1408
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“1408,” by Stephen King
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1408, directed by Mikael Håfström
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
A few years ago, a friend of mine came into Portland with his new girlfriend. I drove down from Lewiston to meet them on a Saturday night; we went out to dinner and then did some barhopping. Eventually, we all got drunk enough that I wasn’t going to be able to drive home. So we found a Motel 8 just off the turnpike and rented two rooms—one for them and one for me. There was more drinking, a bit of talk, and sometime after one, I made my way next door to crash.
I woke up at eight the next morning, and for a few seconds, I was very confused. This was not my beautiful bed by a long shot. But then I heard noises from the other room; I remembered the night before, recognized my reflection in the mirror over the dresser and realized the sounds I was hearing were my friend and his girl having (fairly enthusiastic) hangover sex.
Breakfast was awkward.
Mike Enslin, the writer cum paranormal investigator of 1408 tells us that hotel rooms are scary places. He’s not far off; but while Enslin talks about the people who’ve used the room before you, how the person who last slept in the bed you lie on could’ve murdered his whole family and you’d never know, I think the situation is more complex. What bothers me about hotels—about the neat homogenization of human needs, the sterility that resists even the slightest hint of permanence—is that they pretend at intimacy without ever truly achieving it. It’s a bedroom, and that’s where you sleep, but it’s not yours. The hundred small gestures we use to make a space our own become irrelevant in a room where furniture placement follows a rigid conformity; where toothbrushes come in plastic bags and shampoo in personal sizes.
That impermanence leaves you vulnerable. Those noises I heard were nothing to worry about, but what if they had been? And what if after a few moments, those noises had turned into screams?
As Stephen King himself admits in its introduction, “1408″ was a story he never intended on finishing. He wrote the first ten pages as a way to demonstrate some of the principles he’d been laying out in his non-fiction book On Writing; but the story turned out to be less disposable than he’d initially believed.
Which is interesting, because that opening is easily the least compelling thing about the piece. Mike Enslin, as described above, arrives in the lobby of the Hotel Dolphin where he is immediately pulled aside by Olin, the hotel manager. Olin takes Mike into the manager’s office and does his best to convince him not to stay in room 1408. Clearly, Olin would like to forbid the use of the room entirely, but due to an obscure civil rights law, if a room is open, a hotel has to let it to anyone who specifically requests it.
We learn that Enslin makes his living by visiting supposedly haunted locations, like graveyards and mansions and writing about them in lurid (and often trumped up) detail. But he has never seen an actual ghost; he doesn’t believe they exist. Olin thinks this arrogance makes Enslin uniquely ill-prepared to face whatever’s waiting for him upstairs—something that isn’t a ghost, exactly. Something that’s much, much worse.
Structurally, “1408″ is relatively straightforward, and this first scene is no exception. The “Don’t dare go inside the abandoned house/factory/bumper cars” speech is one of the hoary standards of horror writing, and the conversation between Olin and Mike does nothing to subvert our expectations. Olin brings out the body list, tells Enslin a whole host of bad things, and Enslin does his level best to Scully them all. Of course he refuses to leave. They always do.
This feeling of familiarity isn’t helped by the fact that King himself has already written a very similar scene in the first chapter of The Shining. The relationships are somewhat changed—in the novel, the manager is talking to a prospective employee, neither man likes the other very much, and Ulman (the manager) doesn’t go into the same depth as Olin does. But it’s still a hotel, there’s still a lot of foreshadowing, and it’s still one man trying to convince another where his best interests lie after all other recourses have failed.
“1408″ suffers in comparison because the writing simply isn’t very good. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what’s wrong (Enslin’s explanation for the cigarette behind his ear is clunky, but that’s the most specific example I can think of); it’s more the sense that you get in a lot of King’s late-period work that everything is going on longer than it needs to. A set-up works best when the writer gets as much of its way as possible: hook the reader, give the premise, and then move on to other things. Here, it just drags.
We learn that Mike considers himself to be slumming with the kind of work he’s doing; that he used to be a “real” writer, but now just sticks to fake spook hackery. He’s defensive about it, too—always jumping to the wrong conclusion if there’s any chance Olin might insult him. This is decent character building, until you read the story a second time and realize that it never actually goes anywhere. Clearly, Enslin is being set up as the traditional skeptic who must learn the Error Of His Ways, but once he goes inside 1408, he could be anybody. All the talk about the room’s deadliness is nice, but it’s so rote that it’s not really scary; you can’t help but feel that King wrote the scene not because the story demanded it, but because it’s tradition.
Still, one reason sequences like this are so common is that they work, and even with all its problems, this one isn’t a total loss. I especially liked Enslin’s surprise when he learns about all the supposed “natural” deaths in the room—he’s done the research, he knows about the six or seven suicides, but he never thought to take into account simple heart attacks. The sheer volume of mortality takes him (and us) off-guard.
Things really kick in once the exposition gets out of the way, and when “1408″ gets going, the pay-off is surprisingly excellent. King makes an effort to subvert the usual haunting tropes; there are no specters, no rattling chains, nothing that ever was or could ever be human. Just a terrible randomness that only makes sense when it runs down your spine.
It’s worth getting into in more depth, but we should probably talk about the film version first, so as not to repeat ourselves. (Not sure why we slipped into first person plural there. Should probably consult an exorcist.)
1408 starts strong. We watch Mike Enslin (John Cusack) spend the night in a supposedly haunted bed and breakfast; ghosts and goblins fail to make an appearance. We then follow Mike to a signing for his 10 Nights at 10 Haunted Spots series, where an audience proves just as elusive as the previous night’s ghouls. Maybe three people show up. One of them asks Mike to sign one of his pre-ghost novels, an achingly “serious” thing called The Long Road Home. He asks her how much she paid for it; somewhat embarrassed, she tells him, “not much.”
All of this is nicely done; in quick sketches, we get an idea of who Enslin is, what he does, and how he may not be entirely satisfied with doing it. There’s a surfing sequence that practically screams, “This will be important later!” but the first real sign of trouble comes when Mike picks up his mail. He finds a postcard with a photo of the Dolphin Hotel on the front; on the back, the message, “Don’t go into 1408.”
This was when I started to adjust my expectations.
A closed room story works best when operating under its own inherent limitations; the rule is, the hauntee is only in danger when actually inside the affected room. We never learn who sent the note. Since there’s no indication that Mike had plans on to visit the Dolphin before he got the postcard, it’s doubtful that Olin or anyone else involved in the hotel would’ve tried to contact him. The most likely suspect, given how the rest of the movie plays and the surprisingly artful handwriting on the card, is that the room–or whatever malicious force resides there—somehow managed to mail a postcard for the simple purpose of luring Mike inside.
That’s about an 11 on the idiometer, honestly. (Though it’s only a rough 7.2 on the You’ve Got To Be #%*@ing Kidding Me scale.) All you need for a follow-up is to learn that 1408 already killed Mike’s father, and that Mike’s grandfather was the hotel’s original architect.
Fortunately, things never get that bad. Instead, we get an in-between movie—one where the best impulses are in constant struggle with the worst.
1408 is in many ways a one man show, so it’s a lucky thing that one man is the film’s greatest asset. Much like Johnny Depp in Secret Window, John Cusack is the sort of actor who can be called on to make the best out even the most dreadful scripts. (Hell, I actually dug him in Identitiy.) Here, he’s able to redeem a good number of the movie’s less than inspired choices; and when there’s a choice that does work, he more than rises to the occasion.
The rest of the cast doesn’t fair quite so well. In their defense, apart from Samuel L. Jackson as Olin, their characters are largely superfluous. (I suppose the screenwriters would disagree when it comes to Mike’s wife, played by Mary McCormack, but we’ll get to that.) Even Jackson’s role is beefed up unnecessarily; he appears near the beginning, as in the story, but comes back for two later scenes, once as an apparent hallucination and then again after the climax, in a moment so poorly conceived it’s hilarious.
The conversation between Enslin and Olin that began the short story remains much the same for the film version. It actually felt a bit less effective, oddly enough. While some bits (like the cigarette thing) play better when spoken, much of the dialogue falls flat, and the blocking for the two actors is distractingly labored. (Lots of getting up and sitting down for no more reason than the director wanted the shot to have more action.) Plus, you can’t completely disregard the suspicion that Jackson—generally a dynamic screen presence—is miscast in the role of handwringing middle management.
However, much like its source material, 1408 picks up considerably after the preliminaries are dispatched. It never quite achieves consistently the excellence of its best moments, but it’s better than its worst moments suggest.
In the story, Mike Enslin’s trip into 1408 lasts seventeen minutes. The effect of whatever presence is in the room on a visitor is described as being similar to poisoned gas, and few people are able to stay inside for very long without suffering long term adverse affects. For Mike, things start to go wrong almost immediately; when he arrives outside the room, he finds the door is crooked. The jamb is even, but somehow the door itself is off-kilter. The moment passes—sort of—but we’ve just been given a glimpse into the nature of the evil we’re about to face. It’s not something that can be directly handled. Fighting through it is like wrestling a particularly vivid fever dream.
The seventeen minutes that follow are extremely creepy stuff, although not in a way I feel comfortable describing explicitly. There are three paintings on the wall of the room, and all three are hanging wrong. Mike fixes them. They go wrong again. He talks into the microphone of his tape recorder and speaks rational assessments that slowly degrade into gibberish. (My favorite line: “My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut turnpike.") The phone rings and a disembodied voice shouts numbers at him ("Five! The number is five!") Then the walls start melting and he hears the sound of something coming for him—something that will rend him utterly, but will leave behind a corpse that looks remarkably like it died a natural death.
That’s basically it, but I’m getting a chill even writing it down. (Doesn’t help that it’s near on midnight, and I live alone.) The speed with which events deteriorate once Mike enters 1408 takes you by surprise, especially after the somewhat stately build-up that proceeds it. The “poison gas” description gives you something specific to connect with, and it’s disturbing the way you can never tell how much of what Mike sees is hallucination—how he keeps speaking into the microphone with utter confidence while his mind betrays him—and the final deep down terror that what’s real and unreal no longer matters.
Any movie attempting to do a strict adaptation of such material would need a particularly visionary director at the helm; I’m thinking of something like Eraserhead-era Lynch on cocaine. Mikael Håfström, director of 1408, chooses to go a different route. While I can’t exactly blame this decision, I can’t help but feel a little let down by the result.
While story Mike’s fate is decided less than twenty minutes after he enters the room, movie Mike is inside 1408 for a full hour before things climax. This changes the nature of the experience altogether; instead of a immediate and total break-down of perceptions, we get a gradual build-up of weirdness.
This weirdness can be said to fall into two broad categories: general environment warping and attacks specifically targeted at Our Hero. Of those two, the former (inevitably) works the best. Mike suffers through temperature changes, a bed that makes itself (leading to one of the greatest lines in any movie ever—I’ve quoted it at the end of this review), a psycho with a hook popping up at the darnedest times, visions of the room’s previous occupants, and the ever changing spatial geography of the hotel room itself. Not all of these are actually frightening; the appearance of the other guests is too predictable, and the phone conversation Mike has where a perky female voice tells him he has to take his life “of your own free will” was a little too on the nose for my taste. But the hook-wielding flannel dude was always good for a jump, and there’s a great bit where Enslin starts signaling for help to someone in an apartment directly across the street from his—only to realize that the other person isn’t just responding to his gestures, but copying them.
Besides, any movie that uses the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” as a cue for bad mojo has its heart in the right place.
It’s the other kind of attack that gave me the most problems—the scenes which are intended to play on Mike’s personal history and drive him to eventual suicide. There’s a brief sequence where Mike sees his father (Len Cariou!), hospitalized and confused, but for the most part, the room chooses to focus it’s Freudian malevolence against Mike’s ex-wife (Mary McCormacK) and, perhaps most importantly, the daughter whose death ruined his marriage and killed his more idealistic writing career.
One thing I will say in the movie’s favor: we don’t actually learn about the dead girl until Mike’s well into the mind-screwery. We know Enslin’s troubled, and when his publisher asks him if he’s sure he wants to come back to New York, we get a sense of some history there; but it’s only when the room starts showing Mike video of his previously happy family that the whole picture comes clear.
Too bad that picture is so thuddingly unoriginal. The trouble with having a plotline like this is that it allows you to distance yourself as an audience from the main threat. I’ve had some unpleasant things happen in my life, but I’ll freely admit that none of them come close to the horror of losing a child. While I can pity and feel for Enslin (largely due to Cusack’s excellent performance; the scenes with the kid are generally lousy, but Cusack sells them well), once 1408 starts hitting on such a localized trauma, I’m no longer threatened. There’s nothing in my past that would cut me this deeply. The situation becomes less about the room’s dangers and more about Mike’s unresolved issues, and those issues are just not that compelling.
(To give the devil his due, this does lead to one good scene near the end of the film where Mike confronts his daughter’s ghost. It’s not scary, as such, but the desperation in Cusack and the eerie calm of his child are actually surprisingly moving.)
The movie’s other big mistake is making Mike’s ex-wife Lily an active participant in the plot. As things in the hotel grow increasingly worse, Mike becomes desperate to contact someone from the outside to help him. Somewhat implausibly (since Olin told us at the start that “electronics don’t tend to work in 1408″), he’s able to get a wireless ‘net connection on his laptop, and go into a video chat with his ex. The presence of an outsider immediately ruins whatever claustrophobic momentum the film had been building. We can briefly hope that this is just another illusion—until we realize that the room has intentionally let Mike get a hold of Lily, so it can trick her into coming out to the hotel to rescue him.
It’s stuff like this that drives me insane, because it’s so thoroughly useless. You can argue that putting his ex in danger forces Mike to fight the room more proactively, but isn’t someone struggling for his own sanity and soul enough? Throwing in Lily just makes it all so safe, as though 1408 wasn’t a place where people lose everything, but a place they go when they need some really aggressive therapy. A haunting isn’t effective unless you’re truly alone; there’s a reason that Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is as much about social alienation as it is about bumps in the night. 1408’s clearest intention is to drive its occupant to a state of ultimate despair, and reminding Enslin he has someone out there who loves him enough to rush to his aid isn’t exactly a smart play.
(One last thing before we wrap up, but since it involves big ole spoilers, I’ll give you a chance to skip the next paragraph, should you be so inclined.)
Both short story and movie end in fire. But while in the movie version, Enslin uses an incredibly expensive bottle of booze to start a conflagration in 1408’s bedroom, thus “killing” whatever force is driving the room and saving his wife, story-Enslin sets himself on fire. The difference shows the crucial change in philosophy between story and film. One has a man ultimately triumphing over evil; the other has a man confronted with such an overwhelming doom that his only option is to damage himself in order to get free. I don’t know if I can say whether one approach is explicitly better than the other, but I damn well know which scares me more.
A hotel room can be an off-putting place because it reminds of us our relative unimportance. We are not the first person to use this room, and we will not be the last; but in terms of effect and consequence, who we are while we’re there matters hardly at all. “1408″ exploits this by giving us a threat whose attacks are devastating and entirely impersonal. 1408 uses some of the same tactics, but in the end, its central conflict is more about a hero desperate to redeem himself than a monster that likes to play with its food.
Which is too bad, really.
SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
“Let’s Encyclopedia Brown this bitch.”