I'm More Sane In My Insanity

I'm more sane in my insanity than you'll ever be in your so-called sanity. A friend as good as labelled me as insane around the Saturnalia festival (of Xmas time), which was awfully thoughtful of him. Over the festive period I awaited notice of an appointment from him so that I could put to rest the notion and the friendship - a term I'm using loosely here. I'm in an altered state of mind right now. By that I don't mean that I've taken anything, any substances, I most definitely have not. For as long as I can remember I've been in and out of altered states of mind. That's just me. (Don't put me in a box.) As stated previously, this year is going to be the last year I post on here, so I'll try and make the most of it. I'm going to recover some of my dignity. I'm going to try and be more honest and less blunt. For example, I've found it's easier for a male to say they've got a drug addiction than to admit to having an eating problem. I use the term 'eating problem' for myself when I don't deem it to be as severe of a case as it is for the people who're struggling with institutionally-defined eating disorders. Though it's been difficult, I've dealt with this alone. And I've not had an addiction to drugs, but I have had habits. I consider that to be an important distinction. There's addiction and then there's habitual behaviour. I was just watching Session 9. It's a film I first saw when I was about eleven, rented from a video shop called Choices. It's a film that's affected me on some level, a film I'd say has contributed to my development in someway, a film I once held to be a favourite. I don't know if I'd say it's one of my favourites anymore, but it is one of my favourite horrors and I certainly feel that it's one of the best of its kind. Each time I watch it I take something else away from it. This time I was almost tearful because I felt like I realised which side I'm on. I don't know if one has a choice, if one can turn their life around and change sides, or even if one should want to. For as long as I can remember, that'd be my mid-teens, I've been attracted by the night, the darkness. While the majority of people have gone through life in a daze, I took it further and went exploring the unknown. I wouldn't say I was won over - I've yet to be won over by anything - but I certainly went deeper into it than most others would ever dream of doing. I'm not bragging when I say this, I'm not sure there's anything to brag about, it was a disconcerting experience but one I feel to have been ultimately rewarding. I'm about to undergo regression therapy, not so much for the therapy aspect as for the will to open up further doorways in my psyche in this life, not to help myself but instead to drag up any darkness and fears that are buried in my subconscious. I've been feeling strange today as to begin with I did some of my own 'visualisation' this morning. 'Visualisation' in speech marks because I can't really visualise anything like I used to, not when it's required of me. If it's possible to change from being a predominantly visual learner to an auditory learner then I think that's what happened somewhere along the way. I watched Session 9, watched the featurette as I tend to do after watching the film. I felt as though I've been through all of this before, what's been and what's about to come. I'm romanced by the night while the Spring and early Summer sunlight washes over my pale but marked skin. I just hope that I don't make the same mistakes, because I can almost feel the pain it's going to bring, the regret, the guilt. I know it as if I've felt it before. I was thinking, if one has a predisposition to the sun then naturally that's going to treat them right, that's going to be right for them. The same goes for the moon. The sun wouldn't be for me, that path wouldn't be true, wouldn't be my truth. I was totally shocked and disturbed by the film, far more than usual. In your righteous sanity, my 'dear' friends, you have scorned and scolded me. Moreover, in your blissful ignorance you've caused great suffering unto others; children, women, gentlemen. I wouldn't want to go to where you do. Which leaves me with what? The cover of darkness? The cover of darkness where I can pitifully nurse my wounds. I'm the bad one, the one in the wrong. It's not fair, but then life isn't.

Lou Barlow, 'Choke Chain'
Untrained you never shut up
Needs keep you empty
Freedom spins you out of control
Till someone chokes you with a chain.

Learn to be paranoid
Fear pulls my strings, too
Oh what a lack of trust can do
Poor broken-hearted you.

I'm sorry I hurt you
Please don't leave me on my knees
We had a simple understanding
Didn't we?
Didn't we?
All consumed and convinced as ever
But where were you?
Tease my guilt but please me still
All the others just disgust me
Too simple to trust me
Too dull to engage
Too shallow to please me
It would be so easy to please me.

The Haunted Palace (The Ghosts of Danvers Hospital) (transcription of the Session 9 companion featurette)

David Caruso (Actor): "There's something here. I mean, there's nowhere like this in North America. This is probably the scariest building in the world."

Jeremy Barnard (Photographer): "There's something very human about this place. There's something that's here that's in all of us."

Mike Ramseur (Painter / Author): "It's a heavy-duty place, it's extremely heavy-duty, and it's very psychic, and I think we all in a sense have to protect ourselves."

A. Andy Chulyk (Sculptor): "You know, art and madness has always been connected. Creativity and madness. There's a fine line."

Peter Mullen (Actor): "When we perform in these rooms, it's not difficult to be fucking real because it's creepy."

Brad Anderson (Director, Writer, Editor): "We wrote the script with this actual location in mind."

Mike Ramseur: "The psychotic thought process that went on inside these walls. You can't imagine it."

Peter Mullen: "Don't suggest there was no pain in this place. Don't suggest that this was a lovely little sunny outpost for the inmates, you know, or if you do so, you do so at your peril."

[Title card] Becoming a Snake Pit

Ramseur, pastel: Heavy Metal Entry

Mike Ramseur: "I've done a lot of drawings of Danvers State and beginning about five years ago I began researching the history and writing a history of the place. I've got a number of horror stories that people have told me, and I've got a number of [stories that say] that there was a lot of caring that went on here."

Danvers Hospital closed in 1982 [note: this appears to be incorrect; although Danvers was dismantled throughout the '80s, it wasn't until 1992 that it was officially closed.]

Bodies buried in unmarked graves, just numbers.
After Danvers State Hospital closed in 1992, burial records were lost.
It was a group of former patients (as members of the Danvers State Memorial Committee)
that set out to restore and memorialise the cemeteries in 1998. Their heartfelt dedication was concluded in 2002.
I urge anyone to watch online the short documentary, 'From Numbers to Names'.

Peter Mullen: "Thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people have sat here with their fellow inmates and the old nurse popped around popping pills in their mouths in the '60s, hitting them in the head in the '50s, restraining them on the ground in the '40s, and these days we make movies about it. Is that progress? I've no idea."


Was it that something went wrong for all of these people?
Or is it that something these people did was taken the wrong way?

Jeremy Barnard: "Initially, Danvers State provided a wonderful asylum for the folks who lived here. They grew their own food, they raised their own livestock, they had a life which on some levels was rather idyllic."

Mike Ramseur: "There was a lot of reform in the beginning, there was a congregate diner room, there was a no-restraint policy around 1900."

David Caruso: "There's a real element of loss here, there's a real element of a high-stakes tragedy that's taking place."

Mike Ramseur: "The whole story of Danvers is about the evils of overcrowding which the physicians were always lamenting in their reports, so it was just constantly escalating census. By 1900 actually the whole dream of moral treatment which brought a place like Danvers into being was dead. These institutions were on their way — all of them, they were all the same story — were on their way to becoming snake pits."

Ramseur, pastel: Danvers Red and White

The Pre-Frontal Lobotomy was developed at Danvers Hospital in 1948

A. Andy Chulyk: "This is where they did the lobotomies, this is what happened, this is the horrific thing that happened here; you can just keep... it can just keep going."

Mike Ramseur: "The stories like the grandeur, the grandeur of the architecture and all this, versus the stuff that went on inside."

[Title card] Overactive Curiosity

Jeremy Barnard, A. Andy Chulyk: Mythra Circle (alt)

Peter Mullen: "Madness often times is completely ill-defined. Most madness is overactive curiosity. What's it like to walk down the middle of the street with no clothes on? What's it like to take an axe and chop off someone's head? And that's what makes them frightening, and that's what makes that place frightening. It's because not only were there people there who would exercise that bizarre curiosity, [but] many of them were physically lobotomised to prevent them doing so which thus makes the state - or the keeper - as bad as the kept, and I think that's what comes across here."

"We did a scene on the roof and for a blip of a nanosecond - it was that short - I wanted to throw myself off the roof. I don't know, would I fall, would I float? We're just chatting away and it suddenly just - like a voice - was kind of, 'try it, someone will catch you, it's a film, actors don't fall off roofs', and that scared me. It scared me of what you're capable of. Like why on earth would I want to jump off a fucking roof? I have no reason to want to fucking kill myself. But that was the thing, it wasn't a suicidal thought, it was a curiosity, and... I'm pretty convinced that came from here, that comes from the building."

[Title card] Inspired by the house

Brad Anderson: "It's a horror movie in the sense... in the traditional sense of horror as dread as opposed to shock. It's more about the internal mechanisms, the inner workings of the human mind and how they kind of get twisted; particularly five men, the relationships between five men under very stressful circumstances, working in a big crazy place like this and doing dangerous work. The horror evolves out of their relationships."

Josh Lucas (Actor): "The beauty of the script is that all of us have ... there's very different ideas about why life has not worked for them and why they've ended up in a position where they have a very risky, very dangerous, very lonely, ugly job."

Brad Anderson: "These guys enter this place and five days later they've kind of become patients themselves. The building has absorbed them, taken them in."

Brendan Sexton III (Actor): "The institution, the atmosphere is the sixth character in the film. It's the one pushing the other characters and making them change course and have different motivations, make them deviate from their normal characters. That's the whole sort of supernatural eeriness to it."

David Caruso: "When you get to do your first walkthrough, it's not something I mentioned earlier that you kind of go into denial to perform the movie, but you do your first walkthrough and those images and that feeling will stay with you forever."

Steve Gevedon (Actor / Co-writer): "It was a very synergistic kind of thing where we were inspired by the house, the house inspired us."

Peter Mullen: "It's a huge kind of maze of anguish. Every corridor has a different kind of story to tell, every room, every blade of grass around here has been touched by what went on and it looms large in everybody's psyche. You act very differently in a place like this."

[Title card] Art Has a Habit of Going Bad

Peter Mullen: "I don't know how much I believe in all this supernatural-y sort of stuff, but if it is there then because this film has been done - touch wood - with relatively good intent then there's been little interference. I think buildings and places where things have happened, I think if they think there's an ill intent then they start to react. But what it is, if it's done with ill intent, if it's done for ego or exploitation then art has a habit of turning nasty on you."

"I was waiting... I found a little corner for myself because I was having to do some quite sort of heavy kind of stuff... there was no one around me and someone whispers 'Peter'. It was the way in which they whispered it that made me turn. [...] it was a request, a very, very quiet request, and as I looked I was waiting to see someone [say] 'Peter, sorry to bother you, you're wanted on set', [but] as I turned there was no one there. I hadn't created this for myself, someone said to me as a request, 'Peter', and it scared me, it did scare me. But not scared in the sense 'oh my god, any second now someone's going to jump out and kill me', it scared me because it was a request, it was almost 'would you like to come in, I'd like to talk to you about something', and that's scary, because you fear for... that's when you fear more for your sanity than for yourself. It's like, no, I'm not going in there, I don't want to be talking to any fucking ghost, no. Someone make a film about it, fine, someone write me about it, fine, but I'm sorry, I don't have the wherewithal to sit down with something that doesn't exist to tell me what the fuck happened in this place over the last hundred and fifty years."

Bonner Medical. © Tom Kirsch. http://opacity.us/

[David Caruso reported in the official Production Notes that he saw "something pass my window" when shooting inside the Bonner Medical Building of Danvers State Hospital. "I didn't want to tell anybody, because people would start looking at me strangely...."]

[Title card] It's When You Walk Away

Peter Mullen: "I'm sure there are many ghostly spirits around here that would find us - our activities - laughable. It's like, you wanna know madness? I'll show you madness. Enter my brain for fifty seconds."

David Caruso: "In order to perform the movie you have to go to a place of denial somewhat because you kind of, well... wow, a lot went down here."

(As if the place wasn't off-kilter enough, staff felt it necessary to add a little clown spice into the mix.)
Jeremy Barnard: clown mold

Jeremy Barnard: "The line between sanity and insanity somehow is a bit blurred it seems to me and we all reside on one side or the other of that line and I'm not sure that we know which side that is always and I think that it's a question that this place poses to us."

Mike Ramseur: "I've developed more of a sense of respect here that borders on a fear, it's a respect out of fear, because I feel like in its own way the place is alive."

Peter Mullen: "I don't think it's like you walk in and it's musty and [you think to yourself] 'I want out of here', I think it's when you walk away."

Paintings, illustrations and history
by Michael Ramseur
old school website and across the web (just search his name to find his body of work which consists of art, videos and books):
http://www.angelfire.com/id2/DanversStateHosp/dshgues.htm

exit doors Mythra

View the Danvers-related artwork of Jeremy Barnard and A. Andy Chulyk, two exhibitions titled "Light into Darkness". Click. Click.


If you want to see the 12-minute featurette 'The Haunted Palace: The Ghosts of Danvers Hospital' for yourself, you could either pick up a copy of the psychological horror film Session 9 (where you'll find it on the special features menu) or, if you aren't able to do this for whatever reason, you could always see if it's on the net - the featurette, not the film. Last I checked it was indeed. I won't link to it because chances are it will be removed in the near-future and then the link'll be redundant.


History of Danvers State Hospital and the source of an old picture or two that I've used, here:
http://www.danverslibrary.org/archive/?page_id=1096

Avalon Danvers apartments, Danvers MA, 26th August 2010.
CC-BY-3.0 John Phelan.

Danvers closed in 1992, stood abandoned for around a decade and was put to good use in the 2001 film Session 9. It was a beautiful building, as strange as that is to say about such a place. Beautiful architecturally. It was 2006 that demolishment began against a public outcry, I remember it well. In 2007 there was a fire, mostly of the construction site, but a little of the historic. But, still, that year and the next the 'Avalon Danvers' apartments were gradually being occupied by residents. Can you imagine living on the site of all that confusion and suffering? I think turmoil leaves a greater impression than peace. The condominiums aren't just on the site, they've retained the original façade of the asylum as an act of preservation. I don't know if I'd be brave enough to live there. I'd absolutely go in the original building if it were still standing, might even bring myself to spend the night, likely with someone else, but semi-permanently living in apartments on the site, no way. That's too much commitment.

I like the parallel to be drawn between the mental hospital of both the film and of real life with the outside, how these individuals in the short featurette address the nature and personality of Danvers State Hospital as being like a microcosm for the world - we enter and it devours us. We're not from here but we're acclimatised to think that this is home, that this is where we belong. It's kind of insane.


From the boy who cried fair use. Fair use! Fair use! Fair use! Fair use! Fair use! Fair use! Was I not entirely fair?
(Be there, do it, see the movie, get the t-shirt - at your own discretion, of course. P.s I'm better than you. But nobody that I've referenced here affiliates what I've said, so get your panties out of a twist. There's no affiliation going on. None. I just appreciate their work. Is that alright or—?)