and the sets and the whole design is very homemade but very charming and ingenious and you'll never see anything like it." Between that and Session 9 , however, Anderson stayed away from the horror genre, directing the romantic comedies Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents .

Session 9 marked Anderson's first foray into this kind of big-screen horror - but not his last . He followed it up with the thriller The Machinist starring Christian Bale in 2004, and by 2006, he had a slot in the roster of the Showtime anthology series Masters of Horror , where he was rubbing shoulders with more established veterans of the genre, like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, and Stuart Gordon.

Whether Or Not There Are Supernatural Forces At Play Is Left To Interpretation

A lot of classic horror movies get mentioned as influences on Session 9 . Titles like Don't Look Now and The Shining are thrown around. One less obvious one is John Carpenter's classic The Thing. Sure, there's the fact that the movies both feature pretty much all-male casts stuck in an isolated location as the paranoia begins to ratchet up, but they have something else in common, too: an ambiguous ending that has kept audiences guessing and fans coming back to interpret and reinterpret the available data.

According to the film's commentary track, the original script of Session 9 made it quite a bit clearer what was real and what was supernatural - and what was all in someone's mind. It was "very much a clinical interpretation of mental illness," as Anderson and company said on the commentary. You can even see some of these moments in the film's deleted scenes, which include an old woman who might be the former patient Mary Hobbes hiding in the building. However, as they were putting the film together, they "realized audiences wanted it to be a little more spooky and ghostly ."

The final words in the film are the voice of Simon, one of Mary's multiple personalities, on tape saying, "I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc." This could mean that everyone has the potential for mental illness and/or violence. Under the right circumstances, anyone can "snap." Or it could mean that, as some have theorized, Simon is an actual entity, the " malignant genius loci of the gothic building ."

" Session 9 can be interpreted in different ways," director Brad Anderson told AMC. "You can get the sense that Gordon breathes in an evil spirit, but can also be read as a much more clinical movie that shows a man who becomes unhinged, or may be going mad."

The Story Plays With The Pitfalls Of Toxic Masculinity

"It’s as if director Anderson wanted to show how embracing the idea of what Tony Soprano referred to as the 'strong, silent type' only leads to self-destruction," Thomas Hobbs wrote about how Session 9 approaches toxic masculinity .

"Anderson and co-writer Steven Gevedon (who also plays Mike, the guy who spends most of the movie listening to the tapes that give the film its name) were smart enough to show all of the guys cracking in their own way ," Brian Collins wrote of the film, "Gordon is the only one who turns violent, but Phil's (David Caruso, in one of his last roles before CSI ) paranoia and resentment gets worse over the course of the week, Mike seemingly abandons his work duties entirely to listen to the tapes, and Jeff... well Jeff is just afraid of the dark and the place does that fear no favors."

Then, of course, there's Hank. Hank with his lengthy monologue about how the stress of this job will get to you and how you need an "exit strategy." Hank, who claims that he is only with his co-worker's girlfriend because it makes Phil angry. Hank with his story of a "whale," a high-stakes gambler, who gave his friend at the casino a Porsche as a tip. As we spiral deeper and deeper into the film's story - into the literal bowels of the hospital - each of the men becomes a potential problem.

Actor Josh Lucas, who plays Hank, pointed out that, "For these struggling guys, the idea about the American Dream (prosperity and wealth) doesn’t necessarily exist." (See the broken American flag symbol that recurs in the film.) It is, in many ways, this stress that kicks off the film's descent into tragedy, as Gordon underbids the amount of time the job will take because he is desperate for money, desperate to keep his business, provide for his family, and retain the respect of the men who work for him.

They are all trapped, in their own way. Within their lives. Within the walls of the hospital. Within the prisons of their own minds and bodies, where their emotions have to remain under the surface until they boil over into violence or paranoia or some other destructive behavior. Thomas Hobbs described the "silent rage" of the film, "with the asbestos feeling like a metaphor for the toxicity of how a whole generation of men have been taught to mask their emotions so noxiously."

It's Partially Based On The 'Satanic Panic' Of The '80s

In one of the film's most disconcerting scenes, Mike (played by co-writer Stephen Gevedon) tells the story of Patricia Willard, one of the hospital's former patients. As he narrates, the camera shows first images of the inside of the ruined hospital, and then sequences of insects crawling on the grass. Director Brad Anderson says that he showed Peter Mullan, the actor who plays Gordon, the sequence of a spider attacking an insect and said that it " defined his character's path ."

Test audiences suggested that the scene be shortened, but "happily Anderson ignored their requests," stating, "We had a mind from the get-go this movie was gonna be a movie that took its time." The resulting scene remains one of the most unsettling in the film.

The story of Patricia Willard, who recovered repressed memories of elaborate Satanic ritual abuse by her parents, turns out to have been essentially a hoax. While Patricia Willard's story isn't real, like many aspects of the film, it was based on real events - in this case, the " Satanic Panic " of the '80s, which included many accusations of Satanic ritual abuse that mirror what is described in Mike's recounting of Patricia's story, though the real cases were more likely to target daycare centers than the child's own family.

The fact that these stories proved to have been every bit as false and fabricated as the one Mike tells, often the result of "coercive and suggestive interrogation by therapists and prosecutors," hasn't stopped many people from serving long jail times over the years as a result of false accusations of this kind of ritual abuse.

Session 9 Ending, Explained

‘Session 9’ (2001) follows a very simple story where a group of asbestos cleaners is asked to disinfect an old, abandoned mental hospital. With what follows, one of the leading crew members of the group, Gordon, descends into a seemingly supernatural-infused madness. ‘Session 9’ isn’t your typical horror movie. For the most part, it draws its scares from the complexity and interactions of its characters. Although it is very well-constructed, the complications in its premise can be hard to comprehend, especially only after a single viewing experience. So we’ll be breaking down the entire movie in the article below, with not just one but several theories.

Session 9 Explained

Mike, who is one of the smartest crew members, discovers an old records room in the basement of the hospital. In the room, he finds the tape records of a patient named Mary, who suffered from multiple personality disorder. The box that contains her tapes is labeled with the names of all four of her personalities—Mary, Princess, Billy, and Simon. Throughout the movie’s runtime, as Mike plays each of the nine tapes from Mary’s box, he gets a glimpse of all of Mary’s personalities, except for one—Simon. In the tapes, Mary’s personalities keep shifting between her true self, Princess and Billy, but every time her doctor brings up Simon, she refuses to wake him up. The Simon side of Mary’s personality only shows up in the final tape, which was Mary’s “Session 9” with the doctor. While Mary’s other two personalities are just mere plot devices for the movie, Simon becomes a significant part of the movie’s premise.

Mary’s Hauntings, Explained

In the opening scene of the movie, Gordon expresses how stressed he and his wife have been feeling lately because of their newborn baby. This is when the movie first gives you a glimpse of the downward spiral in which Gordon is potentially heading. Moments after this, Mike and Gordon enter the mental hospital for the first time and are given a brief tour of it by a security guard. When they head down to the dark underground tunnels of the facility, Gordon spots a wheelchair from a distance, and that’s when he hears a voice in his head that says, “Hello, Gordon.” It’s this scene that marks the inception of Gordon’s descent into madness and it also shows how Mary’s specter has now taken over Gordon’s mind.

Later on in the film, there are several “coincidental moments” that somehow bring the lives of the asbestos removal workers in tandem with Mary and her personalities. One of these incidents is, of course, Gordon’s experience when he first sees Mary’s wheelchair in the corridor. Right after this, when Mike and Gordon head deeper into the tunnels of the hospital with the guard, for some strange reason, Gordon tries to lead the way as if he’s already well-versed in the geography of the huge hospital. This scene clearly shows that Mary is now somewhere in the back of his head. The next is Mike’s experience with the hospital’s tapes. Almost coincidentally, Mike ends up finding the room where the hospital keeps all of its old records and patient interview tapes. And what’s even stranger is the fact that out of all the hundreds of tapes in the room, Mike is only drawn to Mary’s box of tapes.

Other similar coincidences are sporadically distributed throughout the film, wherein one of them also shows Gordon sitting on top of Mary’s grave, which has 444, Mary’s number, inscribed on it. With all of these seemingly eerie cosmic coincidences, it seems like the entire hospital is nothing but a manifestation of Mary’s many different personalities. And if you’ll watch closely, you’ll realize that as the film progresses, each character almost becomes one of Mary’s personalities. Mary isn’t just your typical ghostly poltergeist but is actually a “presence” that looms over the entire hospital.

Did Gordon Kill his Wife and Daughter?

When Gordon’s first day at the hospital ends, he heads back home with a bouquet of flowers for his wife. When he gets home, he watches his wife and daughter from a distance and then stares at a steaming pot of pasta that rests on his home’s stove. Throughout the film, Gordon can be seen reliving this exact moment until one day, he reveals it to Mike that he hit his wife. He tells him that after their first day at the hospital, when he went back home, his wife accidentally dropped a steaming vessel of pasta on his leg. That’s when he completely lost his temper and slapped her.

Later on in the movie, there’s a scene where Mike finds a bouquet of flowers thrown in the corner of a room in the hospital. This bouquet is the same one that Gordon had carried home to his wife on the first day. Much later in the movie, it is revealed that Gordon not only slapped his wife that day but killed her and his baby after she dropped the vessel of pasta on his leg. The scenes later on in the movie where he keeps pretending that he’s talking to his wife on the phone are simply a reflection of his guilt.

Why did Gordon kill his wife, you might ask? This itself can have two explanations. As I’ve mentioned earlier, from the beginning of the movie itself, Gordon seemed to be very unhappy and stressed out because of his baby. This, along with the stress of his work, piles up on him and drives him nuts. The mental breakdown he experiences because of all this makes him lash out on his wife. However, in some ways, this theory demeans all the other supernatural plot points surrounding Mary and her manifestations in the hospital.

Hank’s Mysterious Disappearance

Midway through the movie’s runtime, one of the crew members named Hank finds a small crack in one of the walls of the hospital. When his curiosity gets the best of him, and he puts his hand inside the crack, he discovers a number of coins, gold teeth, silver lobotomy instruments, and even eyeballs inside it. Although he does not realize this, he gets all these objects out of the furnace where patients were previously burnt. Soon after this, as Hank attempts to sneak out of the hospital with all the gold and silver he has acquired, a dark figure follows him.

The next day, Hank’s girlfriend tells the crew that Hank hastily left for Miami. Moments after this, Jeff spots Hank inside the hospital wearing a pair of black sunglasses. Hank keeps asking him the same question again and again: “What are you doing here?” However, before Jeff is able to bring the rest of the crew to the location where he found Hank, Hank disappears. With scenes like these, the movie not only intends to confuse its characters but it also tries to baffle you as a viewer. Hank’s sudden appearance and disappearance right after make you question whether anything in the movie is real or not.

What Happened to Hank?

A lot is revealed in the closing moments of the film, and at the same time, almost nothing is. In the ending moments of the film, Gordon completely loses his mind and relentlessly kills all the members of his crew. One major revelation that the closing scene of the movie makes is that Hank was actually there in the hospital when Jeff spotted him that day. It turns out that when he was trying to steal all those coins and silver teeth from the hospital that night, Gordon was the dark figure who followed him. Gordon then used the lobotomy instrument and placed it right inside Hank’s prefrontal cortex. This explains why Hank loses his mind and keeps asking Jeff the same question. This also explains why he was wearing those black sunglasses. As foreshadowed in one of the early scenes of the movie, doctors who used to perform a lobotomy on their patients “prescribed” them black glasses as the lobotomy often leaves patients with a black eye.

The Ending: “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”

A supernatural explanation for the ending of the movie would be that Mary and all of her personalities completely took control of Gordon’s mind. As revealed in the 9th tape, Mary’s fourth personality, Simon, claims, “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.” Since Gordon is so vulnerable from the beginning of the movie itself, he becomes an easy target for Simon. This also explains that Gordon killed his wife because when she dropped that vessel on his leg, the Simon side of Mary’s personality was woken up in his head. Even in the final moments of the movie, when Gordon kills all of his men, Mary’s “Simon-personality” takes over him. To put it simply, it is Simon who made Gordon kill everyone.

Why Was Phil Telling Him to Wake Up?

When Gordon goes on his killing rampage, Phil asks him to “wake up.” Moments after this, Phil suddenly disappears in thin air. It is then revealed that right before this, Gordon had already killed Phil. This scene can also have two explanations. One could be that Phil was simply a projection of Gordon’s subconscious, which was fighting back to gain control. Phil was Gordon’s underlying guilt which was trying to protect him and stop him from completely losing his shit. Or it is also possible that after Gordon killed him, Phil’s ghost showed up to snap him out of his mental breakdown and release him from Mary’s possession.

An Alternate Theory

In the above explanation, we have deduced how Simon/Mary possessed Gordon and then made him commit all those murders. A more realistic and not-so-supernatural theory to explain the ending would be that Gordon was once a patient at the hospital, and he very well knew Mary when she was kept there. When he first saw Mary’s wheelchair, all of his old memories at the hospital came rushing back to him, and that’s how he completely lost his mind. The ghosts of Mary and Simon that lurk in the back of his head are just troubled memories from his past experiences at the hospital. This theory also explains how he seemed to be so well-versed with all the routes of the hospital and also knew how to perform a perfect lobotomy.

Moreover, this also explains why he got so pissed when he found out that Hank was stealing the belongings of the patients who were burnt there. If you recall correctly, there’s also a scene at the beginning of the movie where the guard of the facility reveals that when the hospital was shut down, many of its patients were simply set free on the streets. So it is possible that Gordon was one of these patients who were just let out after it was shut down. With this theory, Simon was nothing but the devil that rests in the back of every human’s head. While some of us are able to tame it, others, like Gordon, become its victims.

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Directed by Brad Anderson

Fear is a place.

Tensions rise within an asbestos cleaning crew as they work in an abandoned mental hospital with a horrific past that seems to be coming back.

Peter Mullan David Caruso Stephen Gevedon Josh Lucas Brendan Sexton III Paul Guilfoyle Larry Fessenden Charley Broderick Lonnie Farmer Sheila Stasack Jurian Hughes

Director Director

Brad Anderson

Producers Producers

Dorothy Aufiero David Collins Michael Williams

Writers Writers

Brad Anderson Stephen Gevedon

Casting Casting

Sheila Jaffe Georgianne Walken Katharina Eggmann

Editor Editor

Cinematography cinematography.

Uta Briesewitz

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Lighting lighting.

Evans Brown

Camera Operators Camera Operators

Charles Papert Colin Hudson

Production Design Production Design

Sophie Carlhian

Art Direction Art Direction

Roger Danchik

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Peter Kuran

Composer Composer

Climax Golden Twins

Sound Sound

Jason George Derek Marcil William Smith Johanna Turner Javier Bennassar Carrie Lisonbee Michael Mullane Tom Williams

Costume Design Costume Design

Aimee McCue

Makeup Makeup

Todd Kleitsch Tricia Heine Joe Rossi

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Elizabeth Cecchini Jerry DeCarlo

USA Films Scout Productions October Films

Releases by Date

31 jul 2001, 09 oct 2001, 11 apr 2002, 27 apr 2002, 18 sep 2002, 31 jan 2004, theatrical limited, 10 aug 2001, 27 sep 2002, 14 sep 2001, 11 oct 2001, 22 mar 2002, 10 may 2002, 22 jun 2002, 04 oct 2002, 16 dec 2002, 12 mar 2002, 24 apr 2002, 13 aug 2002, 26 nov 2002, 17 feb 2003, 08 mar 2005, 22 nov 2005, 11 mar 2009, 23 aug 2023, 02 nov 2001, 29 jan 2004, releases by country.

Physical 13 DVD
Physical MA 15+ DVD
Premiere Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival
Physical 14 DVD
Premiere 14A Fantasia International Film Festival
Physical DVD
Premiere Gérardmer Fantasticarts Film Festival
Physical Blu-Ray
Physical 16 DVD
Physical 16 (video premiere)
Theatrical T
Theatrical (Tokyo)
Theatrical 18PL

Netherlands

Premiere Fantastic Film Festival
Theatrical limited M/16
Physical M/16 DVD and Blu-ray

South Africa

South korea.

Theatrical 18
Premiere Sitges Film Festival
Premiere Lund Fantastisk Film Festival
Theatrical 15
Theatrical limited R

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Popular reviews

Review by Tony the Terror ★★★★★ 29

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

“I live in the weak and the wounded...doc.”

It’s a bit nerve-wracking to rewatch a film for the first time since creating your Letterboxd account and putting it in your top 4. Will it live up to that honor? Was it really that good or was it nostalgia? Was I high the first time I watched it? Probably, but still.

It’s been a few years since I watched this and over a year since I placed it in my top 4 so I was a little hesitant about rewatching it because I was worried it wouldn’t be the “perfect time” for what I claim as one of my favorite movies. Well, all that worry was for nothing because, after this…

Review by Larry ★★★★ 6

You stick with this job too long, it'll mess you up man. It gets inside of you - the stress.

This is probably one of the strangest horror films I've ever seen.

It's cheap looking but superbly acted and directed.

It's got a cheesy setup but turns into something you don't expect.

It's got Horatio Cane in a haunted asylum.

Does it sound good already? Well, a lot of people would be inclined to disagree. But ignore those Netflix star ratings, because I think Session 9 is a great little horror flick that I think is horribly underrated and unjustly criticized. Some of those complaints are valid but some I believe we're born out of viewers simply not getting what…

Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★ 2

Having frequently argued that horror movies are scarier when they leave rationality behind (and that recent celebrated horror films like The Babadook and Under the Shadow suffer from being so blatantly allegorical), I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to complain that a horror movie makes no damn sense. On the one hand, Anderson and Gevedon provide multiple red herrings, suggesting that the entire crew may be influenced by some malevolent entity (strongly implied, by both parallel editing and cheesily booga-booga sound design, to be released when Mike opens the box of session tapes). On the other hand, Gordon murders his family very early on—an act that's telegraphed so blatantly and repeatedly that nobody could possibly…

Review by matt lynch ★★★

Crumbling domesticity mirrored in a decrepit, poisoned estate and thwarted masculinity spun out like analog tape.

Review by c h r i s ★★★½ 5

“I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”

An asbestos abatement crew in dire need of work win a bid to disinfect an abandoned mental hospital. During their cleanup, complications arise between the team when one member goes missing after his curiosity gets the best of him and another finds recorded session tapes numbered 1-9 from an inpatient named Mary, who suffers from having multiple personalities.

Session 9 almost escaped me and made itself very comfortable in my watchlist for many, many years. An early 2000’s low-budget midnight creeper with a haunted asylum setting that heavily relies on its somber atmosphere and psychological thrills; which all lead up to its pretty grand twist finale. This is the kind of…

Review by Jay 👽 ★★½ 3

Recommended by Myles Brodsky .

Session 9 ? more like Session 5 out of 10. Hehhhhh...

It's a very mixed bag. There's a lot to admire for sure; the score is one of the freakiest I've heard in a while. It's got this Selected Ambient Works II kind of vibe, with deep, uncomfortable layered textures, samples of fading and warping strings and reversed classical piano teardrops. The piece that played during the very end scene was genuinely skin-crawling.

The film somewhat admirably relies very much on pure atmosphere for its horror rather than straight gore like a lot of its contemporaries were doing at the time. It works for the first hour until the editing starts to get a little bit silly…

Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★ 4

David Caruso’s acting is like asbestos. People thought it was good back then until everyone realized that long exposure to it could cause a number of life-threatening illnesses. That’s why he stopped acting in 2012.

Review by shookone ★★★ 2

Andersons low budget horror is a psychological game of deception, living through the constellation of characters and the simple creepiness of the tapes letting images work in the spectator. red herrings and predictability aside, this has some smart political undertones, and besides it's always great to watch Mullan go at it.

Review by theironcupcake 25

I'm going to tell you a story.

My great-aunt, by which I mean my mother's mother's younger sister, had four children: three sons and a daughter, all of whom are my second cousins. One of those second cousins and his wife live a content life in upstate New York; I've met them only a handful of times over the last three decades, like at a bar mitzvah or a funeral. Anyway, this cousin's wife has a brother, Richard Rosenthal. In 1995, he was an insurance executive who lived in Framingham, Massachusetts with his wife, Laura Jane Rosenthal, and their baby daughter.

On August 28, 1995, Richard Rosenthal killed Laura Jane, a crime known in the Boston area as "the burnt…

Review by {Todd} ★★★★ 3

"It gets inside of you... the stress." -Hank

That job is not worth five dollars an hour.

An asbestos cleaning crew spend a week working in an abandoned mental hospital and things go bad. Not just a psychological horror but a horror about psychology, Session 9 is a very slow moving film that builds to something intense and mysterious and kind of glorious. For about thirty minutes I thought that I might hate it but it begins to win you over with it's quirk and at times bizarre cinematography. This film wouldn't work without really great performances and proper direction because so much of the development takes place non-verbally.

Great ending! Fun watch.

Review by DirkH ★★★★½ 3

Location. Location. Location.

The true star of this film is the asylum it takes place in. It's almost a character and this is achieved without cgi or any other effects. It is the place. The majestic exterior and the run down and creepy interior. What Brad Anderson does here is what he is best at and that is to create an atmospheric piece. And that is a welcome change of pace from the majority of horror films produced these days.

This film is about fear and paranoia and in order for that to work it shouldn't be full on scary, but it should be unnerving and get under your skin. And that it does. While watching it there is no…

Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★★ 7

Very suspenseful and creepy. Session 9 is more proof that you don't need an insanely high budget to make an effective movie. Just get yourself a great location and you're at least halfway there (what better horror movie setting is there than an abandoned mental institution ).

I'm glad Michelle introduced me to this underrated gem.

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The Ending Of Session 9 Explained

"Session 9" is a horror film that went largely unnoticed at the time of its release back in 2001, but has since gained more attention among fans of the genre. Directed by Brad Anderson, who may be best known to most audiences for the Christian Bale-led film "The Machinist." Like that film, "Session 9" similarly explores themes of psychological terror and a warped reality.

At the beginning of the film, we're introduced to a motley crew of tradesmen named Phil (David Caruso), Hank (Josh Lucas), Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), and Mike (Stephen Gevedon), who all work for their small company's owner, Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan). Specializing in the removal of asbestos from properties, they take on a highly lucrative but time-sensitive job with a one-week deadline at the site of the former Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, which now lies derelict. But as the crew begins their work, they soon realize that — though the facility is abandoned and its staff and patients long gone — the evidence of their time there remains, as does the dark history that still hangs over the building.

"Session 9" comes to a close with a dramatic twist ending that leaves just as many questions as it does answers. With that in mind, let's take a look back at the ending of "Session 9" and what it all means.

What you need to remember about the plot of Session 9

While combing through the labyrinthian hospital, Mike finds a doctor's office filled with hundreds of sensitive files. When curiosity gets the better of him, he listens to the audio recordings of sessions with Mary Hobbes, a former patient who suffered from dissociative identity disorder. Throughout the film, excerpts of these sessions are played, shedding light on the now-deceased patient's trauma and revealing a number of her alternative personalities.

As work on the site continues, a series of strange events plague the other members of the crew. Hank disappears entirely with no one knowing where he went, resulting in a replacement being brought in. Mike becomes withdrawn as he grows more and more obsessed with Mary Hobbes' tapes, and Gordon — troubled by hearing a voice calling to him at Danvers — begins to crack which leads to troubles at home.

With the situation becoming more dire and the crew's looming deadline getting closer, tensions flare among them. Phil loses faith in Gordon's leadership after he reveals he hit his wife at home one night, leading Phil to suggest that he should take over the job to Mike. Then, Jeff claims to have spotted Hank, so the crew split up to try and find him.

What happens at the end of Session 9?

Jeff screaming and running down a hallway

By the end of the film, what should have been a simple asbestos removal job has ended in total disaster. Nearly every member of the crew has seemingly gone missing, with Gordon the only one still wandering the halls of the facility. It's then that he's met by Hank's replacement, Craig (Larry Fessenden), who's shocked to find the site in a state of chaos with Hank lying wounded on the floor and Gordon standing over him, delirious, and the truth of what really happened over the past week is finally revealed.

In a conversation between Phil and Gordon — where the latter seemingly figures out that Phil was responsible for attacking Hank — he's told that he needs to wake up. As Gordon looks back, trying to recall his deeply repressed memories of what happened, Phil vanishes into thin air and Gordon finally realizes that he was the one responsible for the crew's deaths. Waiting to strike until they were alone, Gordon took them out one by one until he was the last one alive.

After finally waking up and seeing reality as it is, in the final shot of the film, we watch Gordon breaking down on his cell phone, and begging his wife for forgiveness. As for Hank's death, and to figure out what drove Gordon to begin his killing spree, there's still plenty more to explain.

Where did Hank go?

Partway through the film, while working solo in a remote section of the hospital, Hank discovers a small fortune in silver coins peeking out through the wall. Among the coins are a number of other valuable personal artifacts, such as gold teeth, rings, and even a lobotomy pick. But unbeknownst to Hank, and in a grim reveal that only we see, he's actually looting one side of the facility's crematorium where former patients were incinerated after their departure.

With no way to smuggle the valuables out in front of the others, and determined to keep the stash for himself, he returns under cover of darkness to collect it all. On his way out, however, Hank crosses paths with a mysterious figure, with the revelation following that he never arrived at the job site the next morning. While trying to locate him, the crew calls Hank's girlfriend, who leads us to believe he's ditched Gordon and the rest of his coworkers and is flying out to Miami. Of course, as we soon find out, Hank never even left the hospital grounds.

In reality, the mysterious figure he was accosted by was Gordon, who, with a newfound knowledge of how to perform a lobotomy, makes Hank the first victim we know of. It's why when Hank reemerges later that week, he's only able to repeat his final words to Gordon, asking "Why are you here?" It also explains why he's wearing sunglasses, which is to cover up the black eye left on a patient after a lobotomy.

Who was Mary Hobbes?

Patient #444 at the Danvers State Mental Hospital when it was still active, Mary Hobbes was admitted at a young age in the wake of a family tragedy that remains unspecified throughout most of the film. Upon admission to the hospital, she was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, with a trio of personalities separate from her own known as "alternates." Attempts by doctors to treat her were recorded on a number of tapes labeled sessions one through nine, which Mike discovers.

A former law student with a keen knowledge of criminal history, Mike is immediately drawn to the disturbing file. Over time, we find out that whatever happened to Mary occurred over Christmas, 22 years before the sessions were recorded, and in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. Mike further deduces through the recordings that each of Mary's alternates "live" in a different part of her. "The Princess" lives in the tongue, and talks the most. "Billy" lives in the eyes, as he sees everything.

The doctors are less interested in those two, however, as they prove less than helpful in helping Mary recall what happened that night. Instead, only a third alternate known as "Simon" seems to know what happened, but waking him is easier said than done. Finally, in the ninth and final session, the doctor interviewing Mary and her alternates gets his wish, and the voice of Simon is finally revealed.

What really happened at Gordon's house?

Throughout "Session 9," the audience is repeatedly shown a scene of Gordon parked outside his family's home, watching his wife Wendy (Linda Carmichael) and infant daughter from his car before opening the door and heading inside. As the film progresses, a brief line of dialogue is added, before being violently cut with a scream, suggesting some tragic incident playing out. Gordon later confesses to Phil that the night they won the job contract, he came home to celebrate with his wife, only to have snapped and hit her after she spilled a pot of boiling water on him. But, like much of "Session 9," what we're seen and told isn't the whole truth.

In reality, that fateful night at Gordon's home ended in a much more violent way, with Gordon lashing out and murdering his wife and daughter in an unexpected act of violence. There are even a number of clues that heavily foreshadow their deaths, with everything from dried blood being shown on Gordon's hands, the flowers he purchased for her found discarded in the hospital, and even a slow pan to Mary Hobbes' grave whilst Gordon is supposedly on the phone with Wendy in the cemetery. Who he was really talking to is unknown, as in reality he may have truly believed he was talking to Wendy, or perhaps instead the voice of Simon.

Who or what was Simon?

Who or what Simon is remains one of the film's most interesting questions. Revealed to doctors during Mary's ninth psychiatric session, Simon is believed to be the only one of her alternates who is truly malevolent. During the session, Simon recalls what happened that Christmas night in Lowell, stating that Mary was startled by her brother Peter, causing her to be badly wounded and fall onto her doll. It was then that the presence of Simon took over, leading her to retaliate and murder not just her brother, but her parents as well.

Beyond the influence that Simon had on Mary ever since that night in Lowell (or perhaps even earlier), it's shown that the alternate has the ability to reach out to others. While touring the property, it first speaks to Gordon as he's staring down a long corridor. Just hours later, he perpetrates the grisly murder at home that's subsequently buried deep in his subconscious.

One way of interpreting Simon is to view it as a literal entity, which possessed both Gordon and Mary during a moment of weakness and caused them to lash out violently. Another interpretation instead views Simon as simply a manifestation of our darkest urges, which only come to light when we're pushed to a breaking point — as both Gordon and Mary were. The final line of the film, in which Simon tells doctors that it "lives in the weak and the wounded" can support both theories, implying that it can only take a new host who is vulnerable, or is instead a mentality that thrives in the mentally broken.

Other theories about the ending

At its heart, "Session 9" is a story of the plight of blue-collar workers and one man among them being pushed to his breaking point, as well as the destructive aftermath it has on his life. Part of what's made the budget horror film such an enduring favorite among audiences over 20 years after its release is the elements left open to interpretation. While we've already explored who or what Simon was, and the truth of what happened at Gordon's home, there are still some bits of the story that are worth exploring.

In a post in the r/horror subreddit , a user presented a particularly interesting theory that claimed Gordon was actually a patient at the hospital, either in the present day or years prior. The theory goes on to say that everything we saw was inside of Gordon's head and that Phil, Hank, and the rest of the crew were all figments of his imagination, and even competing alternates much like Mary's. There is a fair bit of evidence to support the belief that the first time we see Gordon entering Danvers State may not truly be his first, such as his ability to seemingly find his way around the sprawling building with ease, and later his collection of family photos arranged in Mary's former room.

Though it might be a bit of a stretch, given that there are arguably more straightforward explanations for each point, it's an example of how much "Session 9" leaves its audience thinking long after the credits roll.

What has the cast said about Session 9?

Passionate and curious fans aren't the only ones who have talked at length about the niche horror favorite. David Caruso, who plays Phil, appeared in an interview back in 2001 alongside director Brad Anderson with AboutFilm.com , and opened up about what it was like to work on the set of "Session 9," saying: "Danvers is not a movie location. It really is [a mental hospital]. It was a place we never got comfortable in ... It was always scary, and you could really feel the pain of the people that were at Danvers." He went on to talk more about the location, and revealed that one of the film's crucial plot elements was rooted in reality: "there's a lot of stuff lying around that you can take a look at should you choose to. There are a lot of case folders and stuff. Every once in a while you would maybe look through a real case folder."

20 years later, fellow cast member Stephen Gevedon, who played Mike, spoke to Fangoria where he added to how unsettling just being on the then-condemned property really was, saying, "You wouldn't want to go there at night, man. Like, that would be too much, even for me."

What has director Brad Anderson said about Session 9?

Alongside Stephen Gevedon in the interview with Fangoria, director Brad Anderson opened up about the true crime case that inspired the story of "Session 9," and also what prompted him to choose Danvers as the film's location. Citing the Richard Rosenthal murders – in which an office worker brutally murdered his wife and child over an argument over dinner — the director stated, "The guy was pretty normal – educated, y'know? Wasn't known to have any mental issues. But something snapped. He snapped. And the thing that was to me creepy about it – beyond the horrific, outrageous nature of the crime – was that he just went about his daily routine for a number of days afterward."

Speaking further about settling on a location for the film, the director said, "I lived in Boston for a number of years, and I would drive by Danvers all the time. When Steve [Gevedon] and I were first brainstorming, we didn't have the framework of what we wanted to hang our horror film on. But then I remembered Danvers, and we thought it'd be cool to set a story [there]."

What have critics said about session 9?

Though "Session 9" only grossed $1.6 million at the global box office upon release, it still managed to attract a considerable amount of attention from critics, with the general consensus being largely positive. Critics like Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised "Session 9" as "a spine-tingler directed with fierce finesse." Others, such as Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly , went into a bit more detail, calling the film "a marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere." He went on to say, "At moments, you can just about smell the invisible fibers, and the ghosts of former patients as well."

Of course, not all critics were as enthralled with Brad Anderson's movie. Most took issue with the number of plot threads presented, such as Robert Koehler of Variety , who criticized the movie as, "little more than an overworked exercise in jostling red herrings." Ultimately, "Session 9" proved to be a divisive entry among horror films, but one that still manages to captivate audiences both then and now.

Will we ever see more entries in the story?

Though it leaves some of its most pressing questions open to interpretation by audiences, "Session 9" does end with a satisfying conclusion that leaves little room for a sequel. Of course, the sky's the limit should the team behind the horror flick ever want to make a prequel, which is exactly what director Brad Anderson had in mind years ago. The director revealed some details to Fangoria, saying, "The general gist of the story was that it'd be about Mary Hobbes, the character in the original movie who's on the tapes and who has these alternate personalities and who would ultimately realize she killed her family on Christmas Day. Here we'd learn the entire Mary Hobbes story – how she went from being a fairly normal 12-year-old girl in 1959 and '58 to slaughtering her whole family, and why."

Unfortunately, problems quickly arose regarding the prospect of a potential prequel, thanks to an unusual company rule by the current holder of the film's legal rights. Anderson explained, "The problem is, we then went to Focus and said, 'We want to do this movie, and it's a prequel to 'Session 9.' It's one of your movies, if you even know about it.' And they were like, 'Oh.' Next thing you know we get the calls from the lawyer saying, 'Well, you can't do that. We own that property, and we don't normally allow filmmakers to make sequels or prequels to our movies.'" Whether these issues could be overcome for a future prequel or sequel remains to be seen, or indeed if there is still much interest in a follow-up so long after the original.

Session 9 (Movie Review)

Angelo's rating: ★ ★ ★ director: brad anderson | release date: 2001.

There’s really nothing more disappointing than a great film that falls apart in the final act. It’s like going out to dinner and having a great meal that comes with a terrible dessert. No matter how much you liked the first two courses, the last thing you taste will be that awful, super-bitter and salty pudding. Not that I’m still bitter about a certain birthday dinner or anything. Though with films, it’s even worse. Unlike with a meal where you can always go back and just skip dessert, you can’t just watch the first 4/5 of a film and then walk away satisfied, you have to eat that nasty dessert. As a result, it kind of retroactively ruins everything. Unfortunately for “Session 9”, regardless of how great the first hour and a half is, the final 15 fifteen minutes forever sentence this film to being a mediocre thriller.

“Session 9” has pretty much everything it needs to be a great, original horror film. The ultimate problem is that pretty much everything that is done well and is original in the film gets dropped in the final act for a super-tired, lame climax. Unfortunately it’s not even just a case of a lame ending, the tone of the film shifts so drastically in the final act that the film, when taken as a whole, feels disjointed and clunky. To draw an analogy most people reading this should get, imagine if in the final 10 minutes of “The Exorcist” it turned out that the girl was faking the whole thing, she stops and reconnects with mother and we get some sappy, “Happily Ever After” kind of ending. You’d feel pretty cheated, right? Well, that’s kind of what it’s like watching this film.

But enough about what’s wrong with the film, let’s talk about what it does right. Aspiring film-makers should have to watch this film solely to learn how to create atmosphere and set a tone. The film follows a group of asbestos removers as they work on clearing an abandoned mental asylum. The entire film is set in this decrepit, dark and filthy old hospital and the interplay of setting and the framing/lighting create a mood that’s wholly unsettling and effective. Many scenes are framed with the character plunging into sheer darkness with only the light of a weak flashlight to illuminate their surroundings. As such shadows move in the periphery causing a near constant sense of unease. The camera is often set far away from the characters and is framed almost in the point of view of something watching them from a far, which is really creepy and unsettling. The amount of dread and tension this film builds solely through visuals is really impressive and astounding.

The plot also starts off being fairly unique and original. The company doing the job is run by an Englishman (maybe a Scot, I’m not too great with identifying my UK accents) currently going through some family problems. As we meet them, we come to find that most of his employees are also going through some sort of personal turmoil themselves. As they work on cleaning out the hospital, one of the workers discovers some recorded therapy sessions (which is where the title of the film comes from) of a patient named Patricia Willard. Willard’s case is an infamous case involving a hypnotic regression that unsurfaced supposedly false memories of a satanic ritual that forever scarred the girl. As the clean-up crew works on the hospital, one of the workers continues to steal away to listen to the session tapes. For an hour and a 15 minutes, we get this really cool, really interesting mystery where we watch the crew slowly sink into madness as creepy things happen around them which is interwoven with the backstory about Patricia.

Unfortunately, none of this goes anywhere. The film has a somewhat abrupt, incredibly anti-climatic ending. Even worse, none of this build-up ever leads to anything. If you plan on watching this film, I’d stop reading here, but it turns out the whole Patricia story is all a red herring. What we get is a very lame, very trite “turns out the main character was mad all along” storyline, which, honestly speaking, I can never remember turning out well in a film. It’s such a waste because this film had the opportunity to do something really cool, unique and memorable and instead it ends with the kind of resolution you’d get on an episode of “CSI: Miami”. David Caruso included.

Ultimately, “Session 9” is a frustrating film. I wanted it to be so much more than it wound up being. There’s so much potential and promise here that it’s painful to watch it all get flushed away on such a stupid, pointless twist ending. The viewer has the pleasure of watching an incredibly interesting, engrossing mystery slowly unravel at the perfect pace, in the perfect setting only to get the worst, most generic and stock resolution possible. While I’d encourage anyone to watch this film in the dark just to soak up the atmosphere, I can’t recommend it as a film to watch for the plot. And that’s really disappointing.

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COMMENTS

Session 9
Jay H One of the best horror movies of the 2000s. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 04/06/24 Full Review JÃ©sus H. C Tried to hard to seem suspenseful, but ended up putting me to sleep.
Session 9 Still Offers a Potent Slice of Psychological Horror
Soon he becomes obsessed with slipping away from his duties so he can listen to them, and the eerily time-warped sounds of "Mary" and her doctor become a key part of the movie's unsettling ...
31 Things We Learned from the Session 9 Commentary
They weren't interested in making an "MTV-style horror movie.". 12. Anderson believes this was the first film shot on HD 24p. 13. The library room where Mike listens to the session tapes was ...
Session 9
Session 9 is a highly atmospheric suspense yarn with a strong sense of place. In fact, Anderson has admitted that he had the setting for his film before he had a screenplay. Full Review | Feb 27, 2020
Brad Anderson's "Session 9": The Little Leap From Comedy to Killing
its limited theatrical release in 2001, Brad Anderson 's "Session 9" has slowly. gained prominence among film fans as one of the great American horror films of. the 21st century. With an impressive ensemble cast, unnerving. soundtrack and unforgettable use of location, the film not only set the stage. for the modern renaissance in ...
Session 9
Session 9 is a 2001 American psychological horror film directed by Brad Anderson and written by Anderson and Stephen Gevedon. It stars David Caruso, Peter Mullan, Brendan Sexton III, Josh Lucas, and Gevedon as an asbestos abatement crew who take a clean-up job at an abandoned mental asylum amid an intense work schedule, growing tensions, and mysterious events occurring around them.
Session 9
Session 9 is not only the scariest movie of the year, but also perhaps the most easy to believe since the first "Blair Witch." ... If this review was based on the story itself, it would be an 8 or a 9. The movie is moody, menacing, and at some points borderline terrifying. But there's way more to a movie than the story.
Session 9 (2001)
Session 9: Directed by Brad Anderson. With David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Lucas. Tensions rise within an asbestos cleaning crew as they work in an abandoned mental hospital with a horrific past that seems to be coming back.
Session 9 (2001)
Notable as the first 2.39:1 movie shot in high-definition video - the same process used by George Lucas for STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES the following year - SESSION 9 is described by director Brad Anderson as an exercise in 'creeping dread', filmed at the deserted Danvers Mental Institution in Massachusetts, whose crumbling ...
Review: Session 9
Review: Session 9. It proves to be a remarkably spare journey into the confines of the mind and a unique evocation of just how terrifying it is to loose one's mind. Nicolas Roeg's seminal thriller Don't Look Now is a riveting study of couple's frustrated sexual desire in the wake of their daughter's death.
Session 9 Ending Explained: Where Is My Mind?
Thematically, "Session 9" is an open-ended movie (at least for now). Given the esteem in which Gordon's men hold him, my very creaky-limb take here (devoid of deleted-scene analysis, 'cuz if it ...
Why Session 9 is the scariest film you can watch this Halloween
Why. Session 9. is the scariest film you can watch this Halloween. The Wolf of Snow Hollow director-star Jim Cummings talks about his love for, and fear of, the 2001 horror movie. In filmmaker Jim ...
Session 9 (2001)
SESSION 9 Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 Sound format: Dolby Digital Five professional contractors are hired to strip asbestos from an abandoned asylum where they're haunted by the building's horrific legacy. Notable as the first 2.39:1 movie shot in high-definition video - the same process used by George Lucas for STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES the following year - SESSION 9 is described by ...
Session 9
With: Gordon Fleming - Peter Mullan Phil - David Caruso Mike - Stephen Gevedon Hank - Josh Lucas Jeff - Brendan Sexton III Bill Griggs - Paul Guilfoyle Voices: Lonnie Farmer, Sheila Stasack ...
'Session 9' Is The Best Psychological Horror Film You've ...
Orrin Grey. Updated July 3, 2024416.7K views12 items. Released to little fanfare in 2001, Session 9 is an amazing and too-often-overlooked psychological horror flick that would feel right at home rubbing shoulders with today's modern slate of "elevated horror" pictures - just as much as it felt oddly out-of-place in a post- Scream 2001.
Session 9 Ending, Explained
Updated August 2, 2022. 'Session 9' (2001) follows a very simple story where a group of asbestos cleaners is asked to disinfect an old, abandoned mental hospital. With what follows, one of the leading crew members of the group, Gordon, descends into a seemingly supernatural-infused madness. 'Session 9' isn't your typical horror movie.
Session 9 (2001)
We review the movie Session 9 directed by Brad Anderson and starring David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, and Paul Guilfoyle.Buy it here https://amzn.to/32H3BaCSyn...
‎Session 9 (2001) directed by Brad Anderson • Reviews, film + cast
Cast. Peter Mullan David Caruso Stephen Gevedon Josh Lucas Brendan Sexton III Paul Guilfoyle Larry Fessenden Charley Broderick Lonnie Farmer Sheila Stasack Jurian Hughes. 100 mins More at IMDb TMDb. Sign in to log, rate or review. Share. Ratings. 158 fans 3.2. ★. 517 half-★ ratings (1%)
The Ending Of Session 9 Explained
Though "Session 9" only grossed $1.6 million at the global box office upon release, it still managed to attract a considerable amount of attention from critics, with the general consensus being ...
Movie Review: Session 9-Demonic Possession and Mental Illness
For our first horror movie discussion, I present to you an old but strikingly engaging flick from the far-beyond days of the early 2000's: Session 9 (2001). Though Session 9 cannot claim ...
Session 9 (Movie Review)
Session 9 (Movie Review) Angelo's rating: ★ ★ ★ Director: Brad Anderson | Release Date: 2001. By Angelo on June 23rd, 2011. There's really nothing more disappointing than a great film that falls apart in the final act. It's like going out to dinner and having a great meal that comes with a terrible dessert.
Session 9
Session 9, a spine-tingler directed with fierce finesse by Brad Anderson, puts an asbestos-removal crew (Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III) into an ...
Session 9
Session 9 - Movie review by film critic Tim Brayton Jessica Brown's delayed pick for a On Campaign review was actually a list of possibilities, of which I made this choice for selfish reasons: I really love the movie and had never come up with a plausible excuse to review it. Which is turning into a bit of a theme ...

31 Things We Learned from the Session 9 Commentary

“It’s not a nice place.”

Session 9 (2001)

Best in Context-Free Commentary

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Brad Anderson’s “Session 9”: The Little Leap From Comedy to Killing

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Session 9 Ending Explained: Where Is My Mind?

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‘Session 9’ Is The Best Horror Film You've Never Seen, And It's Based On Real-Life Events

'Session 9' Oozes Dread From Every Frame

The Movie Was Filmed On Location At The Abandoned Danvers State Hospital

It Was A Horror Debut For The Director, Whose Previous Credits Were Romantic Comedies

Whether Or Not There Are Supernatural Forces At Play Is Left To Interpretation

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Session 9 Ending, Explained

Session 9 Explained

Mary’s Hauntings, Explained

Did Gordon Kill his Wife and Daughter?

Hank’s Mysterious Disappearance

What Happened to Hank?

The Ending: “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”

Why Was Phil Telling Him to Wake Up?

An Alternate Theory

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