The Best Horror Film You've Never Seen Is More Disturbing Because It's Based On Real Events

From the very first frame of the movie - an image of a lone chair, sitting in a beam of light in a decaying hallway, the whole frame turned upside-down - Session 9 sets out to make the audience ill-at-ease. Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, said of the film's unremittingly unsettling tone that director Brad Anderson, who was a newcomer to horror films, "seems to be bending over backward to stretch his wings."

"Stretching his wings" in this case translates to "freaking the audience out." Gleiberman went on to refer to Session 9 as a "marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere." The director put it another way: "We weren't going for jolts (things jumping out of closets and stuff) as much as we were creating an atmosphere of dread or menace that lives with you."

Anderson and his crew had an able partner in that enterprise in the form of the film's setting - the decaying hulk of the abandoned Danvers State Hospital which, just as in the movie, had housed the mentally ill for more than a century, until it was closed down in the 1980s. But the building alone could only do so much, and the film's roving camera and ominous soundscape take over from there, showcasing the contrasting beauty and isolation of the location and creating a sonic landscape that heightens tension at every turn.

Session 9 does a lot with very little. There are few special effects. Instead, we get eerie images of the abandoned hospital, recordings of an interview with a patient that turns increasingly chilling, portrayals of human psyches fracturing apart in ways that make it seem like any one of them could be behind the strange goings-on within the walls, and in one particularly effective sequence, a series of images of insects crawling on grass set to a monologue about the hospital's sordid history.

Originally built in 1874, the abandoned Danvers State Hospital is basically the perfect location for a horror movie. Not only is it a derelict hospital for the mentally ill with a litany of unsettling stories associated with its long history, but it was actually built on the spot where one of the judges in the Salem Witch Trials once lived. Hard to get a more perfect horror movie pedigree than that.

The hospital is also said to have been the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitarium, which in turn, lent its name to the infamous Arkham Asylum where Batman's rogues gallery spend much of their time. According to the cast and crew of Session 9, the hospital more than lived up to its eerie reputation.

"It was a terrifying location," actor David Caruso said of the hospital. "It was a place we never got comfortable in. It wasn't like it was day three and you were throwing water balloons because it was so much fun to be there. It was always scary, and you could really feel the pain of the people that were at Danvers. It's a rough environment. But, I mean, it's on the film. You can see. They didn't have to dress any sets or anything, all that stuff was already there."

The crew were only able to use a small part of the hospital because much of it was unsafe. In the film, the man who is hiring the crew to remove the asbestos describes the building's Kirkbride Plan, an architectural and philosophical approach to constructing such hospitals, in a suitably gothic manner, comparing it to a giant bat. Today, what remains of the Danvers State Hospital has been converted into pricey apartments and condos - for those brave enough to live there.

Technically, director Brad Anderson's debut was a 50-minute short filmed on Super 8 in 1993 called Frankenstein's Planet of Monsters! According to B.C. Sterrett of the Lost Media Archive, it was "ultra low budget and the costumes and the sets and the whole design is very homemade but very charming and ingenious and you'll never see anything like it." Between that and Session 9, however, Anderson stayed away from the horror genre, directing the romantic comedies Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents.

Session 9 marked Anderson's first foray into this kind of big-screen horror - but not his last. He followed it up with the thriller The Machinist starring Christian Bale in 2004, and by 2006, he had a slot in the roster of the Showtime anthology series Masters of Horror, where he was rubbing shoulders with more established veterans of the genre, like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, and Stuart Gordon. 

A lot of classic horror movies get mentioned as influences on Session 9. Titles like Don't Look Now and The Shining are thrown around. One less obvious one is John Carpenter's classic The Thing. Sure, there's the fact that the movies both feature pretty much all-male casts stuck in an isolated location as the paranoia begins to ratchet up, but they have something else in common, too: an ambiguous ending that has kept audiences guessing and fans coming back to interpret and reinterpret the available data.

According to the film's commentary track, the original script of Session 9 made it quite a bit clearer what was real and what was supernatural - and what was all in someone's mind. It was "very much a clinical interpretation of mental illness," as Anderson and company said on the commentary. You can even see some of these moments in the film's deleted scenes, which include an old woman who might be the former patient Mary Hobbes hiding in the building. However, as they were putting the film together, they "realized audiences wanted it to be a little more spooky and ghostly."

The final words in the film are the voice of Simon, one of Mary's multiple personalities, on tape saying, "I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc." This could mean that everyone has the potential for mental illness and/or violence. Under the right circumstances, anyone can "snap." Or it could mean that, as some have theorized, Simon is an actual entity, the "malignant genius loci of the gothic building."

"Session 9 can be interpreted in different ways," director Brad Anderson told AMC. "You can get the sense that Gordon breathes in an evil spirit, but can also be read as a much more clinical movie that shows a man who becomes unhinged, or may be going mad."

"It’s as if director Anderson wanted to show how embracing the idea of what Tony Soprano referred to as the 'strong, silent type' only leads to self-destruction," Thomas Hobbs wrote about how Session 9 approaches toxic masculinity.

"Anderson and co-writer Steven Gevedon (who also plays Mike, the guy who spends most of the movie listening to the tapes that give the film its name) were smart enough to show all of the guys cracking in their own way," Brian Collins wrote of the film, "Gordon is the only one who turns violent, but Phil's (David Caruso, in one of his last roles before CSI) paranoia and resentment gets worse over the course of the week, Mike seemingly abandons his work duties entirely to listen to the tapes, and Jeff... well Jeff is just afraid of the dark and the place does that fear no favors."

Then, of course, there's Hank. Hank with his lengthy monologue about how the stress of this job will get to you and how you need an "exit strategy." Hank, who claims that he is only with his co-worker's girlfriend because it makes Phil angry. Hank with his story of a "whale," a high-stakes gambler, who gave his friend at the casino a Porsche as a tip. As we spiral deeper and deeper into the film's story - into the literal bowels of the hospital - each of the men becomes a potential problem.

Actor Josh Lucas, who plays Hank, pointed out that, "For these struggling guys, the idea about the American Dream (prosperity and wealth) doesn’t necessarily exist." (See the broken American flag symbol that recurs in the film.) It is, in many ways, this stress that kicks off the film's descent into tragedy, as Gordon underbids the amount of time the job will take because he is desperate for money, desperate to keep his business, provide for his family, and retain the respect of the men who work for him.

They are all trapped, in their own way. Within their lives. Within the walls of the hospital. Within the prisons of their own minds and bodies, where their emotions have to remain under the surface until they boil over into violence or paranoia or some other destructive behavior. Thomas Hobbs described the "silent rage" of the film, "with the asbestos feeling like a metaphor for the toxicity of how a whole generation of men have been taught to mask their emotions so noxiously."

In one of the film's most disconcerting scenes, Mike (played by co-writer Stephen Gevedon) tells the story of Patricia Willard, one of the hospital's former patients. As he narrates, the camera shows first images of the inside of the ruined hospital, and then sequences of insects crawling on the grass. Director Brad Anderson says that he showed Peter Mullan, the actor who plays Gordon, the sequence of a spider attacking an insect and said that it "defined his character's path."

Test audiences suggested that the scene be shortened, but "happily Anderson ignored their requests," stating, "We had a mind from the get-go this movie was gonna be a movie that took its time." The resulting scene remains one of the most unsettling in the film.

The story of Patricia Willard, who recovered repressed memories of elaborate Satanic ritual abuse by her parents, turns out to have been essentially a hoax. While Patricia Willard's story isn't real, like many aspects of the film, it was based on real events - in this case, the "Satanic Panic" of the '80s, which included many accusations of Satanic ritual abuse that mirror what is described in Mike's recounting of Patricia's story, though the real cases were more likely to target daycare centers than the child's own family.

The fact that these stories proved to have been every bit as false and fabricated as the one Mike tells, often the result of "coercive and suggestive interrogation by therapists and prosecutors," hasn't stopped many people from serving long jail times over the years as a result of false accusations of this kind of ritual abuse.