1408

What’s the Story?

Stephen King makes a good living writing about scary things and places. He also writes frequently about what it feels like to write about scary things and places. 1408, based on one of King's short stories, is sort of a mix of both. Mike (John Cusack) is depressed about what he does for a living. He writes cheesy, repetitive "ghostly" travel books (10 Haunted Hotels, 10 Haunted Lighthouses); he researches them by spending nights in supposedly haunted rooms, then produces rote manuscripts that appeal to unimaginative readers (his disdain for his audience is revealed during a public reading attended by a few dimwitted fans). Mike's frustration and cynicism come to a head when an anonymous postcard writer challenges him to stay in room 1408 of Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel -- which has produced more than 50 corpses over the decades. When the management refuses to let him, Mike gets curious, eventually muscling his way in via legal threats and generally obnoxious behavior. He's warned off by earnest manager Mr. Olin (a very subdued Samuel L. Jackson), who insists it's not because he cares about Mike but because he doesn't "want to clean up the mess." But Mike thinks he's seen it all ("I know that ghoulies and ghosties don't exist") and takes the room.

Is It Any Good?

If you've read or seen The Shining, you've probably seen it all, too -- or at least what goes on in this room. Considerably more claustrophobic than that story's Overlook Hotel -- it is, after all, set in just one room -- 1408 nonetheless deploys the same gimmicks: cracked, bloody walls; babies crying; ghosts in emotional disarray; and flashbacks to distressing personal history (in this case, Mike's daughter, dead of a disease that makes her very pale and dark-eyed). Mike actually feels bad about a number of family traumas, including having abandoned his wife Lily (Mary McCormack) in order to drown his misery in sad-sack drinking, beach-bumming, and lazy writing.

The room locks Mike inside and then proceeds to bring all of his roiling emotions to the surface, sometimes very cleverly but more often very tediously (a window smashes his hand, the room turns hot and cold, the walls collapse, the room changes temporal dimensions, etc.). The room's most deliciously perverse (and always jarring) assault is the clock radio's auto-turn-on, which repeatedly blares the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." But even better, when Mike looks out a window to a room across the street hoping to signal for help, he sees a mirror version of himself -- dressed differently, unspeaking, apparently from another time. Unable to communicate with himself, Mike discovers that he is, after all, quite stunningly alone. Such moments grant Cusack a chance to disintegrate subtly rather than raging about in a spooky-horror-filmy fashion, and he takes full advantage of the opportunity.