Twenty-five years after its release, Brad Anderson’s spine-shivering psychological thriller Session 9 remains maddeningly underrated. The mortifying story follows five asbestos abatement cleaners hired to clear out Danvers Psychiatric State Hospital in Massachusetts, a real-life insane asylum abandoned by the U.S. government about a decade earlier. The genuine evil stored within its frames not only informed the entire production but also deeply affected the actors while they were making the movie.
Straight up, did you know the story was loosely based on a real-life murder that took place in 1995? Have you heard the stories about actors David Caruso and Peter Mullan experiencing terrifying paranormal activity while filming inside the hospital? What about the deleted scenes and alternate ending that radically changed how viewers perceive the cryptic finale? We’ve got the scoop on all that and much more as we go back inside the horrifying halls of Danvers State Hospital and revisit how Session 9 came to be.
After directing a couple of delightful romantic comedies, Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents, writer/director Brad Anderson set out to make his first horror film. Writing the screenplay with co-star Stephen Gevedon, Anderson sought to subvert modern horror tropes, which he felt had devolved into MTV, teeny-bopper thriller territory rather than legitimate horror made for mature audiences.
One of the movie’s most unspoken influences was a real-life homicide that occurred in 1995 in Anderson’s hometown of Boston. The grisly case involved Richard Rosenthal, a 40-year-old insurance executive who brutally killed his 34-year-old wife, Laura Jane Rosenthal, after she accidentally burned their ziti dinner one evening. Rosenthal reportedly snapped in a fit of rage, bludgeoned Laura to death with a rock in their backyard, eviscerated her corpse, and impaled her heart and lungs on a stake. The following day, he claimed to have no recollection of the vicious bloodbath. His defense argued that he was innocent by reason of insanity, while the prosecution maintained that he was faking mental illness.
Although the Rosenthal murder is never mentioned in Session 9, it directly informs the character of Gordon Fleming, played with great pathos by Peter Mullan. In the film, Gordon’s growing stress and anxiety over his newborn baby and his wife’s postpartum mood swings gradually escalate. Combined with the haunting influence the insane asylum seems to have on his psyche, those pressures drive him murderously insane. He ultimately kills his wife, Wendy, their infant child, and the family dog after Wendy accidentally spills boiling pasta water on him.
Anderson cast Mullan after becoming a longtime fan of the actor, particularly impressed by his excellent performance in the 1998 film My Name Is Joe, which earned him international acclaim. According to the director, he knew audiences would buy Mullan as a sympathetically tortured, hard-working blue-collar man desperate to provide for his new family.
Beyond the Rosenthal murder case, Anderson was inspired to set his story at the infamous Danvers State Psychiatric Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts. In the late 1990s, Anderson lived about 30 miles away in Boston and often drove past the massive, bat-winged brick building. Constructed in 1874, opened in 1878, and closed in 1992, the hospital made an unforgettable impression on him.
While struggling to find the right framework for his story, Anderson remembered those drives past Danvers and thought it would be a cool place to set the movie. With a limited $1.5 million budget from USA Films, shooting in one self-contained location also seemed practical and cost-effective. Little did the filmmakers know how the abject terror of the real-life location would pervade the entire production and seep into the movie itself.
While writing the screenplay, Anderson was also influenced by two bona fide horror classics. He cited Nicolas Roeg’s searing psychological thriller Don’t Look Now as a major inspiration, particularly its story of a father who eventually realizes he is at the center of a puzzling murder mystery as the climax unfolds. Anderson was also struck by the film’s terrifying tone and Gothic sense of place.
The other film that directly informed Session 9‘s location and aesthetic was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The similarities go beyond the sprawling single location where a man psychologically spirals into a murderous rampage. Anderson also borrowed from the way Kubrick’s movie is divided into sectional days and incorporates slow-creeping horizontal wide shots to accommodate an enormous space.
Session 9 was one of the first pictures shot on Sony’s 24p HD digital format, which, like film, captures images at 24 frames per second. This allowed Anderson and cinematographer Uta Briesewitz to capture long tracking shots through the enormous hospital without losing background focus, something that would have been much harder with typical digital video shooting at 30 frames per second.
Anderson also deliberately established an eerie soundscape, incorporating subliminal animal sounds and mechanical noises throughout the film. Much like the hidden evil that unwittingly seeps into Gordon’s pores, these sounds tacitly torment the viewer’s subconscious.
Story-wise, Gordon’s psychotic breaking point is inextricably linked to the hospital’s unnerving paranormal activity. Or is it? As Gordon possibly becomes possessed by a disembodied voice that drives his murderous rage, Anderson combines Danvers’ unsettling location with the Rosenthal murder to create a pulse-pounding horror tale rooted in reality.
This could only have been achieved by making the film independently. Had it been a studio production, there’s a good chance the filmmakers would have been forced to recreate Danvers on a set rather than shoot inside the actual shuttered psychiatric hospital. That would have removed much of the genuine terror of the location and resulted in a much weaker film.
Of course, the title Session 9 refers to the psychotherapy sessions recorded on magnetic tape reels that Mike (played by Gevedon) seems supernaturally drawn to and repeatedly plays throughout the film. The tapes contain intimate one-on-one interviews with patient #444, Mary Hobbes, a former asylum inmate with dissociative identity disorder. As the lead doctor tries to understand what happened one fatal Christmas night inside Hobbes’ home in Lowell, Massachusetts, the tapes reveal that one of her malignant personalities, Simon, was responsible for forcing Mary to massacre her family. Along with Mary’s other alter egos, Princess and Billy, Simon was voiced by actress Jurian Hughes in post-production.
Ultimately, Anderson poses more provocative open-ended questions about the central mystery than he provides answers. Was Gordon possessed by the demonic spirit of Mary Hobbes and her sadistic alter ego, Simon? Was it the abject evil and history of mental illness inside Danvers that infected his psyche?
Although many interpretations of the ending have been proposed, Anderson’s wisest decision was to leave things ambiguous and allow viewers to decipher what happened for themselves.
Seriously, though, how many of you knew the ending was drastically different from what Anderson originally intended?
In the theatrical cut we all know and love, Session 9 ends with Gordon using a broken cell phone to call his dead wife. Standing in a fevered, hypnotic trance in Mary’s seclusion room, he sees pictures of his family on the wall and experiences dissociative memories of killing each member of his crew, one by one. The implication is that Gordon is consigned to live forever in the mental institution, completely deranged and psychologically tormented by what transpired. The deeply sad and incredibly haunting ending is amplified by the skin-crawling voice-over in which Mary’s doctor asks, “And where do you live, Simon?”
“I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc,” Simon replies as the camera hovers above the asylum before fading to black.
The originally filmed alternate ending was quite different. Gordon looks at the photographs on Mary’s wall when an elderly homeless woman suddenly storms in and bludgeons him to death with a flashlight. As he lies dying in a pool of blood, Gordon slowly remembers killing his colleagues and his family. A far less menacing version of Simon’s “weak and wounded” dialogue plays over the imagery.
More importantly, this alternate ending ties directly into a subplot that was removed from the theatrical cut to streamline the narrative and keep the pacing tight. The homeless woman makes several appearances in the deleted material, beginning with the film’s opening shot of a wheelchair illuminated in a dark corridor. She scampers across the back of the frame just before the shot cuts. Anderson initially avoids showing her face, adding an unsettling mystery to her identity.
At one point, we see the woman collecting random items from the hospital and arranging them in groups of three. These include some of the crew’s belongings, such as a rubber glove, a Doritos bag, and Jeff’s half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She keeps the items in a hidden lair somewhere inside the enormous complex, where she also sleeps. We eventually learn that she’s been spying on and eavesdropping on the crew, witnessing Gordon slay his co-workers throughout the film. In fact, the long shot of Mike walking through the gym just before Gordon attacks him from behind was originally filmed from the woman’s perspective. So when the old woman brutally brains Gordon to death in the alternate ending, she does so out of fearful self-defense.
Similar to Phil (played by David Caruso), the elderly woman also serves as a red herring, further messing with Gordon’s mind as he hears bumps in the night and sees footprints suggesting someone else is lurking in the hospital. Her presence also makes us wonder who killed Hank (played by Josh Lucas) when he returns to the asylum to inspect the loot he found inside the brick wall. It’s a sly misdirect that ultimately fooled the audience a little too much.
Anderson eventually had to excise the subplot after test audiences found it too confusing. Although the material fleshes out the narrative, many viewers assumed the homeless woman was Mary Hobbes, even though the movie clearly establishes that Mary is deceased and even shows her headstone. More importantly, Mary is depicted in photographs as a middle-aged white woman with long blonde hair, while the homeless woman is an elderly Black woman. They’re obviously two different people. But after test audiences incorrectly assumed Mary Hobbes had murdered Gordon, Anderson radically edited the film to accommodate their interpretation.
For instance, after Jeff finds Hank staring out of a window in a catatonic state, we’re led to assume that the footsteps heard moments later belong to Hank as he starts running through the asylum. In the original edit, those were the homeless woman’s footsteps.
Removing the subplot pushed the theatrical cut further into supernatural mystery, amplified the ambiguity, and gave Gordon a much more miserable, merciless, and eternally haunting fate. Without the homeless woman, the story is less logical and straightforward, opening the door to various interpretations of the enigmatic ending.
As nebulous as the source of Gordon’s psychosis remains, one thing is crystal clear: the real source of terror is Danvers’ genuinely freaky environment. The hospital was widely known for its troubled history, including abusive treatment, overcrowding, and groundbreaking prefrontal lobotomy procedures. Mike discusses some of that history in the film when recounting the Patricia Willard scandal of the 1980s.
Once Anderson and the crew received permission to film inside the real Danvers State Hospital, they were surprised to discover that they needed very little set decoration. According to the director, the crew brought in only a handful of outside props, preferring to accentuate the asylum’s creepy, pre-existing furniture and ancient fixtures. Anderson did acknowledge that the set decorators and production designers added a bathtub to the hydrotherapy room, along with the dangling meat hooks seen in the massive kitchen during the crew’s tour. Other major additions included the photo collage in Mary’s room and the plastic surgical gloves scattered along the underground tunnel that Jeff races through when the lights go out.
Beyond that, almost everything seen inside the hospital was already there, abandoned long before filming. That includes much of the graffiti sprayed on the walls and the bizarre bird murals seen throughout the movie. The broken American flag visible in the background of a couple of shots, alluding to Gordon’s shattered American Dream, was also there before the production arrived.
The room where Mike listens to the therapy sessions was originally a coffee room. The dusty boxes, folders, patient files, tape reels, old lamps, and other objects that help bring the mise-en-scène to life were found scattered throughout the hospital and simply rearranged to make the room as unsettling as possible. The crew even found old medical tissues and blood samples from real patients treated before the hospital closed. No joke: spending time there was not for the faint of heart!
Mirroring the movie’s premise even more, Danvers was genuinely beset with asbestos and other toxic substances, restricting the crew to areas deemed safe enough for filming. In a 20-year retrospective with Fangoria, Gevedon recalled: “Technically, no one was supposed to be in there. There was asbestos, the floors were collapsing, there were rusty pipes and lead paint everywhere. I mean, it was a disaster zone, much of that building. But somehow, I can’t remember, our producers knew someone in the Massachusetts film office who knew someone in the Massachusetts government who was able to grease some wheels and get us permission to shoot there, as long as we stayed within certain confined areas.”
The grim history of Danvers and the rampant psychosis that once ran through its halls set the tone for the entire film, and some of the actors were affected by the location in unsettling ways. While filming the rooftop scenes, Peter Mullan claimed he heard internal voices telling him to jump off the building. The urge was so palpable and overwhelming for a split second that he nearly did so.
Meanwhile, while filming inside the Bonner Medical Building, David Caruso claimed that he saw “something pass my window.” “I didn’t want to tell anybody, because people would start looking at me strangely,” he added.
Caruso also told MovieWeb in July 2001: “It was a place you never got comfortable in. It wasn’t like day three, and we were throwing water balloons because it was so much fun to be there. It was always scary. You can really feel the pain of the people who went through Danvers. It’s a rough environment. It’s not fun. It’s on the film. They didn’t have to dress any sets or anything. All of that stuff was sitting there. The federal government walked away from it about thirty years ago. It was a terrifying location.”
Here’s one last morbid real-life parallel with the movie, and it’s particularly unsettling given Danvers’ authentic history of suffering. While filming the scene in the subterranean corridor where a shadowy figure chases Hank, cinematographer Uta Briesewitz accidentally injured herself while operating a handheld camera. She ran into an old medical cart left inside the hospital, hit her face against the sharp edge of a surgical prong, and badly injured her eye. The jagged edge pierced the camera’s eyecup and punctured Briesewitz’s eye, nearly mirroring Hank’s demise when Gordon jams a metal lobotomy pick into his eye socket.
Twenty-five years later, Session 9 remains one of the scariest movies released in the 21st century. Beyond the ambiguity of Gordon’s spiraling descent into madness, Brad Anderson’s independent psychological horror thriller is forever unshakable thanks to his decision to shoot inside the real Danvers State Hospital.
The lingering evil of the shuttered asylum seeps into the magnetic tapes, infiltrates viewers’ subconscious, and stays deep within the recesses of our minds, bodies, and souls. It’s a film that leaves us with more questions than answers, and that’s precisely what makes its final moments so difficult to forget.