Session 9 turned 25 this year, and its director spent part of the anniversary tour pitching the sequel nobody’s greenlit.
At a screening and Q&A tied to the film’s 25th anniversary at Mass Mini Con, Brad Anderson told the crowd he and Session 9 co-writer Stephen Gevedon have been developing a prequel called Session 1, built around the origin of Mary Hobbes — the multiple-personality patient whose recorded therapy sessions form the psychological spine of the original film.
“It’s really about the origin story of Mary Hobbes,” Anderson said, describing a story that would dramatize “her life, growing up… and what happened to her and how she got possessed. And how she killed her family.”
His remarks were first relayed via social media by Broke Horror Fan‘s Alex DiVincenzo and picked up from there by Bloody Disgusting; Rue Morgue hasn’t independently confirmed further specifics beyond what Anderson said from the stage.
Anderson and Gevedon have been floating some version of this prequel for years — a report dating back to 2021 indicated the pair had already written a full treatment and taken it to Focus Features, which holds the Session 9 rights and, at the time, maintained a standing policy against sequels or prequels to its library titles. The studio passed, according to Anderson, despite the project reportedly requiring no financial investment from them. Whether that door has reopened in the years since is unclear; nothing said at Mass Mini Con indicates Session 1 currently has a distributor, a greenlight, or a production timeline. What it clearly still has is a director who hasn’t stopped believing in it.
That persistence says something about Session 9‘s afterlife. Shot largely inside the real, decommissioned Danvers State Hospital and starring Peter Mullan, David Caruso, and Gevedon himself, the film built dread out of a soundtrack of degraded therapy-session audiotape rather than jump scares — and it’s spent a quarter-century quietly picking up converts who rank it among the sharpest American horror films of its decade. A prequel courts the risk of explaining a mystery the original left sealed for a reason. But Anderson’s pitch, at least as described from the stage, sounds less interested in solving Mary Hobbes than in walking into the dark alongside her, one session at a time.
For now, Session 1 remains exactly what it’s been for roughly five years: an idea its own director can’t stop pitching at every opportunity he gets. Rue Morgue will keep watching to see if that ever changes.
