SESSION 9 Director Brad Anderson Has an Idea for a Prequel Film Titled SESSION 1
Director Brad Anderson’s 2001 movie Session 9 is one of my favorite horror films, and it’s completely underrated! I haven’t met a lot of people who have seen this movie, and whenever that happens I make an effort to make sure they watch it, and when they do, most of the time they love it. So, if any of you haven’t watched Session 9 yet, check it out!
If you have seen it, you might be excited to learn that Anderson and co-writer Stephen Gevedon have an idea for a prequel film that they’d like to make. With the film celebrating its 20th anniversary, Anderson sat down with FANGORIA to discuss the movie.
Session 9 tells the story of a group of asbestos removal workers who land a job at the abandoned Danvers insane asylum. They have to work quickly to remove the asbestos, and as things play out emotions are running high, they working under a lot of pressure, things get insanely tense, and strange things start to happen. All of this happens in the “complex of buildings that 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...”
The film stars David Caruso (CSI: Miami), Brendan Sexton III (Boys Don’t Cry), Josh Lucas (Ford v. Ferrari), Peter Mullan (Braveheart, War Horse, Top of the Lake), and Gevedon also has a role in the movie.
When talking about the film and its audience Anderson said, “It’s a kind of movie that’s specific to a type of viewer, one that’s looking for [what’d now be considered] ‘elevated horror’.” The whole point was to do something different in the horror genre, “something that genuinely gets under your skin and has that sense of dread that we were after, something creepy.” It definitely succeeds in that which is why I like the film so much!
Anderson then went on to share his thoughts on his prequel idea, which he calls Session 1. He explains:
“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.”
I would absolutely love to see this story brought to life! Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’ll happen. You see, Focus Films owns the rights to Session 9 and they turned down the treatment for Session 1. Apparently, Focus Features’ legal contract states that they won’t make any prequels or sequels to the properties that they own. That just seems ridiculous to me! What a shame. There’s great and creepy story here to be told.