In 2007, it was nice to see a Stephen King adaptation at an actual movie theater again, where they belong, instead of the watered-down, overlong miniseries that played several nights on network TV and basic cable. It was also nice to see it contain actual scares, surviving the transition from its source material intact.
1408 comes from King’s 1992 short-story collection, Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. As King notes in his introduction, it was never meant to be an actual story, but an example of how writing progresses from draft to draft. For whatever reason, he finished it, and it’s one of Eventual’s many highlights. It’s easy to see why it was handpicked for big-screen treatment, and its modest success — combined with Frank Darabont’s The Mist later that year — helped usher in another wave of quality King films still going semi-strong more than a decade later.
John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a writer of several midlist books on haunted places. He’s working on one for hotels, rating each on a scare scale of one to 10 skulls. In his research, he’s found that supposed ghost-infested bed-and-breakfasts are just a way to drum up business. That will all change with his stay in room 1408 at New York’s Dolphin Hotel — a room perennially kept unoccupied for a reason: 56 occupants have died in it, none lasting for more than an hour.
Or, as the Dolphin manager (Samuel L. Jackson) puts it, the room is “fucking evil.”
Once inside, Mike’s stay starts off innocently enough: unexplained mints on the pillow, blared Karen Carpenter from the clock radio. But soon, actual bodily harm comes to him, and the clock starts providing a handy 60-minute countdown toward his apparent doom. With a barrage of spirits and phenomena and other things that go bump in the dark, it’s like The Shining compressed into one compact suite.
While King’s original story of the same name is structured roughly into thirds — before, during and after Mike’s stay — most all of the film is concerned with the during. Granting the tale an ominous touch, King relates the goings-on in the room not as they happen, but only afterward, via whatever details Mike left on his voice recorder.
What he doesn’t say makes our imagination run wild. But movies being visual, 1408 shows all, and some of it is very creepy. With the film more or less being confined to one space, Mikael Håfström does a great job of concocting more and more things to make Mike’s night a living hell. Although it includes all of the shocks of the story, it has to expand upon it in order to hit feature-length, adding a subplot about Mike’s ex-wife (Deep Impact’s Mary McCormack) and dead daughter to help fulfill that.
Hope you like Cusack, because the entire movie is on his shoulders. If he weren’t such a talented actor, we’d want to check out of 1408 early. But he makes the skeptic Mike likable, believable and sympathetic. As much as the moviegoer in us likes to see him go through the ringer, we feel bad for him all the same. In fact, parts of the film are real downers, but that just means it works.
The movie’s not perfect, mostly because of maybe two too many false endings. But it’s a smart and stylish chiller/thriller — everything that Håfström’s previous film, Derailed, was not. —Rod Lott