Brad Anderson Reveals He's Developing SESSION 9 Prequel SESSION 1 and It Will Explore the Story of Mary Hobbes
One of horror’s creepiest cult movies may finally be getting the prequel I’ve wanted to see for years.
Director Brad Anderson’s Session 9 is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and Anderson has revealed that he’s actively developing a prequel titled Session 1. Even better, the movie would dig into the disturbing history of Mary Hobbes and reveal exactly what happened to her before the events we know from Session 9.
Anderson shared the news during a special 25th anniversary screening of Session 9 at Mass Mini Con, where he was joined for a Q&A by co-writer and actor Stephen Gevedon.
During the event, Anderson explained that he and Gevedon have been working on an idea for Session 1 and already have a pitch for the project.
“Would that be of interest? To see a movie that’s about the origin story?” Anderson asked the crowd. “So we’ve been toying with this for a while.
“But we have a pitch for a movie that’s sort of a prequel to [Session 9]. It’s called Session 1. It’s really about the origin story of Mary Hobbes, the young girl in the movie… the woman who has the multiple personality disorder.”
That’s exactly the corner of this story I’d want a Session 9 prequel to explore. Mary’s recorded therapy sessions are among the most unsettling and haunting elements of the original film, and there’s a lot about her past that Anderson could dig into.
He went on to reveal when Session 1 would take place and just how dark Mary’s story gets, saying: “It’s about her life, growing up in the late ’60s in Boston, and what happened to her and how she got possessed.
“And how she killed her family. I’m saying that because we’re trying to get that movie off the ground and we think there’s an audience for that.”
Yeah, I’m part of that audience. Released in 2001, Session 9 follows a hazardous materials crew brought in to clean out an abandoned mental hospital with a horrific past.
As the crew works through the building, disturbing discoveries begin surfacing and tensions between the men intensify. Paranoia, psychological deterioration, and the institution’s history start bleeding together until it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where the real horror is coming from.
The movie didn’t exactly explode when it first arrived in theaters, but it eventually found its audience and became a genuine horror cult classic. I was a very unique horror film for its time.
I’m a huge fan of Session 9. It’s one of my favorite horror movies, and I’ve always thought Mary Hobbes was the perfect character to build a prequel around. Her story leaves plenty of disturbing territory to explore, with what happened to her, her family, and the events that eventually led to those horrifying recordings.
Anderson previously shared: “The general gist of the story was that it’d be about Mary Hobbes, the character in the original movie who’s on the tapes and who has these alternate personalities and who would ultimately realize she killed her family on Christmas Day.
“Here we’d learn the entire Mary Hobbes story — how she went from being a fairly normal 12-year-old girl in 1959 and ’58 to slaughtering her whole family, and why. Our story was gonna be kind of a portrait of madness through the eyes and the lens of that little girl in the late ’50s, early ‘60s.
“It’s called Session 1. The movie ended with the first session, which would then become a series of sessions that this girl would go through, and ultimately would lead to Session 9.”
This would be an awesome prequel. Session 1 isn’t officially moving forward yet, but Anderson and Gevedon have a pitch and are trying to get the project off the ground.
Hopefully somebody gives them the chance to make it happen because after 25 years, I’m absolutely ready to return to the nightmare of Session 9.