October 13th, 2013 
Drew Caruso 
Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of October, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.
31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring daily feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home. If you have a suggestion, contact us and we may include your favorite scarefest in an upcoming column!
Day 13: Session 9 (2001)
“The human mind is extremely susceptible to hallucination,” rings Professor Richard Dawkins’ words as he dangerously walks the line of Christian blasphemy. Analogous to the inheritably psycho-revealing film Session 9, the vastness and depths of the human mind is investigated. What makes Session 9 stand out against its fellow brethren of horror films, to me, is its actuality. Being from Massachusetts, I can tell you that the story’s setting, the Danvers State Hospital, is a very real and frightening place. Said to be the birthplace of frontal lobe lobotomy, many high-schoolers in Massachusetts make a trek out to the site’s remains. For those who wish to garner a sense of setting for the grounds, the popular Batman video game Arkham Asylum was heavily inspired by the Danvers State Hospital.
The brain and nervous system are amazing pieces of anatomical biology, and the human brain is a statue of millions of years of perfecting evolutionary biology. Along with our opposable thumbs, the brain is what makes humans the leaders of this biosphere we call Earth, but, not so fast, as it can also be our biggest defeat. With the imbalance and subsequent equilibrium of chemical neurotransmitters in our brain, we have striking, and sometimes debilitating emotions.
This is what I particularly enjoy about Session 9 over others. Examining the psychological aspects of evil and cruelty in our very real world, not everything is love and happiness. What happens when a dog goes astray? Is there a way to describe such a feeling when you know evil has been confined around you? A chilling investigation into the nonfictional realm of mental instability, Session 9 asks these questions as a team of asbestos removal workers attempt to work in the abandoned mental hospital, finding remnants of the building’s past horrors.
With one character’s finding of an orbitoclast, which was the tool used by doctors to carry out lobotomies, there is a very real calling to the early development and treatment of psychosis. What is essentially a finely tuned ice pick (before the invention of orbitoclasts, a lobotomy was called an “ice pick lobotomy”) the orbitoclast is inserted through the patient’s eye socket and lodged forward to the brain, disrupting communications of the prefrontal cortex with the rest of the brain. With such minimal knowledge on how the procedure worked, the outcomes were various. Some patients were changed into a lethargic, vegetative state, most famously Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy.
Within the context of the story, we meet the allusive Simon, a single arrangement of a personality found within therapy tapes left behind of the enigmatic, multiple personality patient, Mary. Synonymous to evil, (I will let you piece together your own puzzle regarding other aspects of the story) Simon is an entity that to me, is more frightening than a ghost popping out behind a door, or a bloody figure waiting to be seen in the bathroom mirror. Simon is real. Simon could be you, or it could be me. There is a very fine line that keeps us humans from our barbaric, natural, immoral ways. Never forget that that line is but a mere balance of chemicals floating around in your head, just waiting for an event to set us back to our beginnings. Walking, at times is too difficult, sometimes we must crawl.
If you are looking for a break from the typical Halloween horror show, try out Session 9. If it’s not for you, remember to check back here daily for a wonderful plethora of scare-tastic films to wet your sadistic palate.
Editorial written by: Andrew Caruso — Follow him on Twitter
Last year’s Day 13 film: Drag Me To Hell
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