1408

The New York Sun, June 22, 2007

I like hotels: the soothing anonymity, the agreeable sensation of watching people pick up after you, the questionable pleasures of pay-per-view. Needless to say, Stephen King, a writer at his best when conjuring up evil from the everyday, disagrees. In the prelude to his short story, "1408," he explains why hotel rooms are "naturally creepy": "How many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV?"

If you feel the same way, and you're reading this while slumped, quivering, and sweaty, in a Hilton, Hyatt or, God help you, Bates Motel, I'd prescribe clonazepam, not "1408." The latter is an effective, gripping tale, classic King, clammy and troubling, set in a hotel room so nasty that not even Basil Fawlty would dare explain it away. And if Mikael Håfström's new movie adaptation of the story has made it to that beckoning pay-per-view, keep clear. It'll only make matters worse.

Not that Mike Enslin (John Cusack, in a terrific performance) would. Mike is a once-promising novelist who now earns a good living churning out potboilers designed to discredit tall tales of hauntings, specters, and otherwise misbehaving dead. He's looking to conclude his latest book, so the arrival of a mysterious postcard hinting that room 1408 in Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel merits investigation proves to be an irresistible temptation. As a skeptic in a Stephen King story, Mike should know better, especially after being warned off by Gerald Olin (a splendidly forbidding Samuel L. Jackson), the Dolphin's manager. Gerald really, really doesn't want Mike to stay in 1408. Mike pays no attention, even after the solicitous Gerald plies him with good wine and a bad dossier. And what a dossier it is, choc-a-bloc with dangling corpses, bloody mutilations, and finales too disgusting to mention. It's not a question of ghosts, explains Gerald. It's just an "evil f------ room."

But Mike won't be deterred. Evil or not, the room is vacant. Under the law, he's entitled to book it (something to do with civil rights, apparently), and book it he does. This turns out to be the worst decision involving a hotel and a tale by Stephen King since Jack Torrance accepted that job at the Overlook.

As to what happens, you'll have to find out for yourself. Suffice to say, a bit of trouble with the heating (we've all been there) is the least of our hero's problems. If some of those problems (a sinisterly malfunctioning clock radio, attack by faucet, oozing walls à la " Barton Fink") are a touch clichéd, they don't detract much from what is, if not a masterpiece, a thoroughly competent, perfectly enjoyable horror flick — something that comes as a relief after the mess the Swedish Mr. Håfström made of his first English-language film, a train wreck of a movie called "Derailed."

A more serious objection to the approach he has taken is his recourse to sporadically spectacular special effects. These come close to turning "1408" into a generically chilling thrill-ride of a type that we have taken far, far too many times before. Worse, insofar as they open up and broaden the imagery of the movie, they risk throwing away the sense of claustrophobia that ought to be key to any narrative revolving around the plight of a man unable to escape from one murderous room. That this doesn't happen owes a lot to Mr. Cusack, who is horribly convincing as somebody caught in a trap that not only threatens his life, but also destroys the belief that has come to comfort, define, and enrich it — his conviction that the paranormal is delusion or fraud and that there's nothing that goes bump in the night.

It's no surprise to learn from an interview with Mr. Håfström on www.bloody-disgusting.com (you missed it?), that Mr. King has singled out Mr. Cusack for praise. The author was also, apparently, "very pleased" with the film as a whole. Given the mess that so many others, including, uh, Mr. King himself, have made of transferring his work to screen from print, it's a reasonable response. Even if the master of horror's judgment in this respect is not always sound (famously, he had major objections to the finest King movie of all, Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of "The Shining"), "1408" is a pretty good take on the original story. It's no "Carrie," but it's a long, long way from "The Lawnmower Man."

And if, in the end, it fails to deliver quite so much as the page-turner from which it has sprung, this was probably inevitable. The genius of Mr. King is more verbal than visual. It lurks in that curious mish-mash of the vernacular, the macabre, and the supernatural that he has made his own. In its blowsy excess, cornpone optimism, and bleary disillusion, it's as American as a slightly sour apple pie, yet it's so distinctive that, as Mr. Håfström is the latest to remind us, it is almost impossible to reproduce.

Nevertheless "1408" is well worth checking out. Just don't check in.