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Brad Anderson is developing a prequel to Session 9, and it is called Session 1. He said so out loud at a 25th anniversary screening of the film at Mass Mini Con, during a Q&A alongside co-writer and co-star Stephen Gevedon.
“Would that be of interest? To see a movie that’s about the origin story?” Anderson asked the room. “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.”
Broke Horror Fan’s Alex DiVincenzo reported the remarks first. Bloody Disgusting and Rue Morgue both carried them.
It Is Mary Hobbes’s Story
“It’s really about the origin story of Mary Hobbes, the young girl in the movie… the woman who has the multiple personality disorder,” Anderson said. “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.”
Why That Is a Strange and Good Idea
Mary Hobbes never appears in Session 9. She is a voice on reel-to-reel tape, performed by Jurian Hughes, buried in a box of recorded therapy sessions that Mike (Gevedon) turns up while his asbestos crew strips the abandoned Danvers State Hospital. He keeps going back to them. Her alters answer the doctor one at a time, and the last one to speak is the reason the film has the title it has.
Building an entire feature out of the voice on the tape is a real swing. It is also the one thing the first film deliberately withheld, which is a decent argument for going and getting it.
Focus Has Already Passed Once
This is not a new idea. Anderson and Gevedon told Fangoria in 2021, around the film’s 20th anniversary, that they had written a full treatment and taken it to Focus Features, which holds the rights. Focus passed. Anderson said at the time that there was no ill will, and characterized the studio’s position as a blanket one: it does not make prequels or sequels to the properties it owns.
What is different in 2026 is that he is saying it to a room full of people and asking them whether they want it.
About That Building
Part of why Session 9 still gets talked about is that Anderson did not build anything. He shot inside the real Danvers State Hospital in the fall of 2000, a Kirkbride-plan asylum that had closed in 1992 and sat empty afterward. The place had a horror pedigree before the crew ever got there: it is widely cited as the model for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium, which is where DC Comics got Arkham Asylum.
The building did not survive its own afterlife. AvalonBay Communities bought the site in 2005 and demolition began in January 2006, with the Kirkbride’s interior gutted and its brick face kept as a shell around new apartments. In April 2007 a fire tore through four of those buildings, the smoke was visible from Boston, and the surviving Kirkbride spires caught. What stands today is that shell, parts of the D and G wards, the cemeteries, and a replica tower.
Whatever Session 1 turns out to be, it cannot be shot where the first one was.
What Is Actually Confirmed
A pitch and a title. No distributor, no greenlight, no cast, no schedule. Session 9 cost roughly $1.5 million and took $378,176 in U.S. theaters in 2001, which is both the problem and the point — it was not a hit, it became a cult object anyway, and the people who love it have been waiting a long time for anybody to go back down that hallway.