Session 9

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Session 9 is a 2001 psychological horror film set inside a real abandoned psychiatric hospital, and nearly everything terrifying about it was already there when the crew arrived. The Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts had been left to decay for decades. Its floors were collapsing. Asbestos coated its corridors. Medical tissue and blood samples sat in rooms no one had cleaned out after the institution closed. When director Brad Anderson brought a small cast and crew inside those walls, he found that he barely needed to dress the sets at all. The props, the atmosphere, the dread: the building supplied them.

  What makes Session 9 strange is how deliberately it refuses to behave like the horror films that surrounded it in 2001. Anderson had spent his career directing romantic comedies. His two previous features were Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents. Nothing in that filmography predicted what he would do with a dilapidating asylum, a $1.5 million budget, and a screenplay built around a real Boston murder case from 1995. The questions the film plants, and never fully answers, are the engine of its lasting power: who is the killer among the workers, and what exactly lives inside the building's walls?

• 2. A Real Crime, A Real Place

  ›

  The murder that planted the seed for Session 9 happened in Boston in 1995. A man named Richard Rosenthal killed his wife after she accidentally burnt his dinner. He then cut out her heart and lungs and placed them on a stake in his backyard. Anderson grew up in Boston and knew the case. When he and co-writer Stephen Gevedon began developing the screenplay in the late 1990s, that image of domestic violence erupting into something incomprehensible stayed at the center of their thinking.

  Anderson describes the film as an "American tragedy." He and Gevedon aimed, in his words, "to subvert the conventions of the so-called horror genre that exists now," which he characterized as "less horror than it is teen thriller." The Rosenthal case gave them a psychological blueprint: a man undone not by a monster, but by pressure, grief, and something already present inside him.

  The film transposes that logic onto Gordon Fleming, the owner of an asbestos abatement company who accepts a hospital clean-up contract he cannot realistically complete. Gordon promises to finish in one week a job that would normally take two to three. He has confided to no one that he recently struck his wife Wendy after she splashed him with boiling water, and that she has since refused to let him see their infant daughter. The Rosenthal case shadows Gordon's arc from the opening scene forward.

• 3. Danvers State Hospital

  ›

  Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, released in 1973, was one of Anderson's stated influences, valued for its sense of place and for how its lead character arrives at the climax to discover he is at the center of the mystery. Anderson wanted that same quality of location-as-character, and Danvers gave it to him without augmentation.

  Anderson had been living in Boston in the late 1990s and drove past the Danvers State Hospital regularly. He recalled that when he and Gevedon were first developing the script, they lacked a structural framework. Remembering the hospital, he said, they thought setting a story there would be "contained" and "practical" since the entire film could stay in one location.

  David Caruso, who plays crew member Mike, described the rest of the building beyond their shooting area as simply "unsafe." Gevedon was direct about the conditions: floors were collapsing, rusty pipes ran through the walls, lead paint and asbestos were everywhere. He described the location as "a disaster zone." Permission to film was obtained through contacts in the Massachusetts film office who knew people in state government. The crew was restricted to certain confined areas. Anderson said the production designers contributed small additions, including graffiti, but the primary work was "enhancing what was already there." The collages covering Mary Hobbes's former room were inspired by actual patient collages the crew discovered inside the building.

• 4. Casting and Performance

  ›

  Peter Mullan was Anderson's choice for Gordon, the troubled crew foreman at the center of the film. Anderson had admired Mullan's performance in My Name Is Joe from 1998 and felt audiences "would be able to relate to him as a hard working blue-collar man with a new family." Mullan was cast in the lead role with that quality in mind.

  Josh Lucas came to the role of Hank, a gambling addict, through an audition. Lucas later said he was drawn to the character because he was "a working class asshole... he was just a prick, and it was terrific fun to play him that way." David Caruso was cast at the suggestion of USA Films executives, who had an existing working relationship with him. Anderson acknowledged Caruso was an "offbeat choice" for his part, but said the combination "felt very real" precisely because it was unpredictable.

  Brendan Sexton III, playing Gordon's nephew Jeff, was chosen because the filmmakers admired his work in Welcome to the Dollhouse from 1995. Larry Fessenden, an acquaintance of Anderson's, was given the minor role of Craig McManus. Before filming began, the principal cast underwent asbestos abatement training, both to prepare for their roles and to address the real exposure risks of working inside the hospital.

• 5. Technology and Injury

  ›

  Session 9 was among the first feature films to be shot in 24p HD digital video. That format records at 24 frames per second, matching the look of traditional film rather than the smoother, more clinical appearance of standard digital video, which runs at 30 frames per second. German cinematographer Uta Briesewitz operated the camera throughout the production.

  One incident during filming acquired an eerie resonance with the story itself. While shooting the sequence in which Hank is pursued through the subterranean tunnels beneath the hospital, Briesewitz was running with a handheld camera and struck an abandoned medical cart in the dark. The metal prong of a surgical device punctured the camera's eyecup and then punctured the corner of her eye socket, coming close to piercing her eye. The injury directly echoed the fate of Hank's character in the film's narrative: Hank is killed when a lobotomy pick is forced into his eye socket.

  Anderson placed considerable emphasis on sound throughout the production. He aimed to use audio to convey plot as well as generate what he called "a creepy tone." The sound design incorporated subliminal animal and mechanical noises woven into scenes. The session tapes between Mary Hobbes and her doctor, which form the film's secondary narrative spine, were recorded during post-production. Mary was voiced by Jurian Hughes and her doctor by Lonnie Farmer.

• 6. The Tapes and Their Ambiguity

  ›

  The film takes its title from the ninth in a series of audio-taped therapy sessions with a former hospital patient named Mary Hobbes, who was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Mike, the law school dropout on the work crew, discovers a box containing all nine tapes during the job. He begins listening to them, and his compulsion to finish them drives a wedge between him and the rest of the crew.

  The final tape reveals that a personality called "Simon" was responsible for Mary murdering her family. The film closes on Simon's recorded answer to his doctor's question: "I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc."

  Edward Bryant, reviewing the film for the 2003 edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, argued that Simon is not simply one of Mary's alternate personalities but could be read as a malevolent genius loci, a spirit of the place. Brian Keiper, writing for Bloody Disgusting, interpreted the ending as deliberately ambiguous, leaving unresolved whether Gordon's violence arises from psychological disorder or from a demonic entity that possessed Mary and then moved to him. Psychiatry scholar Heike Schwarz described the film as containing dual readings, referencing dissociative identity disorder alongside "a possible possession with a demonic personality." Anderson removed a sequence in post-production that suggested a homeless woman in the hospital might explain the strange events, because test audiences confused her with Mary Hobbes and it created a false resolution he did not want.

• 7. Release and Critical Split

  ›

  Session 9 premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival on the 31st of July 2001. It opened commercially in Boston at the Loews Common Theatre on the 8th of August 2001, then expanded to a limited theatrical release in Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles two days later. The film ran in American theaters through the 18th of October 2001.

  The financial results were modest. The film earned $76,493 in its opening weekend across those three cities. Its total American gross reached $378,176. International markets were more receptive, with the film earning $1.2 million abroad.

  Critical opinion split sharply. Entertainment Weekly called the film "a marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere." Rolling Stone called it "a spine-tingler." Slant Magazine favorably compared it to Don't Look Now. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film's "sense of uncertainty lingers long after the theater lights have gone up." Against those responses, Variety's Robert Koehler argued the film "doesn't know what to do with what it sets up." The Boston Globe's Jay Carr wrote that it eventually becomes "glossy claptrap that plays like its own lobotomy." Dave Kehr, writing a mixed review for The New York Times, praised the performances and the screenplay's "authentic working-class snap" but criticized the pacing as "long and aimless."

• 8. Cult Life and Legacy

  ›

  DVD rentals and word of mouth built Session 9's reputation over the years following its quiet theatrical exit. Bloody Disgusting ranked it fifth on its list of the twenty best horror films of the 2000s. Brian Keiper called it "one of the most unsettling movies of the century so far." By 2021, Netflix had picked it up for streaming, and the film's twentieth anniversary was marked with a screening at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

  Marisa Mirabel, writing for /Film on that anniversary, called it an "underrated gem that was ahead of its time in terms of atmospheric and psychological horror." Writer John Kenneth Muir, in his book Horror Films of 2000-2009 published in 2023, described it as "a masterpiece of mood" that "succeeds by suggesting, not showing the forces at work in the characters."

  Anderson and Gevedon pitched a prequel centered on the Mary Hobbes character in 2020. They developed what Anderson described as "a pretty solid treatment" and attracted producers willing to finance it. Focus Features, which had acquired USA Films shortly after Session 9's release and now held the rights, declined to allow it. A lawyer for the company told Anderson and Gevedon they could not proceed because Focus does not normally allow filmmakers to make prequels or sequels to its films. Anderson noted the company had effectively held those rights for roughly eighteen years without using them. An official novelization by Christian Francis was published on the 4th of October 2024, through Echo On Publications, giving the story new life on the page.