Most haunted house stories go for the easy stuff: flickering lights, jump scares, maybe a ghost in a nightgown humming a lullaby. Session 9, Brad Anderson’s underdog cult horror from 2001, doesn’t need those parlor tricks. It gives you something much worse: asbestos, unpaid overtime, and the creeping realization that your boss is not just bad at scheduling but maybe bad at not murdering you. If you’ve ever had a job where you felt like the building itself wanted to kill you—or worse, your coworkers—this movie is basically your employee orientation video.
Danvers: The Star That Never Got Top Billing
The film is shot in the real-life Danvers State Mental Hospital, a looming gothic beast that looks like it could murder you before the script even kicks in. The place is a character all on its own: long hallways stretching like your worst Monday, peeling paint that looks like it’s mid-scream, and enough mold to qualify as a second antagonist. Anderson didn’t need to decorate. He just turned on the camera and let the building confess its sins.
Meet the Crew (and Start the Death Pool)
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Gordon (Peter Mullan): The foreman, a man with the posture of someone who hasn’t slept in five years and the eyes of someone who’s heard voices in an empty asylum (spoiler: he has). He’s desperate for cash, desperate for work, and apparently desperate to lose touch with reality.
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Phil (David Caruso): A chain-smoking ex who delivers every line like he’s auditioning for a “World’s Angriest Man” competition. He’s the guy who tells you to “wake up” but probably couldn’t wake himself from a nap with a marching band.
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Mike (Stephen Gevedon): A law school dropout turned asbestos scrubber. Instead of doing his actual job, he spends most of the film listening to creepy therapy tapes. It’s like if your coworker on a construction site decided to binge true crime podcasts instead of lifting drywall.
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Hank (Josh Lucas): Gambling addict, cocky, and doomed the second he smirked on screen. His subplot revolves around stealing silver coins from the asylum’s crematorium because apparently robbing the dead is always a smart career move.
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Jeff (Brendan Sexton III): Gordon’s nephew, who’s afraid of the dark. Which is excellent since he’s working in a power-grid-eating mental hospital basement. OSHA would like a word.
Watching this crew unravel is like watching a football team where everyone’s secretly rooting for the other side.
The Tapes: Your New Favorite Podcast from Hell
The real spine of Session 9 isn’t the asbestos, or the lurking shadows, or even Gordon’s slow-motion breakdown. It’s Mary Hobbes, a patient with dissociative identity disorder whose nine recorded therapy sessions are found on a dusty shelf. Each tape is creepier than the last, as Mary’s alter egos emerge: the childlike “Princess,” the protective “Billy,” and finally “Simon,” whose voice sounds like someone gargling despair.
By the ninth session, Simon casually admits to murder, delivering the line: “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.” It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to stop listening—and also the kind of thing that makes you absolutely keep listening, because humans are dumb like that.
Slow Burn, Then Flash Fire
What makes Session 9 brilliant (and bleakly funny) is how little it has to do to scare you. There are no monsters leaping out of the dark. The scares come from the peeling wallpaper, the uncomfortable silences, and the creeping sense that these men are disintegrating just as quickly as the asbestos around them. It’s workplace horror, but instead of a toxic boss, you get a literal toxic building and the faint possibility that you might kill your coworker with a lobotomy pick.
And then the screws finally pop loose. Hank disappears, Jeff gets trapped in the dark like a Scooby-Doo reject, Mike is still hiding with his tapes like they’re crack, and Gordon… well, Gordon proves that hearing voices isn’t just a minor occupational hazard. When the truth about his wife, baby, and poor dog spills out, it’s not just horrifying—it’s gut-punch sad. And the kicker? The asylum saw it coming before he did.
Atmosphere So Thick You Could Asbestos It
The genius here is restraint. The film doesn’t throw CGI specters at you. Instead, it suffocates you with silence, long hallways, and the nagging sense that you might actually be smelling mold through the screen. Every frame looks like it’s decaying. The color palette is as cheerful as a tax audit, the lighting is grim enough to make the sun seem like a myth, and the sound design makes even footsteps feel accusatory.
By the time the killings actually start, you’re so unnerved you’d swear a hallway just looked at you funny.
Caruso’s Curtain Call
Special mention must go to David Caruso, who delivers one of cinema’s great underappreciated moments. When he tells Gordon to “wake up,” it’s not just a line. It’s a mantra for the whole movie. Wake up from the delusion, wake up from denial, wake up from thinking this asbestos gig was ever going to end with a paycheck. Too bad Gordon hears voices louder than Caruso’s cigarette rasp.
The Ending: Simon Says, You Lose
The film closes with Gordon wandering the asylum, realizing—or maybe just imagining—that he has killed everyone. His attempts to call home and apologize to his wife are agonizing because we know she’s not picking up. And then Mary’s tape delivers the final mic drop:
Doctor: “Where do you live, Simon?”
Simon: “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”
It’s one of those rare horror endings that doesn’t just scare you in the moment. It crawls inside your head, rents a room, and starts redecorating.
Why It Works (and Why It’s Funny in the Worst Way)
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It’s a horror movie where asbestos is as deadly as the ghost.
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The villain isn’t some CGI monster but the very human combination of guilt, madness, and poor life choices.
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Half the scares come from men just… not doing their jobs. (“Mike, could you stop listening to murder tapes long enough to scrape some asbestos? No? Great.”)
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It’s one of the few horror films where the building itself feels like it’s laughing at you. And it’s winning.
Final Thoughts
Session 9 is the rare horror movie that makes you feel like you’ve actually spent a week inside an abandoned asylum—and not in the fun, “ghost tour with night vision goggles” way. More in the “my soul has mildew now” way. It’s bleak, brilliant, and unforgettable, like The Shining if it had been outsourced to a New England asbestos crew.
The humor is dark, sure, but it’s there: in the absurdity of men slowly falling apart while pretending everything’s fine, in the audacity of thinking you can clean Danvers in one week, and in the irony of Simon’s final line.
Because in the end, Simon doesn’t just live in the weak and the wounded. He lives in us—for sitting through this movie and realizing the real horror is that we’d probably still take that job if the money was right.
