The Stephen King short story 1408 started out as a writing exercise for the prolific author, a few pages in his nonfiction book On Writing to demonstrate the importance of multiple drafts. Something about it caught the author’s imagination, though, and he expanded it into a full story that can be found in his 2002 collection Everything’s Eventual. It’s pretty basic: Skeptical guy goes into haunted hotel room. Scary shit happens to him. He escapes, but not without serious consequences.
Cusack marvels at the number of bad Stephen King movies
To put it bluntly, there is not enough material in 1408 the short story for a feature film. There is barely enough for an episode of the King anthology TV series Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which ran on TNT last year. That hasn’t stopped film producers from making a movie anyway, and luckily the resulting 1408 film has a strong enough core that it mostly withstands all the extraneous plot added to it to make it the proper length.
That core comes courtesy of John Cusack, who performs what amounts to a one-man show in the film’s middle segment, which adapts the meat of the King story. As writer Mike Enslin, who pens cheapo nonfiction guides like Ten Haunted Houses and Ten Haunted Castles, Cusack uses his sarcastic, hangdog style to sell the character’s cynicism, along with his loneliness. Mike’s at New York’s Dolphin Hotel to stay in the titular room, the site of numerous suicides and natural deaths over the last hundred years or so. He’s dismissive of the grave concerns presented by the hotel’s manager (Samuel L. Jackson), and is more interested in getting some grisly material for his latest book than in actually investigating the paranormal.
You know that Mike is screwed because he’s committed the cardinal horror-movie sin: He doesn’t have faith. Or, rather, he’s committed the related, even worse horror-movie sin: He’s lost his faith—in this case because his young daughter died of cancer a year before. This bit of backstory, added on for the movie, tugs at the heartstrings a little too strongly, although to the filmmakers’ credit they take their time playing it out so it’s slightly less manipulative than it might otherwise have been.
Once inside, Mike gets down to the business of being terrorized by the never-defined evil presence in the room. The walls bleed. The paintings come to life. Ghosts of Mike’s dead loved ones and past residents of the room pop up. It rains. It snows. You know, the usual. Much of King’s story hinged on Mike’s internal breakdown, so director Mikael Hafstrom (Derailed) has to work extra hard throwing all manner of special effects at Mike in order to dramatize the terror. Eventually it gets to be too much, and there is a really cheap fake-out toward the end that is rather infuriating and serves no purpose other than to pad the running time.
But Cusack carries it all, especially when there aren’t any other actors around for him to interact with. Despite the variety of parts he’s taken on over the years, he’s still best known as the sardonic, loveable loser of his ’80s roles, but he puts that image to good use as Mike, a guy who pretends to be too cool for his own work until the smirk is literally shocked right off his face. Those shocks are of your standard, dependable haunted-house variety, but for a while at least, they serve just fine.