What makes Session 9’s behind-the-scenes story worth revisiting?
- Danvers Hospital provides the real abandoned psychiatric hospital setting that shaped the film’s atmosphere.
- Gordon’s story draws on a real 1995 murder while remaining a fictional plot in Session 9.
- alternate ending material included a homeless woman whose subplot was removed from the theatrical cut.
- On-location filming brought the hospital’s existing spaces and unsettling environment directly into the movie.
This article revisits Session 9, Brad Anderson’s psychological horror film, to explain how Danvers State Hospital, the story’s influences, and its deleted material shaped the movie. Readers can compare the theatrical ending with the filmed alternate version and explore the real location behind the horror.
More than two decades after its release, Session 9 remains an unsettling, under-recognized psychological thriller. The story follows five asbestos abatement cleaners hired to clear out Danvers Psychiatric State Hospital in Massachusetts, a real asylum that had been abandoned by the U.S. government about a decade earlier. The location’s history and atmosphere informed the production and affected some of the actors while they were making the film.
The story was loosely influenced by a 1995 murder in Boston, while cast members David Caruso and Peter Mullan described unnerving experiences at the hospital. Deleted scenes and an alternate ending also change how viewers may interpret the cryptic finale. The details below trace how Session 9 came together and why Danvers became central to its horror.
How did Brad Anderson approach his first horror film?
Writer-director Brad Anderson made Session 9 as his first horror film after directing the romantic comedies Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents. Co-writing the screenplay with co-star Stephen Gevedon, Anderson aimed to move beyond what he saw as teen-oriented thriller conventions and make horror for mature audiences.
Session 9 combines psychological horror with a grounded story shaped by real events.
One understated influence was a 1995 homicide in Anderson’s hometown of Boston. The case involved Richard Rosenthal, a 40-year-old insurance executive who killed his 34-year-old wife, Laura Jane Rosenthal, after she accidentally burned their ziti dinner. Rosenthal reportedly attacked her with a rock in their backyard, mutilated her body, and impaled her heart and lungs on a stake. The next day, he said he could not remember the killing. His defense argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, while prosecutors maintained that he was faking mental illness.
The film never names the Rosenthal case, but it informs Gordon Fleming, played by Peter Mullan. Gordon’s stress over his newborn baby and his wife’s postpartum mood swings builds alongside the hospital’s apparent influence on his mind. In the film, he kills his wife, Wendy, their infant child, and the family dog after Wendy accidentally spills boiling pasta water on him.
Anderson cast Mullan after following his work for years, particularly his performance in the 1998 film My Name Is Joe, which earned the actor international acclaim. Anderson believed audiences would accept Mullan as a sympathetic, hard-working man struggling to provide for his new family.
Why was Danvers State Hospital the right setting for Session 9?
Danvers State Hospital gave Anderson a striking real-world setting for the story. He lived about 30 miles away in Boston in the late 1990s and often drove past the large, bat-winged brick building, which was constructed in 1874, opened in 1878, and closed in 1992.
Danvers State Hospital is both the film’s principal setting and a real former psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts.
While looking for a framework for the story, Anderson recalled the hospital and decided it would suit the film. The location also fit the production’s limited $1.5 million budget from USA Films: filming in one contained place was practical and cost-effective. The crew’s experience at the real site ultimately became part of the film’s atmosphere.
Anderson drew on two horror films while writing the screenplay. He cited Nicolas Roeg’s psychological thriller Don’t Look Now as a major influence, especially its story of a father who realizes he is at the center of a murder mystery as the climax unfolds. Anderson also admired its frightening tone and Gothic sense of place.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining influenced Session 9’s location and visual style. Both films use a large, self-contained setting where a man’s mental state deteriorates into violence. Anderson also drew from the way The Shining divides its story into days and uses slow, horizontal wide shots to show an expansive space.
Session 9 was among the first films shot using Sony’s 24p HD digital format, which captures images at 24 frames per second. The format helped Anderson and cinematographer Uta Briesewitz film long tracking shots through the hospital while keeping the background in focus, which would have been harder with typical 30-frames-per-second digital video.
Anderson also built an eerie soundscape with subliminal animal sounds and mechanical noises. These sounds quietly unsettle viewers, echoing the way the hospital’s apparent evil seems to affect Gordon.
Is Gordon possessed, or is Danvers shaping his breakdown?
Session 9 leaves the source of Gordon’s violence uncertain. Anderson connects the hospital’s unsettling atmosphere with the Rosenthal murder’s influence, allowing a disembodied voice and the possibility of possession to sit alongside a psychologically grounded explanation.
Session 9 leaves Gordon’s apparent possession open to interpretation.
Anderson’s independent production made filming inside the closed hospital possible. A studio production might have recreated Danvers on a set instead, losing the atmosphere of the actual location that contributes to the film’s unease.
The title Session 9 refers to psychotherapy sessions recorded on magnetic tape reels. Mike, played by Gevedon, becomes drawn to the recordings and plays them repeatedly. The tapes contain interviews with patient Mary Hobbes, a former asylum inmate with dissociative identity disorder. As her doctor investigates a fatal Christmas night at her home in Lowell, Massachusetts, the tapes reveal that one of her personalities, Simon, was responsible for forcing Mary to massacre her family. Actress Jurian Hughes voiced Simon, Princess, and Billy in post-production.
Anderson raises questions about the mystery without supplying definitive answers. The film leaves viewers to consider whether Gordon was possessed by Mary Hobbes and Simon or whether the hospital’s history and atmosphere affected his mind.
Many interpretations of the ending are possible because Anderson leaves the events ambiguous. That choice gives viewers room to decide what happened.
The ending was also substantially different in the version Anderson originally filmed.
How does Session 9’s alternate ending change the story?
The theatrical cut ends with Gordon calling his dead wife on a broken cell phone while standing in Mary’s seclusion room. The alternate ending instead has an elderly homeless woman enter and kill him, connecting the finale to a subplot that was cut from the released film.
The theatrical ending leaves Gordon trapped in psychological torment, while the alternate ending gives the homeless woman a direct role in his death.
In the theatrical cut, Gordon sees pictures of his family on the wall and experiences dissociative memories of killing his crew members one by one. The implication is that he remains in the institution, deranged and tormented by what happened. The haunting effect is intensified by a 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 looks down over the asylum before the image fades to black.
In the filmed alternate ending, Gordon looks at the photographs on Mary’s wall when an elderly homeless woman rushes in and bludgeons him with a flashlight. As he lies dying, he gradually remembers killing his family and colleagues. A less menacing version of Simon’s “weak and wounded” line plays over the scene.
The alternate ending ties into a deleted subplot that was removed to streamline the story and tighten its pacing. The homeless woman appears in deleted material as early as the opening shot, when a wheelchair is visible in a dark corridor and she moves across the background just before the cut. Anderson initially keeps her face hidden, leaving her identity uncertain.
In another deleted scene, the woman gathers objects from the hospital and arranges them in groups of three. The items include a rubber glove, a Doritos bag, and Jeff’s half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She keeps them in a hidden shelter inside the complex, where she also sleeps. The material reveals that she watches and listens to the crew, including Gordon killing his co-workers. A long shot of Mike crossing the gym before Gordon attacks him was originally filmed from her point of view. In the alternate ending, she kills Gordon in self-defense.
Like Phil, played by David Caruso, the homeless woman acts as a red herring. Her presence adds to Gordon’s uncertainty as he hears noises and sees footprints that suggest someone else is inside the hospital. It also raises questions about who killed Hank, played by Josh Lucas, after he returns to inspect the loot he found in a brick wall.
Anderson removed the subplot after test audiences found it confusing. Some viewers assumed the homeless woman was Mary Hobbes, although the film establishes that Mary is dead and shows her headstone. The two characters are visually distinct: Mary appears in photographs as a middle-aged white woman with long blonde hair, while the homeless woman is an elderly Black woman.
The edit also changes how viewers understand the footsteps after Jeff finds Hank staring out of a window in a catatonic state. The theatrical cut leads viewers to associate the sounds with Hank running through the asylum; in the original edit, the footsteps belonged to the homeless woman.
Removing the subplot made the theatrical cut more mysterious and emphasized supernatural interpretations. Without the homeless woman, the ending is less straightforward and Gordon’s fate feels more unrelenting.
What made the real Danvers State Hospital so unsettling?
Danvers State Hospital had a troubled history that included abusive treatment, overcrowding, and prefrontal lobotomy procedures. The film refers to some of that history when Mike recounts the Patricia Willard scandal of the 1980s.
The real hospital’s existing conditions and history supplied much of the setting’s disturbing realism.
After receiving permission to film at the hospital, Anderson and the crew found they needed little set decoration. They used much of the building’s existing furniture and fixtures, adding a bathtub to the hydrotherapy room, dangling meat hooks in the kitchen, a photo collage in Mary’s room, and plastic surgical gloves in the underground tunnel Jeff runs through when the lights go out.
Much of what appears in the hospital was already there before filming, including graffiti and unusual bird murals. A broken American flag seen in the background of several shots was also already in the building; the film uses it to suggest Gordon’s shattered American Dream.
The room where Mike listens to the therapy sessions had been a coffee room. Dusty boxes, folders, patient files, tape reels, old lamps, and other objects were found around the hospital and rearranged for the scene. The crew also found old medical tissues and blood samples from former patients.
Asbestos and other toxic substances restricted the crew to areas considered safe 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.”
What unsettling experiences did David Caruso and Peter Mullan describe?
Some actors said the hospital affected them during filming. Peter Mullan recalled hearing internal voices telling him to jump while filming rooftop scenes, and David Caruso said he saw something pass his window inside the Bonner Medical Building.
Caruso and Mullan described unsettling experiences at the filming location, but their accounts do not establish paranormal activity.
Mullan said the urge to jump felt overwhelming for a moment. Caruso said he hesitated to tell others because he worried they would look at him differently.
Caruso 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.”
How did a real filming accident echo the film’s violence?
Cinematographer Uta Briesewitz injured her eye while filming a chase scene in an underground corridor. The accident occurred when she ran into an old medical cart while operating a handheld camera.
Briesewitz’s accident involved a surgical prong and closely echoed an injury depicted in the film.
Briesewitz struck her face on the sharp edge of a surgical prong. The prong pierced the camera’s eyecup and punctured her eye, nearly mirroring Hank’s death when Gordon drives a metal lobotomy pick into his eye socket.
Why does Session 9 remain frightening?
Session 9 sustains its horror through Gordon’s uncertain psychological collapse and the atmosphere of the real Danvers State Hospital. Brad Anderson’s decision to film inside the former hospital gives the story a setting that is central to its unsettling effect.
Session 9 uses its real location and unresolved ending to keep its central mystery open.
The hospital’s history, the magnetic tapes, and the film’s deliberately ambiguous final moments combine to leave viewers with questions rather than clear explanations. That uncertainty is a defining part of the film’s lasting effect.
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