Warning – spoilers ahead.
The wife roped me into watching 1408, a horror movie based on a Stephen King short story. I get the feeling that Stephen King just really doesn’t like hotels.
The film stars John Cusack, who plays Mike Enslin, a world-weary, cynical paranormal investigator, who doesn’t really believe in the supernatural. The opening scene of the movie has Mike driving in the rain and arriving at a little out of the way hotel. He tries to check in but the proprietors are too busy telling him about the “haunting” to give him his room key. He spends the night and finds absolutely no sign of paranormal activity.
He has a book signing, selling copies of his books on paranormal encounters, where only three people are in attendance. One fan approached him with a copy of an older book, presumably fiction, that she says is great and would like him to write more like it, but Mike says that was a different guy. She asks if the relationship between the father and son in the book was true, and Mike says ‘No.’ I get the feeling we’re supposed to take that to mean that it really was.
He goes surfing but gets distracted right as a wave comes, that knocks him off his board and drags Mike under the water. Mike comes to on the beach, coughing up water, as some guy runs up to find out if Mike is OK.
Finally Mike gets a lead on the Dolphin hotel in New York, where room 1408 is said to be actively haunted. Mike tries to book he room and is firmly rejected by the registration clerk. Mike has to get his publisher and the company’s lawyer involved so he can rent the room.
Mike goes to check in and the registration system flags him and shows an alert on the screen that the registering agent should talk to the manager before letting Mike have a room. The manager comes out (played by the ever wonderful Samuel L. Jackson) and has a conversation with Mike, giving him dire warnings about not staying in room 1408. Mike, of course, ignores him and takes the room anyway.
Then things start getting weird. And this is why I don’t like horror movies. Mike goes through a series of weird events, that just keep getting stranger. He sees ghosts of the people who previously killed themselves in the room. There are jump scares, of someone coming up behind Mike and swinging a blade at him, which never connects and the lunatic is gone when he turns around. Mike gets locked into the room and can’t escape. The clock radio goes nuts and starts a 60 minute countdown.. The walls crack and start bleeding. He tries climbing out the window and walking along the edge (catering to the fear of heights crowd) to get to another room, but all the other widows have mysteriously vanished. He crawls in the air ducts, while something tries to catch him (catering to the fear of enclosed spaces crowd) before finally being deposited back in room 1408.
There is a brief moment where he encounters his dad, sitting in a wheelchair in the bathroom. His dad tells Mike that he was once as Mike is, and Mike will be what his dad is now.
There are hints that Mike’s marriage went bad and his daughter, Katie, died. Mike tries using his computer to contact his ex-wife, holding a video chat with her. He desperately tries to get her to call the police ad sed hem to the Dolphin hotel, when the version of him we can see in the chat window tells her to come down to the hotel. Mike of course is screaming for her to not come and she hangs up and the video chat version of Mike winks at him.
There is one point where after the pressure on Mike has built up, he goes through the surf scene again, but this time ends up in the hospital with his x at his bedside. She tells him that the surfboard hit him in the head. Mike is disoriented but he recovers. Things are good, he’s back with his ex, he’s writing and life is peachy. He takes his manuscript to the Post Office but the clerk tells him they are closed. Mike looks around. There is a construction crew there. The clerk, ad the crew, are all members of the Dolphin hotel staff. They start smashing everything until it is revealed that Mike, surprise surprise, is really still in room 1408.
Mike nearly has a breakdown when his daughter Katie shows up. Mike has a small tape recorder he uses to make notes during his investigations and it is running while Katie is there. She asks if Mike loves her and tells him that she doesn’t have much time, that they won’t let her stay. Mike tells he loves her and tries to hold on to her, only to have her die in his arms again. Then she crumbles into dust. The clock radio counts down to zero.
Mike gets a phone call. The room is back to normal. The voice on the other end says Mike can relive the last hour over again for eternity, or he can use their express checkout service. A noose drops down from the ceiling. Mike tells the voice he’ll check out but not their way. The voice tells him his wife called, she’s five minutes away, and they’ll send her up when she arrives. He gets a bottle of booze, stuffs a rag in it and sets the room on fire.
As Mike is lying on the floor ready to die, firefighters break in and rescue him.
Later he is back home with his ex, writing. She picks up a box and tells him he should get rid of it all. He pulls his tape recorder out and tells her to dump the rest. He plays the recording and after a few of his notes he comes across the recording of Katie. Mike looks up at his ex and she heard it too. Movie ends.
I don’t like the chaos and lack of structure. It annoys me. I also don’t like ambiguous endings. They too annoy me. Are we to assume his ex is now a part of his Hell and he hasn’t really escaped room 1408 and will go through all the chaos again for all eternity? I guess in that sense, the movie did its job. It left me annoyed and irritated. I guess I’m supposed to go back to my normal life now, secure in the knowledge that I don’t have to go through something like that?
I don’t get why people find this entertaining. Are their lives so perfect they need to experience something so disjointed and chaotic to make them feel something positive?
If you’ve got any insight into the matter, my Hordeling, leave a comment and let me know.
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