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kaiz! And happy belated birthday to willow_wode--and probably more. I suck at birthdays.
I saw a movie. Yeah, not the most exciting thing, but it was a movie I keep thinking about and that's exciting to me. It was one of those "Since Netflix charges me a flat fee I can stick stuff on my queue that sounds vaguely interesting." I did that with two movies at the same time, and one sucked ("The Nameless") and the other...well, I am really wary about recommending movies, especially horror movies, because they're so subjective. You never know what's going to creep you out or just bore you. But I quite liked this one--Session 9. This is odd because there were a lot of things as I was watching the movie that made me think it wasn't that good. For instance, I'm not really into slasher movies and this movie has a slasher element. The killings weren’t very interesting to me, nor was the big reveal a big surprise. But I think what I like about the movie is that the reveal and the killings weren’t, imo, the point.
First, the movie is great because of the setting: Danvers State Asylum. It's been torn down since the movie was made, which is a shame because they probably could have made money giving tours and billing it as the creepiest place on the planet. It's like they built the thing and spent 100 years making it perfect for a horror movie. Danvers was a mental asylum built in the nineteenth century with an aim towards providing compassionate, enlightened care for the mentally ill. It's set on a beautiful hill in Massachusetts, and it's this massive gothic structure that looks, as Paul Guilfoyle says in the movie, like a giant bat. Only very quickly it became nightmarishly overcrowded and not so compassionate.
At the time the movie was made in 2001 it was abandoned and condemned, but just walking through it is like taking a tour of the horrors of mental asylums: here's where they did the hydro-therapy--imagine the patient soaking in freezing water under this ugly mural of a swan on the wall! Here's where they perfected the frontal lobotomy (done at Danvers!). Here's the morgue. Here's the cemetery full of patients identified only by their numbers. Here's the underground tunnels where they transported people in the winter--note the grate directing staff to use one side of the tunnel and patients to use the other--and watch the character choose accordingly. Underneath those tunnels are steam tunnels--even closer to hell! Here's a nice wooden restraint chair sitting in a shaft of light in "Ward A," aka "The Snake Pit"--the place where the scariest patients go even though it’s got pictures of horsies on the walls. Oh, and don't miss the "seclusions," those rooms with bars on the windows. Apparently in the 70s it was popular to have patients paper their rooms with magazine collages, apparently just so that 25 years later you could have faded 1970s advertisements along with the peeling paint to make it all the more creepy.
The filmmakers didn't even have to make sets. They mostly used what they found. Anyway, the basic story is that there's this crew of 5 guys who outbid the competition (by promising impossible speed) to remove the asbestos from the building, which is being renovated. Over the week, which is marked by Shining-type announcements of time, they all become affected by the place. One member of the crew may be more vulnerable than others to the, uh, "vibe" of the place. Perhaps even before they start work...
I went and read a bunch of reviews of the movie after I watched it, and I thought a lot of them missed the mark. Some pointed out the things that were just mediocre about the movie and didn't see anything else to it. Others, though, seemed to miss the point. First, they seemed to demand that different elements of the movie tie together in a linear way, as if this would make it more satisfying. Many of those same reviews claimed that the way the movie did it, with those elements not tying together in a literal way, made no sense.
That’s just incorrect. It does make sense. The story is actually pretty straightforward. It's just these reviews seemed to avoid what I thought was the central idea of the movie, which was not some specific mystery, but an idea about "madness"--the literary kind that's less a clinical illness and more a state of mind anyone could succumb to in the right circumstances. One of the characters, Mike, is a law school drop out who at one point mentions that the insanity defense never works because most people are cognizant when they kill--killing implies motive. Ironically some of the negative reviews I read were frustrated by the fact that they couldn't understand "the killer's motive." It's ironic because the movie seems to literally be about those few killings that have no rational motive--the times when people just lose it and kill people they wouldn't normally want to kill.
Several of the men on the crew find things in the hospital that draw them. One who dreams of winning the lottery or being a gambler finds a cache of 19th century valuables stashed behind a brick in the morgue--he's like the perfect heir to whatever sleazy morgue attendant squirreled those things away years before. Mike discovers a box marked "evidence" and begins listening to tapes of a patient, Mary Hobbes, who is buried in the graveyard.
This impulse of violent madness is personified in the movie--or not so much personified but given a voice--in a character named Simon, who is an alternate personality of Mary Hobbes. Horror movies don't use sound often enough for my liking, but Session 9 is all about sound. (Not since The Exorcist has a movie been so much about sound.) Nature sounds--geese, birds, bugs; Mechanical sounds--the generator, cars, machinery. And mostly disembodied voices, whether from nowhere (hallucinations?), over walkie-talkies or in the tapes Mike hears (carefully distorted like old reel-to-reels would be). Mary Hobbes had multiple personalities, admittedly a cliché. But more effective, imo, because we don't have to see Mary with her Disassociative Disorder. We just hear her sessions with her doctor and "the Princess" (a little girl), Billy (who sounds like a tiny Confederate drummer boy just returned from the Battle of Bull Run--I loved Billy) and Simon, the "hidden alter" who only "wakes up" for the final session 9.
What I felt raised Session 9 above the level of any slasher movie was the imo ambiguous attitude the film has towards Simon, who is kind of a personification of madness, the part of insanity that can't really be analyzed and understood logically. In reading about Disassociative Disorder the filmmakers said they learned some people feel their personalities each "live" in different parts of the body. Princess lives in the tongue, Billy in the eyes. Where Simon lives is only revealed at the end, but significantly his "home" is far more universal. Not only that, but it has a definite connection to class. These men are under stress because their job is dangerous and difficult. Just as the patients of Danvers went there (or returned there after it was closed) because they had nowhere else to go, these men are forced to go there to support themselves, breathing in asbestos and madness that anyone "not nuts" would avoid.
Like I said, I hesitate to recommend stuff like this because you never know what's going to push peoples' buttons with horror movies. It's possible another person would watch this movie and think it was just a stupid slasher flick that exploited the real horror of the patients at Danvers for a good setting. But I don't know. What stuck with me after watching it was actually a real sadness about the place and the people there, and the idea that their insanity was a real part of the human condition.
Oh, and I also thought the performances were all very good--again some criticism disagreed. The guys are Peter Mullen, David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon (co-writer) and Brendon Sexton III.
Probably this long meditation is of interest to nobody but me--unless someone else has seen this and liked it!
kaiz! And happy belated birthday to willow_wode--and probably more. I suck at birthdays.I saw a movie. Yeah, not the most exciting thing, but it was a movie I keep thinking about and that's exciting to me. It was one of those "Since Netflix charges me a flat fee I can stick stuff on my queue that sounds vaguely interesting." I did that with two movies at the same time, and one sucked ("The Nameless") and the other...well, I am really wary about recommending movies, especially horror movies, because they're so subjective. You never know what's going to creep you out or just bore you. But I quite liked this one--Session 9. This is odd because there were a lot of things as I was watching the movie that made me think it wasn't that good. For instance, I'm not really into slasher movies and this movie has a slasher element. The killings weren’t very interesting to me, nor was the big reveal a big surprise. But I think what I like about the movie is that the reveal and the killings weren’t, imo, the point.
First, the movie is great because of the setting: Danvers State Asylum. It's been torn down since the movie was made, which is a shame because they probably could have made money giving tours and billing it as the creepiest place on the planet. It's like they built the thing and spent 100 years making it perfect for a horror movie. Danvers was a mental asylum built in the nineteenth century with an aim towards providing compassionate, enlightened care for the mentally ill. It's set on a beautiful hill in Massachusetts, and it's this massive gothic structure that looks, as Paul Guilfoyle says in the movie, like a giant bat. Only very quickly it became nightmarishly overcrowded and not so compassionate.
At the time the movie was made in 2001 it was abandoned and condemned, but just walking through it is like taking a tour of the horrors of mental asylums: here's where they did the hydro-therapy--imagine the patient soaking in freezing water under this ugly mural of a swan on the wall! Here's where they perfected the frontal lobotomy (done at Danvers!). Here's the morgue. Here's the cemetery full of patients identified only by their numbers. Here's the underground tunnels where they transported people in the winter--note the grate directing staff to use one side of the tunnel and patients to use the other--and watch the character choose accordingly. Underneath those tunnels are steam tunnels--even closer to hell! Here's a nice wooden restraint chair sitting in a shaft of light in "Ward A," aka "The Snake Pit"--the place where the scariest patients go even though it’s got pictures of horsies on the walls. Oh, and don't miss the "seclusions," those rooms with bars on the windows. Apparently in the 70s it was popular to have patients paper their rooms with magazine collages, apparently just so that 25 years later you could have faded 1970s advertisements along with the peeling paint to make it all the more creepy.
The filmmakers didn't even have to make sets. They mostly used what they found. Anyway, the basic story is that there's this crew of 5 guys who outbid the competition (by promising impossible speed) to remove the asbestos from the building, which is being renovated. Over the week, which is marked by Shining-type announcements of time, they all become affected by the place. One member of the crew may be more vulnerable than others to the, uh, "vibe" of the place. Perhaps even before they start work...
I went and read a bunch of reviews of the movie after I watched it, and I thought a lot of them missed the mark. Some pointed out the things that were just mediocre about the movie and didn't see anything else to it. Others, though, seemed to miss the point. First, they seemed to demand that different elements of the movie tie together in a linear way, as if this would make it more satisfying. Many of those same reviews claimed that the way the movie did it, with those elements not tying together in a literal way, made no sense.
That’s just incorrect. It does make sense. The story is actually pretty straightforward. It's just these reviews seemed to avoid what I thought was the central idea of the movie, which was not some specific mystery, but an idea about "madness"--the literary kind that's less a clinical illness and more a state of mind anyone could succumb to in the right circumstances. One of the characters, Mike, is a law school drop out who at one point mentions that the insanity defense never works because most people are cognizant when they kill--killing implies motive. Ironically some of the negative reviews I read were frustrated by the fact that they couldn't understand "the killer's motive." It's ironic because the movie seems to literally be about those few killings that have no rational motive--the times when people just lose it and kill people they wouldn't normally want to kill.
Several of the men on the crew find things in the hospital that draw them. One who dreams of winning the lottery or being a gambler finds a cache of 19th century valuables stashed behind a brick in the morgue--he's like the perfect heir to whatever sleazy morgue attendant squirreled those things away years before. Mike discovers a box marked "evidence" and begins listening to tapes of a patient, Mary Hobbes, who is buried in the graveyard.
This impulse of violent madness is personified in the movie--or not so much personified but given a voice--in a character named Simon, who is an alternate personality of Mary Hobbes. Horror movies don't use sound often enough for my liking, but Session 9 is all about sound. (Not since The Exorcist has a movie been so much about sound.) Nature sounds--geese, birds, bugs; Mechanical sounds--the generator, cars, machinery. And mostly disembodied voices, whether from nowhere (hallucinations?), over walkie-talkies or in the tapes Mike hears (carefully distorted like old reel-to-reels would be). Mary Hobbes had multiple personalities, admittedly a cliché. But more effective, imo, because we don't have to see Mary with her Disassociative Disorder. We just hear her sessions with her doctor and "the Princess" (a little girl), Billy (who sounds like a tiny Confederate drummer boy just returned from the Battle of Bull Run--I loved Billy) and Simon, the "hidden alter" who only "wakes up" for the final session 9.
What I felt raised Session 9 above the level of any slasher movie was the imo ambiguous attitude the film has towards Simon, who is kind of a personification of madness, the part of insanity that can't really be analyzed and understood logically. In reading about Disassociative Disorder the filmmakers said they learned some people feel their personalities each "live" in different parts of the body. Princess lives in the tongue, Billy in the eyes. Where Simon lives is only revealed at the end, but significantly his "home" is far more universal. Not only that, but it has a definite connection to class. These men are under stress because their job is dangerous and difficult. Just as the patients of Danvers went there (or returned there after it was closed) because they had nowhere else to go, these men are forced to go there to support themselves, breathing in asbestos and madness that anyone "not nuts" would avoid.
Like I said, I hesitate to recommend stuff like this because you never know what's going to push peoples' buttons with horror movies. It's possible another person would watch this movie and think it was just a stupid slasher flick that exploited the real horror of the patients at Danvers for a good setting. But I don't know. What stuck with me after watching it was actually a real sadness about the place and the people there, and the idea that their insanity was a real part of the human condition.
Oh, and I also thought the performances were all very good--again some criticism disagreed. The guys are Peter Mullen, David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon (co-writer) and Brendon Sexton III.
Probably this long meditation is of interest to nobody but me--unless someone else has seen this and liked it!
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breathing in asbestos and madness that anyone "not nuts" would avoid
So true!
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As far as those reviews go... *rolls eyes*
(I'd check IMDB for the date it was made, etc. Fact stuff.)
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How ~*~*~SUPER WEIRD~*~*~!!1
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Bizarrely, the first time I watched it I must have accidentally hit a button and skipped a large part of it. I thought it was super short and why didn't they ever show us that guy that showed up later...? Then I went to watch the director's commentary and realized there was like a whole day of action I'd somehow skipped over--not to mention half the tour!
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And really, it's almost worth it just to see that setting, so it's all good.:-)
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