A Room with a Skew

As I’ve stated before, mainstream horror has a nasty habit of walking into the woods, staring blankly at the beaten path and then the road less traveled, pondering over it for a good thirty seconds and then saying: ‘Hey, Robert Frost! Fuck you and your 1920s rhetoric! I’m gonna take the road that requires less work!’ And voila, you have a year full of movies that follow the same plot and sub-genre. Lately, we’ve been continuously hit with torture flicks and that trend seems to somehow maintain a steady course with audiences. But leave it to director Mikael HÃ¥fström to bring us something not necessarily fresh to the genre, but fresh under the circumstances of current horror. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good ghost story in the cinema. HÃ¥fström’s ‘1408′, is a film adaptation of the same-titled short story by renowned horror auteur, Stephen King, who first made hotels shit-inducing with his novel (and the Kubrick-helmed film) ‘The Shining’. Now, HÃ¥fström ain’t no Kubrick. And ‘1408′ ain’t no ‘Shining’; but the film is executed well enough to perhaps set the (mini)bar for upcoming genre pictures that choose not to divulge in ball-gags, chainsaws, and anything else you can find under my bed.

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a motherfucker. He’s an acclaimed (yet not very popular) Los Angeles based novelist who specializes in supernatural phenomena. He goes from one supposedly haunted location to the next and always finds himself let down by a lack of paranormal activity. A total atheist, he tells a fan at a book signing that he would love nothing more than to see a ghost or something out of this realm, but sincerely doubts he ever will. He then explains to this hopeful fan that the only reason people want to believe in spirits is because they want to have proof that there is an afterlife. Talk about encouraging your fan base, eh?

Still working on his upcoming book, Mike receives a postcard from New York’s Dolphin Hotel with s scribbled message: ‘Do not stay in room 1408′. Well shit, you really expect him not to go now, mysterious postcard writer? Give or take a few hundred frames and Mike is in New York at the hotel. There he meets Dolphin manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) who politely asks him not to stay in the room and then roughly asks him not to stay in the room. Mike doesn’t give shit. Like I told you’this dude is a motherfucker. For every cocky comment you spout his way, this dude throws eight ‘fuck yous’ right back in return. Assuming that Olin is trying to play up the ‘fabled’ room, he takes everything he says with a grain of salt. Mike did his research. He knows there were a handful of suicides in the history of the hotel, all from room 1408. But what he doesn’t know is that there were a total of 50+ deaths in 1408. One man was found dead in bed but the autopsy showed he died from drowning. When Olin gives Mike a dossier of every death in the room (pictures included), we can tell that his curiosity is now at its peak. Shit, he may even be a little nervous. Regardless, he throws out another eight or sixteen ‘fuck yous’ at Olin and heads up to the room.

When he gets in there, he realizes that it’s just a normal room. Nothing scary about it at all. It’s been well kept up, it’s clean, and it has a TV. Using his recorder, he makes some cocky comments about the room to make sure that we know he’s still one skeptical son of a bitch. But slowly (and surely), shit starts hitting the fan. Next thing you know, the room is throwing twenty-four ‘fuck yous’ at Mike and his sanity begins to drop quicker than my grandfather’s pants at a highway rest stop. Will Mike survive the night? Or will he become just a number in 1408’s little black (Gideon) book? Well, considering that it’s a mainstream film, I think you know the answer.

The impressive thing about ‘1408′ is that its scares are subtle. There are only a few obvious ‘jump’ scenes that are actually pretty goddamn decent and come out of nowhere. The rest of the time, they’re quite psychological, building in Mike’s head and in yours making the both of you wonder ‘what the hell does that mean?’ The special effects (though rarely used) are pretty damn good. Pictures explode into waves, phones melt, and the ghosts of the previous guests are given a static-like television glow that says ‘Hey, put the remote down. You ain’t turning me off.’

Also thrown into the movie is a more touching sub-plot involving Mike’s semi-ex-wife and his daughter, which revolves around a family tragedy that the room puts to good use against our protagonist. Once he knows the room is for real, he loses the attitude and becomes insanely logical and emotional and even gives one hell of a tear-jerking moment with his daughter. I’ve always been a huge fan of Cusack. I’ll watch anything he’s in because he has a persona and a look that never gets old. I always find myself wondering what the hell he’s thinking about and with this role, he really does a great job of making it his own. Though he still looks, sounds, and pretty much acts like a John Cusack character, he lets this underlying depth slowly emit during the third act.

The real stars of the movie are Cusack and the room itself. Samuel L. Jackson is given maybe ten total minutes of screen time and Tony Shalhoub (another personal favorite of mine) is given a brief cameo as Mike’s publisher. Now I could complain and say that each of these actors deserved more screen time due to their enormous talent, but then again’the movie isn’t about them. It’s about a motherfucker. And a motherfucking room. And it’s a hell of a good time. Check in.

The Hidden Message: ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.’ (Take notes, Hollywood.)