The Pumpkin King: 1408 (2007)
It doesn’t hit you until a while after 1408’s credits have rolled that not much of the horror about The Dolphin hotel has been sufficiently explained. At least not explained according to the belaboring efforts of modern horrors, a trend seen in the likes of this year’s BARBARIAN and MEN. The film, directed by Mikael Håfström and based on a short story by Stephen King, seems to almost rejoice in being unapologetically dizzying, a thrilling mess that is perhaps underappreciated by many audiences. Though it has a 78% on the reviewer-based Tomatometer, its audience score is a measly 61% and on IMDb it has a mere 6.8 out of 10. A common thread running through less favorable audience reaction on Rotten Tomatoes is a complaint against the oddness of the ending, that it’s confusing, with one user describing it as “the poor man’s THE SHINING.”
But the thing is, horror works best, most insidiously crawls under our skin, when it is confusing, subtle; when it, through uncertain terms and images, reflects our greatest fears—that which we don’t want to countenance, that which frightens us to the point of looking away. And these fears—the fear of processing grief, in the case of 1408—are never rational and therefore are never lessened when they are over-explained. A movie that tends to explicates ad nauseum the source of its horror does so to the unfortunate effect of sapping that horror of its immediacy.
1408 is certainly confusing and complicated, but this is what makes it work, what makes it memorable, and what ultimately lends it a sort of timelessness, to the effect that, 15 years after its release, one still flinches at certain of its turns, shivers alongside John Cusack’s garrulous Mike Enslin, or craves the warmth of Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Olin’s brandy running down one’s throat. Because 1408 is a good horror film; it doesn’t need to explain anything, by virtue of its stellar characterization, powerful performances, sensory immersion, and unrelenting horror elements.
The film follows Mike, a writer committed to debunking the supernatural. His latest project is on haunted hotels, and his process involves, in addition to thoroughgoing research, a one-night-stay at the location, armed with all manner of supernatural-detecting tools and gadgets. Mike’s constant companion is a voice recorder he uses to draft his works. Mike feels he has proven the non-existence of any supernatural entity and by extension the non-existence of god.
After receiving a postcard from The Dolphin hotel (a creaking and luxe building built in 1910s New York City) without a return address, onto which is written in an impeccable 19th-century scrawl, “Don’t enter 1408,” Mike eagerly heads to the location.
Jackson’s steely Olin, The Dolphin’s manager, tries to dissuade Mike from staying in the room, bribing him with a bottle of brandy as old as the hotel and with confidential files about the room—under Olin’s watch, four people have died in room 1408, and he does not want to deal with the mess of a fifth. Altogether, Olin tells Mike, 56 people have died within the room, either from self-inflicted wounds or from natural causes (one man drowned in his chicken soup). But Mike persists, stolid in his belief that there is no paranormal or supernatural or deific force on this planet, even in room 1408. Olin relents. Mike spends the night in the room and increasingly becomes not only harassed by the room itself, but also by his mind, losing it as he confronts ghosts violently moving about the room reliving the moments of their deaths, but also deals with the room’s hellish sentience, and his own haunted past.
The reason why Mike is so eager to disprove the existence of the paranormal, we learn, is because he and his wife Lily (Mary McCormack) lost their young daughter Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony) to terminal cancer—Mike wonders what kind of god could do this to an innocent child. Accordingly, he embarks on the quest of proving there is no god at all. 1408 is certainly a trenchant and gutting exploration of grief—Mike goes through all the Kübler-Ross stages during his stay in the room, learning ultimately that his pain won’t dissipate by disproving the existence of god, but through a process that begins with acknowledging that Katie is gone. But I’m more concerned with how it succeeds as a horror film.
Cusack and Jackson helm this film masterfully, their respective characters feel lived in, rich from the actors’ understanding of not only their characters’ psyches, but also a respect for each their characters’ system of beliefs, which certainly benefits from deft characterization found in King’s original text and the movie’s script (by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski). When characters are well-wrought, it is all the more compelling when the film challenges them or works to unravel them.
Cusack is all arrogance, wit, and confidence (he knows he is a good writer, his earliest book apparently was beloved by readers), all accrued from a lifetime of writing, of being a writer, and from a mysteriously hinted-at fraught relationship with his father. Cusack’s understanding of how Mike is written plays an immense and wonderful part in how Mike responds to Katie’s death—he walks out on Lily, whom he still certainly loves, and moves across the country, remaining obstinately, arrogantly in the denial stage of his daughter’s grief. Instead of processing her death, Mike distracts himself with literally working to deny the existence of a god, all through his rational and obsessive writerly tendencies.
Mike’s tape recorder plays an integral part, almost an extension of Mike’s hand—Cusack reaches for it reflexively as he works out his own thoughts, and it becomes evident not only that this kind of vocalization, this intrusive and confident loudness, is how he makes sense of the world around him.
But also that this is a habit inculcated in him by the passage of years spent writing.
So much of the film is simply Cusack ricocheting about room 1408, and there isn’t a single moment wherein he lets loose of our attention, running from one end to the other as he searches for his tape recorder left in his coat pocket, fact-checking himself, his own voice, when the room morphs before him. Cusack lives in the character of Mike, moving about 1408 with authority (once again linked to an understanding not only that he is a good writer and is on a job, but also confident that there can’t be anything supernatural about the room) and a physicality that is intentionally disrespectful (set to prove that there is no god, under the sway of his own bias after Katie’s death).
Accordingly, as the room increasingly does a number on Mike’s body and morality, we see him becoming increasingly slower and uncertain, more afraid as his tape recorder quivers in his hand before his unmoving lips.
The room brings him, in the end, at a loss for words—the writer’s worst fear.
The horrific effect of this strong characterization is a destabilization of our beliefs; if a fulsome and wholly realized character as Mike, as believable a character as Mike, can lose himself in room 1408, can become its victim, then what hope might there be for us? Cusack’s skills as an actor are on stunning display in this movie, he gives his all to this character (an unabashed physicality and a shrewdness that lends him emotional heft) and delivers possibly one of the best performances of his career.
In addition to Cusack’s shrewd performance, and Jackson’s simultaneously kind and creepy Olin (who seems to know too much but reveals little), 1408 additionally works in a far subtler way through our senses to slowly swallow us whole. There’s a certain swaying of the camera here, like we’re swimming about Mike, like perhaps we’re recalling a dream, like perhaps we are him recalling a dream. 1408’s New York has a dull, green glassy veneer, like the sadness at the bottom of a wine bottle. Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme and editor Peter Boyle work to imbue the film with the effects that, when the room’s scorching temperature pulls sweat from Mike’s forehead, we feel ourselves breathing heavily; when the temperature plummets to below zero degrees, we shiver as Mike piles blankets on himself; and when Mike drowns in the surge of a wave, we sway to stay level. The film’s aesthetic is so palpable, and cut to a delightful, frenetic arhythmic speed, that we are left little time to build a distance between ourselves and the film, and even if we did have the time, its horrific turns pull us back in.
I’m not the biggest fan of jump scares—they are gimmicky and annoying when a film is lousy with them. 1408 has a couple but they are so well placed and spaced that they certainly work within the world built about Mike as they make sense diegetically — ghosts materialize out of thin air, but this is their wont. When the radio blares suddenly it pulls a yelp from Mike and us because of how immersed we are alongside Mike in making sense of something on the other end of the room. The film’s pacing and its genre elements work because the performances and its aesthetic work. Håfström and his team have truly achieved what any good horror would seek: full absorption of our minds.
Mike ultimately escapes The Dolphin, but neither he nor we ever get a sense of why room 1408 took the lives of so many people, why ghosts are stuck reliving the worst moments of their lives within its walls. But this unexplained element doesn’t matter much. Our intense immersion in the film has us forget, or perhaps not care, about the fact that the core mystery of the hotel remains a mystery—when we’re this enraptured, because of the performances and aesthetic, it hardly matters what being could have cursed the place, what demon lives within room 1408. Revisit 1408 and lose yourself not to its history but its roiling horror.
