A retrospective by Brooks Rich What scares you in a film? Is it a masked killer jumping out of the darkness with a knife? A ghost appearing in the blink of an eye? Someone having their skin peeled off slowly? There are all kinds of scares in horror. Today, I want to focus on one of the most interesting: psychological horror. A subgenre that lives entirely in the mind. The best ones don’t show us much. They make us do the work. And sometimes, that’s far scarier than anything we could actually see. A work crew is hired to clear asbestos out of the run-down Danvers State Hospital. There’s competition for the job, so Gordon, the crew’s leader, underbids with a two-week estimate—something he knows isn’t realistic. But they get the job. Then he cuts it to a week. Now they have no choice but to grind. And then… something might start happening. There may be something in the dark of Danvers State. Or there may not be. This is the brilliance of Session 9 . The film lives and dies on i...