Black Treacle Magazine (Issue 3) Read Free Page B

tarot reader and insurance claims handler before having the
good fortune to be able to write full-time. She loves Las Vegas,
vampire films and good Scotch whisky. Find details of her stories
and books at www.transientcactus.co.uk and find her on twitter @MichelleAnnKing .
     
     
Waking Up from the American Dream:
The Horror of Memory in Brad Anderson’s Session 9
    David
Annandale
     
    Memory plays a
crucial role in many a horror narrative. In memory can lie, for
instance, the key to defeating the evil. “You will remember what
your father forgot” (King 422), Danny is told in Stephen King’s The Shining . And he does: in the nick of time he remembers
the boiler (which, untended, will explode) and thus deflects his
possessed father’s murderous rampage. Often, memory’s unlocking of
a mystery leads only to further danger (to Jessica Harper’s dismay,
as she discovers the witches’ secret lair in Dario Argento’s Suspiria ), or the resolution arrives too late to do any good
(and so David Hemmings realizes who the murderer is in the split
second before she attacks him in Argento’s Deep Red ). In Session 9 , written by Steve Gevedon and Brad Anderson, and
directed by Anderson, memory is itself the horror, and so it is
repressed. The effects of that repression, however, are still more
horror. This is the despairing dynamic of the film: false dreams
are lethal, but to wake up from them is to confront a reality no
less destructive. The diagnosis, however, leaves the viewers with
the responsibility to defang that terrible reality.
    Session
9 takes place in the abandoned Danvers State Psychiatric
Hospital. The film was shot at the actual facility, and a more
sinister pile of 19th -Century brickwork would be difficult to
imagine. A hazardous material disposal team is tasked with clearing
the gargantuan asylum of asbestos. Owner of the Hazmat Elimination
Company is Gordon (Peter Mullan). He needs the contract
desperately, or his company is going to go under, and so promises
to do in one week a job that should really take three to do safely.
He and his wife Wendy have a newborn, Emma, who has had an ear
infection for some time, and Gordon is clearly exhausted and
worried from the moment we first see him. Meanwhile, Mike (Steve
Gevedon) stumbles across old archives in the basement of the
asylum. In one box he finds a collection of reel-to-reel tapes of
the psychiatric sessions of Mary Hobbes, and Mike rapidly becomes
obsessed with listening to the recordings. Mary suffers from
Multiple Personality Disorder. She has three alters: the childlike
Princess, the watchful Billy, and Simon, a presence the other two
personalities greatly fear.
    Shortly before
Mike makes his discovery, the question of why the asylum shut down
arises. Mike explains what happened, and this is where the film’s
central concern with memory becomes clear.
     
    MIKE
    Patricia
Willard. She was committed here in the 1970s by her parents. Manic
depression, that sort of thing. Typical adolescent crap. But in the
1980s, this new kind of therapy took off: Repressed Memory Therapy.
See, these shrinks figured that, with these new techniques they’d
designed, they could release hidden memories of traumatic events in
your life. Rape, incest. So Patricia, with the help of her doctors,
recalls that when she was ten, her father raped her. But not once.
No, he’d do it three times a week. And he didn’t just rape her. He
came into her room at night, wearing a black robe. He’d take her
and drive her to a wooded area where her grandparents are her
mother were. And they all had black robes on. They’d take them off
and group orgies would ensue. And then, they’d bring out the
newborn. She was forced to watch as her mother would cut this
baby’s heart out with a stone dagger. She’d drink the blood. Others
would eat the flesh. Her grandfather her father would fuck her
repeatedly. She was forced to have abortions and they’d cook the
aborted