Week of Review - 1408

Welcome back to week of review, in which I dedicate 5-8 days to reviewing a collection of films and TV shows relating to a topical subject of my choosing.  5 days from now we’ll see the return of American Horror Story, the hit anthology horror show from FX.  American Horror Story and I have a…complicated relationship to say the least but I at least acknowledge the incredible influence the show has had.  As we speak the amount of anthologies currently in development is pretty staggering and our new found love of anthologies is no doubt partly responsible for the upcoming Goosebumps film.  So given that I’ve decided to produce a Week of Review dedicated to this season of American Horror Story’s theme: Hotels.  I don’t really know why the creators of American Horror Story felt “Hotel” was the perfect confluence of horror trends and American identity to devote an entire season to but thankfully we don't have to understand it, just embrace it.  So to kick things off I’m looking at one of the best and most underrated Stephen King adaptations of all time 1408. 

1408 is an odd duck of a film created by a unique hodgepodge of conflicting forces that don’t completely coalesce but come close enough to produce a thoroughly unique and enjoyable movie experience.  From the outside the film looks actually pretty bad.  When the movie came out in 2007 horror was right in the midst of Saw’s blockbuster dominance and the emerging market for horror remakes, with more recent trends like the resurgence of haunted house flicks and zombie-mania still a few years away.  This was an undoubtedly fallow period for horror, regardless of what you might actually think of Saw’s breadth of installments or the various remade films of the era like Rob Zombie’s Halloween. 

Additionally this came right at the low point of the Stephen King popularity bell curve.  Nowadays King is back near the top of the food chain thanks to the success of Under the Dome and upcoming projects like The Stand, Dark Tower, Mr. Mercedes, and 11/22/63 but in 2007 he was essentially dead to the world.  Secret Window had really been his last hurrah and even though The Mist came out that year it’d still be awhile before it was legitimately discovered.  Even the director, Mikael Hafstrom, set off red flags as this was still a year before Let The Right One In suddenly opened America’s eyes to the strengths of Swedish horror.  Slop that miasma of issues and doubts onto the quickly diminishing shoulders of John Cusak and nobody believed in this movie, and yet…it’s really damn good. 

The plot revolves around Michael Enslin, a failed fiction writer whose found major monetary success writing “spooky hotel” guides. This job obviously pays the rent but it’s hardly the fulfilling life he’d hoped for and it’s established early on he’s been a shell of his former self ever since a personal tragedy in his past that split up his marriage.  As he’s preparing to finish off his latest guide he gets a mysterious letter alerting him to the deadly room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York.  Intrigued by the mystery and deadly history of the room Enslin sets out to stay in the room and make his investigations only for things to go horrifyingly and surreally wrong. 

The key to 1408’s success is in the kind of horror it’s looking to evoke.  The comparison to The Shining is unavoidable but they do end up different films in how they approach the idea of being trapped in a hotel where everything is slightly off.  I’ll talk more on this when we get to The Shining (how could that not be on the docket for a list of haunted hotel films?) but the key difference comes down to Jack Torrence vs. Michael Enslin.  Both films have a major emphasis on the supernatural trying to get its hooks in us, creeping in through the fractured aspects of our psyche, the central difference here is emotional.  Where Torrence is consumed by the Overlook’s sentient evil through his anger and selfishness, room 1408 comes after Enslin through his depression and trauma.  There’s no family for us to follow along and get distance from the supernatural through and no psychic kid to add to the air of unreality in the proceedings, it’s just us and Michael trapped with something that knows exactly how to hurt you. 

That’s a big part of the difference too, the more alien nature of the room.  While the Overlook was ultimately personified in its various victims Room 1408 never comes close to taking human form, existing only as a malevolent sentience that knows all the place’s you’ll break.  Additionally the room’s origin is never explained, it’s simply left as an opaque mystery that must be accepted.  There’s even a sort of underlying sense that knowing might only make it worse. 

What 1408 is most reminiscent of is actually Silent Hill.  The atmospheric horror and heavy psychological underpinnings of the film is on harmony if not on melody with a lot of Silent Hill’s greatest installments.  There’s always been a kinship between King’s work and the more ethereal horror concepts you find in a lot of Japanese work so it’s not that surprising to be seeing that connection emerge again in 1408.  Speaking of which, 1408 is one of the stranger amalgams of King’s collection of tropes and clichés. 

Most of his normal narrative flavor fillers are actually gone, stuff like redneck characters, alcoholics, bullies with no motivation, metaphors for substance abuse don’t make any appearance here.  Even the more psychological horror on display is decidedly outside of King’s normal run of the mill approach.  His stories usually don’t emerge from delving into psychological trauma, weakness, and fear though that maintains a hovering presence over most proceedings.  Where this movie feels like a true King story is in the central conception.  The “joke” of 1408 as it were is the idea of elevating the simple offness inherent to the artificiality and anonymity of a hotel room into something more menacing and tangible.  That’s very much a King trope to bring up as he’s done previously in stuff like The Mangler, Cell, or Christine.

A lot of the horror in 1408 comes from slow pacing and a sort of dreamlike approach to reality.  It’s not quite on the waking nightmare level as films like House of 1000 Corpses but the very bizarre flow of reality in the films does put on the level of stuff like It Follows.  A lot of this comes from the deliberate unfolding of the story and the confidence to know that when things start to go really crazy it’ll all be worth it.  It also helps that the film never cuts away from Cusak stuck in the room, we’re never afforded any safety.  Cusak for his part does a great job.  Cusak’s credibility as an actor has only decreased as time goes by and while he’s certainly a highly limited talent he manages to play Enslin’s jaded everyman/stifled creative very well with an undercurrent of self-destruction that adds a good element of tragedy to all the horror.  Samuel L. Jackson is also in the film in a brief cameo that he works quite well. 

One of the strangest and most engaging elements of the film has to be the setting.  Horror films set in cities are a major rarity so to see one that’s set almost entirely in urban New York City is a serious change of pace, even more so considering that 1408 is as scary as it is.  I mostly attribute this to the sensibilities of the Swedish direction Mikael Hafstrom.  The main reason urban horror is so rare is because of American shared cultural standards, we as a people don’t view cities as a source of the unique kind of fear that’s elicited through a horror film.  However, there are plenty of cultures out there that actually consider the city with legitimate fear like Canada, Japan, the UK, and Scandinavia.  A lot of this has to do with cultural history and inhumanity and other things that I’ll probably cover in a whole other article but suffice it to say despite the urban environment 1408 is still decidedly creepy and unnerving. 

One last thing to mention is that the film actually comes with a sort of alternate ending.  After a bad reaction from a test audience the original ending was reshot to be more upbeat and cheerful.  I’ve seen both and the original ending is infinitely superior, something the producers actually seem to have realized as it acts as the default ending on DVD and most streaming sites that carry the film.  Suffice it to say I highly recommend 1408 as a horror film and as a Stephen King adaptation.  The atmospheric horror, surreal world, deliberate pacing, and strong performances all make it a very creepy and engaging watch.  Tomorrow, something far worse. 


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