Hotels OsterreichFear is a place

the story

Session 9 is a contemporary tale of horror set in an abandoned insane asylum.

The complex of buildings looms up out of the woods like a dormant beast. Grand, imposing, abandoned, deteriorating. The residents of Danvers, Massachusetts steer well clear of the place. But Danvers State Mental Hospital, closed down for 15 years, is about to receive five new visitors.

Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan), the Scottish emigrant who owns and operates the Hazmat Elimination Co., badly needs to win a contract to remove dangerous asbestos from the hospital, which is soon to be renovated. It’s a lucrative job and Gordon has a wife and baby to support. To seal the deal and collect a big bonus, Gordon unwisely promises town engineer Bill Griggs (Paul Guilfoyle) that he and his crew can complete the massive job in only 1 week - overruling pragmatic crew chief Phil’s (David Caruso) estimate of 2-3 weeks. Already the pressure is on....

Hazmat gets the gig and the following Monday their dangerous work begins. Gordon and Phil are joined by the rest of the crew: would-be lawyer Mike (Stephen Gevedon), goading Hank (Josh Lucas), and Gordon’s impressionable nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III). The five men don protective gear and venture into the eerily vast and vacant spaces and corridors of the hospital. As the workweek continues the crew are drawn deeper into the mysteries that surround the asylum - rampant patient abuse, medieval medical procedures, rumors of demonic possession... The hospital holds many dark secrets - but then, so do each of the men. And the longer they struggle under the grueling pressure of this job, the more likely it seems that one of them will crack. The question is, which one will it be?

Brad Anderson Commentary
“Good old-fashioned scary movies are harder to find these days. You couldn’t have made The Exorcist [1973] today with that script and that kind of meticulous character development. Studios shy away from that. They want pretty teenagers being glib and impaling each other with barbecue tongs, even though the recent Exorcist re-issue did great at the box office. Today’s so-called horror movies are really just tongue-in-cheek J.Crew ads with lots of fake blood and some flavor of the week MTV metal band screaming on the soundtrack. Not scary.

“Session 9 is a horror movie in the traditional sense of horror as dread and menace, as opposed to shock and cheap thrills, like gore. We wanted the story to grow on you, the creepiness to grow on you like mold! We consciously tailored the story to take advantage of the location where we shot - an abandoned asylum north of Boston. So we featured certain locations like: the subterranean tunnels that they used to ferry patients through from the respective wings; the patient’s rooms which were aptly called “seclusions”. The building itself is shaped like an organism. It’s got wings, bowels, a head, arms and legs - it’s a living organism, as if the tunnels are arteries that link the various organs.”

Session 9 poster
Session 9 theatrical poster

Siena cheap hotels Danvers Asylum in Session 9
Danvers Asylum

Peter Mullan in Session 9
Peter Mullan

David Caruso in Session 9
David Caruso

Brendan Sexton in Session 9
Brendan Sexton III

Josh Lucas in Session 9
Josh Lucas

Stephen Gevedon in Session 9
Stephen Gevedon

Peter Mullan and David Caruso in Session 9
Peter Mullan and David Caruso

David Caruso and Peter Mullan in Session 9
David Caruso and Peter Mullan