“Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room.”
Stephen King is such a proven quantity for movies that even his writing exercises get adapted for the big screen. I’m not joking – the story “1408” began life as an exercise in King’s memoir On Writing, just a few thrown-together paragraphs as a way to show the reader how to revise first drafts. A completed form of it appeared in Everything’s Eventual, and in 2007 1408 hit theaters. I mean, the guy who wrote The Shining wrote another story about an evil hotel, what are the odds it wouldn’t be filmed?
Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a typical King protagonist: he’s a writer. He’s also a specifically Kingian writer, in that he once wrote tony novels for the hardcover crowd, only to switch to easier, more profitable genre fare (see also Scott Landon in Lisey’s Story and Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half). Right away 1408 is asking us to make a leap of faith and believe that someone who writes books with titles like 10 Haunted Cemeteries and 10 Haunted Mansions would have not only a following, but a dedicated agent and a beachfront place in Hermosa Beach. In his usual mail haul of invitations to haunted locales, he gets an unsigned postcard from New York’s Dolphin Hotel with an ominous inscription: “Don’t enter room 1408.”
We see where this is going, but who cares? If anyone can take a trope worn as thin as “haunted hotel” and reinvigorate it, it’s Stephen King. 1408 is haunted, yet, but there’s a lot more going on. It’s not just the 56 deaths – some natural, most suicides – it’s the oppressive nature of the room itself. The story does itself a big favor by not elaborating further, although some grisly details, such as a maid who blinded herself with scissors after being stuck in the room’s bathroom for only a few moments. A lot of this is told to Mike, and us, by Mr. Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), the hotel’s manager. It’s a bit of an exposition dump, but Jackson’s voice automatically lends gravitas to everything he’s saying, and he nails the finality of the film’s signature line: “It’s an evil fucking room.”
Much of 1408 is a one-man show, which is a huge responsibility for any actor. John Cusack isn’t exactly Philip Baker Hall in Secret Honor, but he acquits himself nicely nonetheless, and approaches the level Will Smith reached in I Am Legend (wildly uneven movie, but Smith is legitimately great in it). Mike is a more fascinating character when it’s just him in a room; whenever he interacts with other characters, he’s prickly to the point of just being a surly jerk. That some characters seem oblivious to this beggars belief.
1408 is a slow burn, more focused on creating a lingering sense of dread and unease than on jump scares (of which there are a few, and they’re mostly serviceable). It might test viewers’ patience, at least those viewers who want the scares to start hard and fast (then again, The Shining is a pretty slow burn too). It would be easy to go the haunted route in this, but there are larger ambitions on display here. There are some ghosts, sure, but they don’t interfere with Mike so much as they relive their last moments. The ghosts are presented not as traditional phantoms, but as flickering images that look as though they were peeled off of a TV screen. It’s a nice touch.
Of course, when adapting a short story into a nearly two-hour movie, some liberties have to be taken. Not much is retained of King’s work but for the skeleton of the story, so if you’re looking for pinpoint accuracy, look elsewhere. However, this lets director Mikael Hafstrom really explore the space of the room (no pun intended), even breaking the boundaries of the four walls that have trapped Mike. In one nicely tense sequence, Mike attempts to shimmy along the ledge outside the hotel in an attempt to enter a neighboring room (it’s also a possible nod to King’s story “The Ledge,” from Night Shift). As the camera pans out we see that but for Mike’s window, the wall of the hotel is blank.
1408 in many ways is a nihilist film, with no real explanation given for why these things are happening or how they were put into motion. (Longtime King fans have speculated about who sent the postcard to Mike in the first place, with a lot of people agreeing that it was the hotel itself.) It’s a nasty film in a lot of ways, as the room taunts and tortures Mike for no reason that we’re given. Where the film falters is in trying to inject pathos into what is, at its core, a nasty Twilight Zone episode (much like another angry King work, The Mist). We’re never really invested into Mike’s estrangement from his wife, or his unprocessed grief over the death of their child. So when either of these characters show up, it doesn’t pack the emotional punch that it should.
Stephen King adaptations basically have their own wing in the Library of Horror. They’re not all going to be great; for every It, you have a Riding the Bullet, for every Cujo a Dreamcatcher. 1408 is probably somewhere in the middle; to echo a line from Mike, describing the titular room: It’s not without its charms. This is a profoundly strange, mean movie, which means that even if it’s not one of the best adaptations of King’s work, it remains one of the most interesting.
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