Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.
I like good horror movies. I don’t like it when I see the scare coming from a mile away, because what happens might be disturbing or disgusting or nasty, but it’s rarely scary. In many respects, horror movies are the most stylized genre of film. Certain moments are set up in certain ways to elicit a certain reaction from the audience. Since the desired reaction is, in general, fear, there are specific horror movie tropes that get repeated. I enjoy it greatly when a film plays with those tropes and either does things in a new way or does things the old way with a different result. The real issue is that so many of these tropes are so ingrained in the genre that tweaking just one or two of them is often seen as a win or as masterful filmmaking. Session 9 tweaks a few horror movie ideas, but it also falls into a lot of the same pitfalls. That’s both encouraging and disappointing.
In that respect, it reminds me a lot of Paranormal Activity. The two films have very little outside of genre in common, but there is a similarity at the core. Both of them are more or less movies about really dumb characters by really smart filmmakers. Director Brad Anderson sets up some nice scares that don’t come through. Rather than being disappointing, these serve to increase the tension in those scenes. Sadly, those scenes also rely on one or more characters being painfully stupid to be in the situation in the first place.
