Session 9 (2001)

Psychological Horror Movies

Source: IMDB.

When I was still a kid, dwelling in a suburb in Northern New Jersey, I lived near a local mom & pop store. Think 7-11 in the early 1980s, except this place also sold soda pop and light snacks that you could eat at a counter with swivel stools.

One day I went in. I might have been in high school. One of the guys sitting at the counter looked at my hands. I don’t recall if he grabbed them. He told me I had soft hands and I’d never done a real day’s work in my life. Just like Quint in Jaws.

That exchange taught me many things. Mainly, it taught me not to go into that store anymore. It also taught me that I was marked as a weakling. Bad posture. Using too many big words. High-pitched voice. Can’t make direct eye contact. Pulling up your pants wrong. Not being enough of a man.

Gordon, the main character of Session 9, is a blue collar guy. When the film starts, he’s held together by spit and baling wire. His business is about to go under. He can’t sleep, because he’s a new father and the baby is colicky.

Gordon runs an asbestos removal company. He has just underbid on a contract to clean up an abandoned mental asylum. He’s made promises, to both the bidder and his workers, that he cannot keep.

Gordon has no outlet for his feelings. He would never try talk therapy or psych drugs, because that’s for rich people, women, and weaklings. A waste of valuable time and money.

He can’t go the self-medication route, either. Alcohol, sex, gambling, whatever. He’s a responsible father with a business to run. He has to man up, a phrase I adore, and deal with it. And that’s what he does. Until, well…

Gordon’s Number Two is Phil, who seems to be better put together. He’s in a tough spot, also. Gordon is captain of a sinking ship, and Phil knows it. I have no idea if there really is a $10,000 bonus, like Gordon claims, but I doubt it. I suspect Phil doubts it, also.

Oh, and Phil’s ex is fucking Hank, another member of the crew. Gordon won’t let him fire Hank, so Phil has to eat crow every day he goes to work, because Hank sure does rub it in.

Phil has his own problems. That might explain his reaction when Gordon tells him he hit his wife and now he’s living in a motel. That’s Gordon’s version, anyway. We never get to hear hers.

Gordon insists it was an accident. A pot of boiling pasta water fell on his leg, and he snapped. Now Gordon is having trouble dealing with what he’s done, and he needs someone to talk to. Not to excuse his actions, because Gordon will have to live with that, but to get it off his chest.

Phil’s reaction is to shrug and tell Gordon to deal with it, the mantra of manly men everywhere. Earlier in the film, Phil told Gordon that if he needed to talk, he was there for him. Phil is full of shit. He tells another crew member that Gordon is a weakling (the word he uses is liability).

The asylum is a Gothic building that is old and creepy. We don’t see anything, which makes it creepier. The ghosts, and there is at least one, are auditory. Crew member Mike, who is thinking of returning to law school, starts listening to the tapes he ‘accidentally’ finds of therapy sessions with a young woman named Mary, who has dissociative identity disorder.

Except Mary doesn’t have dissociative identity disorder. Mary is possessed by a spirit/demon named Simon. Does Simon even exist? Didn’t I just debunk this very topic in my Psycho essay?

That was then, this is now. Simon is real. He speaks to Gordon at the start of the movie, and it’s the same voice we hear on the therapy tapes. Gordon leans against the grave of Simon’s last host when he calls his wife begging for forgiveness, something she can never grant.

The circumstances of Simon’s emergence, in the past and the present, are almost identical. Simon’s hosts repress their memories of their actions. In his own words, Simon lives in the weak and the wounded.

Gordon qualifies. But not for the reasons Phil, who also qualifies, thinks. People who can’t bend are brittle. They will break if you hit them right. It doesn’t even have to be hard, you just need to know where to place the punch.

I get how the crew of Session 9 feels. Working shit jobs grinds you down. It changes your outlook on life. I worked as a janitorial assistant at an apartment complex and the receiving area of a bookstore for a decade.

Jobs like that are awful. They are repetitive and mind-numbing. The pay always sucks. That being said, I have nothing in common with Gordon’s team. If we met, I wouldn’t like them and they wouldn’t like me.

Asbestos removal is dangerous. One of the interesting things about this movie is watching the crew, who are aware of the health hazards of asbestos, not wear masks in the asylum. They wear them when they’re working, and take them off during breaks.

If it was me, I’d wear a mask at all times. You never know what might be floating around.

But, then again, I’ve never done a real day’s work in my life.