Horror Obsessive
Session 9 didn’t invent a monster. It hired a hazmat crew, handed them a work order, and let a genuinely condemned mental hospital do the rest. It’s been 25 years, and that decision still separates it from nearly every other haunted-institution movie of its era, and it’s the reason the film has aged into one of early-2000s horror’s most quietly devastating cult objects.
That distinction is getting a rare public airing. A 25th anniversary screening of Session 9 is set for September 12–13 at Mass Mini Con, held at Boston’s Yawkey Theater, and it’s free with admission to the two-day pop-culture and physical-media convention. Writer-director Brad Anderson and writer-actor Stephen Gevedon are booked for a Q&A afterward, presented alongside Contra Celluloid, giving the film a homecoming of sorts: Boston is where Anderson’s filmmaking career began.
A Real Asylum, Not a Set
Session 9‘s premise reads almost like a work memo: a crew is hired to strip asbestos out of the shuttered Danvers State Hospital before demolition, and the job goes wrong in slow, procedural stages rather than through jump scares. Anderson has said the choice to shoot inside the actual Danvers building, rather than build a set, is what gives the film its staying power a quarter century later.
“We think Session 9 still resonates today because the place we filmed it was real: Danvers State Mental Hospital, North of Boston,” Anderson said in a statement. “The sinister stories that inspired the film came from actual ones we heard about Danvers. The crew and cast were genuinely spooked by the place, and we think that may have left its mark too.”
That real location does double duty as documentary footage. The water-stained walls, the collapsed ceilings, and the debris left mid-hallway were all there before the production ever arrived. Anderson and writer-actor Stephen Gevedon, frustrated with the mainstream horror of the moment, built a story that let the building’s own decay set the pace instead of leaning on a script full of scares.
The Tapes Do the Damage
The device holding the film together is a set of therapy session tapes, drip-fed to the audience out of order, so the crew’s slow unraveling and the audience’s own picture of what happened inside Danvers assemble at the same rate. It’s a structural trick more procedural dramas use than horror films do, and it’s the reason Session 9 plays less like a ghost story and more like an audit of a place that never got closure.
That patience is also why Session 9 gets called underrated more often than it gets called canon. It arrived in 2001 alongside flashier studio horror and asked audiences to sit with dread instead of jump scares, a choice that looked like a commercial miscalculation at the time and looks like the smartest instinct in the film now. The tagline promised “Fear Is a Place,” and 25 years later that’s still one of the most accurate one-line pitches horror has produced this century.
Danvers itself is gone, torn down years after filming wrapped, which makes a theatrical revival with Anderson and Gevedon in the room rarer than it sounds. There’s no location tour to pair with it anymore, just the tapes and the two people who made them. A new limited edition 19×24 screen-printed poster by artist Daniel Danger, built around the film’s tagline, will be available at the September event, another sign that a movie built almost entirely out of restraint has earned the kind of merchandise usually reserved for horror’s loudest properties.
Quick Takes
- Session 9 marks its 25th anniversary with a free screening at Mass Mini Con on September 12–13 at Boston’s Yawkey Theater.
- The screening includes a Q&A with writer-director Brad Anderson and writer-actor Stephen Gevedon, presented with Contra Celluloid.
- Anderson says the film’s power comes from being shot inside the real, since-demolished Danvers State Hospital.
- A limited edition 19×24 screen-printed poster by artist Daniel Danger, built around the film’s “Fear Is a Place” tagline, will be available at the event.
- The 2001 film follows a hazmat crew whose members begin to unravel while clearing out the abandoned asylum.
