Weak and the Wounded: Compartmentalizing Your Demons in ‘Session 9’
My favorite thing about the horror films of the early 2000s is that no trends had been established yet. The Dark Castle era of the late ’90s that gave us the likes of Thirteen Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill was winding down. The Japanese remake craze would not kick off until October of the next year with Gore Verbinski’s adaptation of The Ring. The slasher remake craze would follow a year after that with the release of Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But in those first couple years, the standouts were films like American Psycho, Ginger Snaps, Valentine, The Others, Hannibal, movies both big and small that really had no connection with one another whatsoever. And of course, in the middle of all of that, there was Brad Anderson’s Session 9. I first discovered this movie in college, in 2007, six years after it came out, when I was really starting to dig deep into the genre beyond the franchises I had grown up with and the familiar titles from the video store. I understood almost nothing the first time I watched the film, and yet it unsettled me to my core.
I couldn’t shake it and I didn’t know why. This is the same time time I was really testing my limits in terms of gore and notoriously hard to watch films, and Session 9 isn’t like that at all. For a good chunk of the film, nothing really happens, and when things do happen, you see almost none of it. The horror in Session 9 stems from the stories you hear rather than the things that you see, and from the almost tangibly oppressive mood.
I also immediately latched onto how blatantly New England it is. I am from Maine, but my wife is from Massachusetts, so that particular vibe and aesthetic, the frequency with which characters drop certain names of places, that’s simply something that has always resonated with me, of which I never, ever tire. I mean, a huge part of the film, maybe the biggest, revolves around uncovering the truth of an incident that occurred in — of all places — Lowell.
Session 9 revolves around an asbestos cleaning crew tasked with cleaning up the infamous Danvers State Hospital, a very real and long-since abandoned mental health facility. The team consists of Gordon, the owner of the company, Phil, his right-hand man, Mike, a level-headed law school dropout, and Jeff, Gordon’s nephew, who is slow to be shown the ropes and has an intense fear of the dark. In a very short amount of time, they add the final member of their crew, Hank, who already has tremendous tension with Phil because he’s dating Phil’s ex-girlfriend and Phil has clearly not come anywhere close to getting over the breakup. Every character has a level of anxiety or stress that they are bringing to the table, especially Gordon, who has a newborn at home and feels the pressure to provide for his family while his company is crumbling at the same time. He takes on the impossible task of promising to do this job in a week because if he doesn’t get this job, the company is over. This is literally make or break. In short, every character has a reason to snap.
Session 9 perfectly recreates the feeling of being near an abandoned building, or a supposed haunted house, any place with a past, and listening to someone tell you the stories, while you tell yourself it probably isn’t true, yet you’ve got goosebumps up and down your arms all the same. That’s what this movie is. It’s so much about what you hear, to the point that it is literally a disembodied voice saying, “Hello, Gordon,” that basically kicks off the horror in earnest. From there, the atmosphere and the tension between the characters all begin to escalate. The most obvious example of auditory horror, however, comes from the titular sessions. In the basement, Mike discovers the tapes regarding a patient named Mary Hobbes who suffered Dissociative Identity Disorder. Mary had three alters, a little girl named Princess, a boy named Billy, and another named Simon that each of them refuse to talk about. There was some kind of incident involving Mary’s brother, Peter, and each session starts to unravel exactly what happened.
The sessions themselves are unsettling enough, but the impact they have on Mike as he sits there and listens to them are clear. Gordon is supposed to be the level head of the group, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that that’s simply no longer the case. Mike is the truly rational member of the group, but listening to these tapes clearly takes a toll on him, and yet he cannot stop. The tapes even seem to affect the environment as a whole, too, that’s the truly interesting part. Everyone is a little more on edge when Mike is listening to those tapes. The hospital itself almost seems to come alive when he’s listening to them.
The beauty of Session 9 is that so much of it is left open to interpretation. Is anything supernatural happening here, or is this just what happens when people are left to fester for a week in a huge, abandoned place with the awful past that this hospital has? Eventually, as the sessions reach the titular ninth, Mary’s therapist is finally introduced to Simon. Simon claimed he was there when Mary needed him, he “introduced himself” when her brother scared her, causing her to fall on her fragile doll and cut herself. Even if he didn’t intend it, Peter knocked Mary down and hurt her badly. Simon picked Mary back up, and Simon took matters into his own hands. Is Simon simply an alter of Mary’s, the darkest part of her own subconscious given life? Or is Simon more? Is he literally an entity, a thing existing fully independent of her, who found her at her weakest, and allowed her to invite him inside? Is he an outside entity that took root inside of her, which drives people to do terrible things, or is he a name, a personification, given to something that is simply inside people and sometimes breaks through to the surface?
Mary’s alters all live in a specific place. Princess, who talks for Mary, naturally lives in the tongue. Billy, who keeps an eye out and keeps Mary cautious and alert, lives in her eyes. That’s crucial. Both of them live in a specific place in Mary’s body, fundamentally making them a part of her, which already alienates Simon and makes Simon truly sound like a separate thing. We don’t get to hear where Simon lives until the last, most chilling line of the film, in which Simon — still a disembodied voice on the tape as always, for the most part — states “I live in the weak and the wounded, doc.” That terrifying revelation does not relate to Mary, specifically, at all. It’s also essential to note that Simon’s voice is heard before Mike ever uncovers the tape, as Simon is the one who says “Hello, Gordon,” the first time that Gordon and Phil ever step foot in the hospital. And Gordon clearly hears it. It’s not simply a stylistic choice, he hears it in the moment.
Gordon winds up doing terrible things, and what’s left up to the viewer is whether or not he did those things with any kind of outside influence. Session 9 is about compartmentalization, it’s about repression, it’s about men who are all going through something and absolutely none of them want the others to see that they’re going through something. Except for Phil and Hank, ironically, who hate each other so much that they’re completely candid with one another. Both of them are similar in that they wear absolutely everything that they’re thinking on their sleeve. Gordon does everything he can to keep it all to himself, when he’s actually done unspeakable things before the movie even begins. This job is all he has, but Gordon has already lost it, in more ways than one.
Is Simon a living entity that found Gordon at his weakest and “introduced himself,” a supernatural force that invites itself inside to carry out a person’s darkest impulses? Again, given the almost physical impact the tapes seem to have and especially considering that Gordon himself never listens to them, there’s evidence for that. Or is Simon simply a metaphor for all manner of inner darkness, a name we attribute to the rot in the human soul that gives in to the worst kinds of rage, making the film more of a mood piece than a clear-cut singular narrative? There’s plenty of evidence for that, too. We don’t need to know. We’re not meant to know.
The beauty of Session 9 is that, as much as the characters are real and lived-in and the setting feels so natural in its own otherworldly way, you’re simply meant to feel it rather than understand it. Much like Simon itself, Session 9 is a movie that stays with you even if you only encounter it once. It takes root in your mind and it sits heavy in your gut. And that is the place where you know it.
