1408

"It's an evil fucking room."

Stephen King’s 1408 is the scariest thing I’ve ever read: a towering achievement of both modern short fiction and horror writing. The terror I felt while reading (and then immediately rereading) King’s story carried over to the film, even as the latter veered in a different and less visceral direction — the story’s effect is so lasting that merely remembering it evoked an immediate sense of unease. In that sense, then, this is the rare adaptation where being familiar with the source material palpably and substantively enhances the movie experience.

The adaptation is rare in a different way, too: Mikael Håfstrom’s film takes what was a basically straightforward (albeit kickass) work of fantasy-tinged horror and turns it into something completely different: an abstract, surreal portrait of a man dealing with his grief. It’s an admirably ambitious project, spinning out King’s subtexts with impressive dedication, and in its way it works — there’s a touching character study lurking here somewhere, and the film hits some effective emotional notes in its increasingly deranged third act. But it also makes mincemeat out of King’s horror premise, and while comparisons to the literary source may be unfair — books are not movies, though the story is nothing if not cinematic — this version doesn’t quite work on its own terms.

Neither King or the screenwriters ever give away the game. We never learn what the hell is going on inside room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, other than that it’s an “evil fucking room” (a line spoken here by the wonderful Samuel L. Jackson). The key is this: though the nature of the evil is never explained in the story, we sense that this is because it’s so alien that it is simply not explainable — our puny minds wouldn’t understand. In the final pages, the walls of room 1408 collapse around Mike Enslin and a terrifyingly foreign yellow light pours in; King describes it as an otherworldly sunset, and it’s the most memorable image in the story. We don’t understand it, but it’s real, and it’s not fucking around.

Here, by contrast, room 1408 ultimately turns out to be little more than a way for Enslin (John Cusack) to live out his worst fears, come to terms with the death of his young daughter, and find a new purpose in his life. There’s no explanation to be found here either, but this time it’s because the nature of the forces operating in 1408 doesn’t matter. The film dutifully reproduces the yellow sunset that so unsettled me in the story, but it changes the context: rather than bringing us face-to-face with something ruthless and unfathomable, the image underscores Enslin’s agony and grief.

This is particularly disappointing because the film initially feints toward the sort of menace that King had in mind. A lamp thrown out the room’s window flickers and disappears before it can hit the street below, and the man in the window across the way turns out to be Enslin himself, waving at his terrified reflection. An abortive attempt to crawl on the ledge to the neighboring window reveals that there is no neighboring window, just a faceless brick wall as far as the eye can see. What did Enslin wander into? For a while, 1408 toys with the sort of bone-chilling, parallel-universe mystery that recalls Vincenzo Natali’s Cube and the best of David Lynch. Then the psychological symbolism takes over, and we realize that the film’s focus on the protagonist’s emotional state is to the exclusion of its taking the premise at face value.

Really, this is all fair enough, especially since Enslin is a moving, reasonably complex character, and since the movie remains frightening and suspenseful to the end. But aside from being more abstract than I would have liked, 1408 seems a little arbitrary, leaving us with the impression that Room 1408, whatever it may be, cooked up its entire horrorshow (including, apparently, the prior deaths of 56 people) to help Mike Enslin move on with his life. (The year’s other movie with an unexplained and weirdly holistic supernatural hook is the less palatable Premonition.) I would have given a lot to see King’s deeply terrifying vision on the screen, but I can suck it up, and leaving questions unanswered is of course perfectly fine. It just better when the questions seem worth answering.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2007
Starring:	John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson
Directed by:	Mikael Håfstrom
Rated:	PG-13