Stephen King adaptations come in all shapes, sizes, and qualities from the Good (The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, Dead Zone, Christine, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, Carrie), the Bad (The Stand, It!, Pet Cemetery, The Running Man, Firestarter) and the Abysmal (Desperation, the TV adaptation of The Shining, The Langoliers, The Mangler, Sleepwalkers, Graveyard Shift, Maximum Overdrive). Sadly, the latest short-story-to-big-screen adaptation, 1408, directed by Mikael Håfström (Derailed) and written by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski, unfortunately falls short of providing moviegoers with enough shocks, scares, tension, and suspense to justify the price of admission.
Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a one-time literary novelist turned paranormal researcher and debunker separated from his wife, Lily (Mary McCormack), gets a postcard in the mail with the number "1408" written on one side and a picture of New York City's Hotel Dolphin on the other side. Intrigued, Enslin researches the hotel's semi-sordid history at his local library (via microfiche no less). Not surprisingly, guests in room 1408 have a habit of checking out via violent, colorful means (e.g., scissors to the neck, leaps from window), 22 in total. Enslin's attempts to get a reservation fail until he gets his editor, Sam Farrell (Tony Shalhoub), and his publisher's attorney, Clay (William Armstrong), to intercede on his behalf with the hotel's proprietors.
Once in Manhattan, Enslin meets the hotel manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), a dapper, goateed, smooth talker who tries to dissuade Enslin from staying in room 1408. Olin informs Enslin about 34 other deaths, all presumably from "natural" means, that newspapers ignored. Olin also informs Enslin that no one's survived in room 1408 for more than an hour before perishing. Despite Olin's warnings, Enslin insists on staying in room 1408 for the night. Mere moments after stepping in the room, Enslin begins to encounter a series of inexplicable, paranormal phenomenon, including ghosts who walk past him and jump from the window, a radio with a mind of its own that counts backward from an hour and continually plays Carpenter tunes, and eventually, Enslin's late daughter, Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony).
Story wise, 1408 starts off strong, establishing Enslin’s backstory, i.e., failed literary novelist turned paranormal debunker with a tragic past, in quick deft strokes. Tension quickly builds through carefully, unobtrusively layered exposition (thanks to Olin’s speech about the hotel room’s dark history). Once in the room, the supernatural creeps in stealthily, first affecting electronic equipment (e.g., the radio), then actively turning on Enslin (e.g., a window closes on his hand, the water turns boiling hot when he turns it on, the door knob falls off, trapping Enslin in room 1408). Olin’s repeated warnings that no one’s survived more than an hour in room 1408 ups expectations that Enslin is in for a rough night.
Once 1408 shifts focus to Enslin’s tortured past, complete with ghost child, the tension and suspense dissipates. All we’re left with is a character trying to make right with his past and his guilt over his daughter’s death (i.e., not encouraging her to fight back strongly enough) and his lack of religious faith, which he considers misguided. Worse, 1408 devolves into trying to fake out moviegoers once or twice. Thankfully, that doesn’t last long, before copping out with a feel-good ending a filmmaker or studio willing to take risks would have, at minimum, subverted to chilling effect. Instead, we get an unnecessary coda that “proves” what we already know about room 1408: the ghosts and the evil that resides there are “real.”
The suggestion here and in Stephen King's short story is that room 1408 acts like an aggregator of evil, due, at first, to the number of unnatural deaths that occurred within its four walls. The supposedly natural deaths (heart attacks, strokes, drownings) are a result of the room's evil presence worming its way into the minds of the more susceptible guests (i.e., guests with tortured, unreconciled pasts like, of course, Enslin). It's not a particularly new idea, not even for King, who used it to better advantage in one of his earlier well-crafted novels, The Shining, later adapted into a successful art-horror film by Stanley Kubrick.
Besides the obvious story problems associated with a short story set almost entirely in a single stretched unnaturally into a feature-length film, 1408 doesn't work as horror films should. Outside of one or two jump scares early on that promise more than they deliver, 1408 isn't likely to scare audiences intimately familiar with all the tricks used to increasingly unrewarding effect here. It probably wasn't the smartest idea to type or code room 1408's ghosts to look like they've been inadvertently spliced from films made in the 1930s or 1940s (complete with grain and scratches on their images and hisses and pops on the audio track). How exactly would that be frightening to audiences? It wouldn't and isn't. And no, adding blood and gore (1408 is rated PG-13) wouldn't have made a difference.
Whether it particularly matters or not (probably not for most moviegoers), 1408 ends up leaving one mystery unanswered: who or what is Olin? Is Olin human or something else, a demonic caretaker for the Dolphin Hotel's paranormal, supernatural guests? Once Enslin enters room 1408 and the countdown begins without the possibility of escape, Olin appears once, but it’s unclear whether his appearance is a figment of Enslin's imagination or a trick conjured by the hotel room's undefined presence. His last comments (plus the ubiquitous salt-and-pepper goatee) suggest he's a trickster character who may not be human, but 1408 leaves that potentially intriguing question unanswered.
© Mel Valentin, 22nd June, 2007
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