Forgotten Film Friday: Session 9

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 its atmosphere. It’s cliché to say a location is a character, but this is one of the rare cases where it’s true. Danvers has its own energy—one we feel as viewers. This is a bad place, and no good comes from it.

I’m being careful not to give away too much, because going in blind is a big part of why this movie works.

There’s also a sadness running through Session 9. Not just in the history of Danvers, but in the men themselves. These are desperate guys who need this job to work out. There is no failure. Gordon, especially, carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. And maybe something in Danvers begins to affect him. To corrupt a broken man who’s already vulnerable.

The worst thing I could do is spell out exactly what happens. That’s not the point. My goal is to get you to discover whether this film works for you.

Some people will find Session 9 boring. I get that. If you’re looking for chainsaws, monsters, and buckets of blood, this probably isn’t your movie. You might get to the end and think, nothing happened. And that’s a completely valid reaction.

But for some of you, this film will get under your skin. Let it. It’s worth it.

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