Cody Hamman has had Film Appreciation for Session 9 since a 2001 horror marathon screening.
My first viewing of director Brad Anderson's psychological horror film Session 9 was a very memorable event for me, and not only because it was the first time I saw a movie that immediately became one of my favorites. It was made even more special due to the venue - this screening, referred to as the "Midwest Premiere", took place at the first 24 hour theatrical horror marathon I ever attended, at the Studio 35 theatre in Columbus, Ohio. This marathon took place from October 20th into the 21st in 2001, and although I've recently drifted away from them and had to relocate, I continued going to marathons in Columbus every October for the next twelve years.
The line-up for that marathon was pretty incredible. Rosemary's Baby, Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D, Nosferatu with live music, an hour and a half long trailer compilation called The Teenage UFO Psycho Monster Sex Show, the original Carrie with Joe Bob Briggs in attendance to present the screening, Session 9 (scheduled to show at 10pm, but I'm sure we were off schedule and it showed much later), The Convent, an infamous middle-of-the-night screening of Don't Look Now, The Howling, the cannibal hippie flick I Drink Your Blood, John Carpenter's Halloween, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Squirm had also been scheduled to show, but the marathon was so far behind schedule that it had to be dropped from the line-up.
Session 9 was a movie I had heard of before the marathon and was very curious to see because it was one of the first movies to be shot with an HD digital camera. This was a year before the release of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, so this movie was an early glimpse at the future of cinema. I could see that it wasn't shot on film, but eighteen years later the look of the movie still holds up well.
Written by Anderson and cast member Stephen Gevedon, the film is set largely within the confines of the Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, a psychiatric hospital that had been abandoned and left to crumble for fifteen years by the time Anderson and his cast and crew started filming there. The characters are an abestos abatement crew who have been hired to clear the asbestos out of the building, and owner Gordon (Peter Mullan) was so desperate to get the job that he has agreed to be finished with it in just one week, a seemingly impossible task.
Gordon has recently become a father, and even before work begins at the hospital it's clear that he's being beaten down by his hectic new home life. Lack of sleep, the baby has had an ear infection for a long time, etc. There's also mention that the abestos abatement company (which is called Hazmat Elimination) is dealing with financial issues, which explains why Gordon went after this job so hard.
On his crew are his right hand man Phil (David Caruso), his dimwitted nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), co-writer Gevedon as former law student Mike, and Josh Lucas as Hank, who is in a relationship with Phil's ex. There's some tension between Hank and Phil because of this, and when Phil's not around Hank admits that he's with the woman just because it bothers Phil.
The hospital is an inherently creepy location, and the creepiness just keeps building up from the moment the crew steps into the place. They're warned that people are often found squatting there, sometimes former patients who became homeless when it was shut down in the '80s. There's a morgue, and a cemetery with over 700 bodies that are marked only with a number. The crew's entire gig is dealing with asbestos, which makes even the sight of dust particles in the air unnerving. As one of them describes it, you get a piece of asbestos in your lungs "and tissue begins to grow around it like a pearl. Like a time bomb".
It's said that the pre-frontal lobotomy was perfected at Danvers, and there's a moment where Mike lets us know how "ice pick lobotomies" were performed. When Jeff makes a joke about lobotomies Mike grabs him and mimes performing one on him, explaining that a thin metal pipette was inserted through the eye socket without puncturing the eyeball, entering "the soft tissue of the frontal lobe." That's followed by "a few simple, smooth, up and down jerks to sever the lateral hypothalamus." This is information we'll be reminded of by the end of the film.
Mike has another great scene - Gevedon really worked with Anderson to give himself some standout moments - where he digs into the history of the hospital and reveals that it didn't close down just due to budget cuts. There was a lawsuit when a patient's repressed memory claims of Satanic ritual abuse were proven false. Mike knows the details of the patient's claims, and the monologue he gives reciting them is quite troubling.
Session 9 has an unsettling atmosphere from the start, and a feeling of dread builds and builds over the course of the running time. Much like the description of asbestos incubating in someone's lungs like a time bomb, there's a time bomb aspect to the film as well. There are two indicators that something is going to go terribly wrong within this week. The first is the simple addition of titlecards letting us know the days of the week as they pass. The second is the collection of audio tapes Mike finds in one of the old offices. He regularly sneaks off to the office to listen to these tapes, which contain interviews with a female patient named Mary who had multiple personalities, each one of them residing in a different part of her body. The personality called Princess lived in her tongue, because she was always talking. A personality called Billy lived in her eyes, because he saw everything. Something bad happened on Christmas twenty-two years before this interview was conducted, and a doctor is trying to get Mary or one of her personalities to discuss that incident. Whatever it was, it seems to have involved a mysterious personality called Simon. The interview clips are intriguing and disturbing, and have a great warped tape sound to them. Each tape is numbered - session 1, session 2, etc. The title lets us know that things are going to really take a turn for the worse once Mike reaches session 9.
Mike listens to the session 9 tape on the day when everything falls apart for the men working in the hospital, and the interview on that tape is the most chilling one of the bunch. It's when the Simon personality finally comes forth to take to the doctor and tell him what happened that Christmas.
Gevedon doesn't have all of the standout moments, in fact the entire cast turns in great performances. Caruso gets to drop one of the greatest F-bombs in the history of film, this serves as a reminder that Lucas really should have a bigger career, and after acting like an idiot for most of his scenes Sexton has a great display of fear when he's stuck in a tunnel with work lights hanging along the wall when the generator shuts down. Those lights go off one-by-one down the hall, with Jeff - who has admitted to being afraid of the dark - trying to outrun the darkness.
An awesome film with one of my all-time favorite last lines, Session 9 is a genre classic as far as I'm concerned. That first viewing experience at the "Nightmare at Studio 35" event was a great one, and I have returned to Danvers with the Hazmat Elimination crew many times over the eighteen years since.
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