Olin: So you don't smoke...do you drink? Mike: Of course, I just said I was a writer.
Mr. Olin tries to bribe Mike with a bottle of eight hundred dollar liquor to get him to not stay in the room. Mike accepts, takes a sip and...
Mike: I'm still staying in that room. Olin: Goddammit to hell!
When Mike first enters 1408, there's a lot of buildup. A dramatic shot of Mike turning the key to unlock the door, the room initially cloaked in darkness, a panning shot of the room with tense music... until the music cuts out and Mike says, "This is it? You gotta be kidding me."
Upon entering 1408, Mike deliberately messes with the tissue roll in the bathroom in order to check for supernatural activities, so when he returns and finds said roll neatly folded, he's more amazed than frightened.
The scene where he finds the new chocolates on the pillows he had just been sitting on and then, after running all over 1408, fails to come up with an explanation as to how it occurred.
"Let's Encyclopedia Brown this bitch."
Mike being shocked by the prices of the stuff in the minifridge.
Mike: "Eight dollars for beer nuts? This room is evil."
Mike takes time to describe the very mundane interior and furnishings of 1408, complete with stock artwork and dull wallpaper.
Mike: Some asshole once spoke about the banality of evil. If that's true, then we're in the seventh circle of Hell. *Beat* It's not without its charms.
When Mike asks for somebody to come fix his thermostat, the maintenance man who shows up flatly refuses to actually enter the room, instead telling Mike how to fix the problem himself, saying "any jackass can fix that thing." By the time the issue is resolved, he doesn't even say goodbye, already halfway down the hall when Mike turns to thank him.
After Mike furiously scrambles out of the air vent trying to escape from whatever was crawling around in there and slams onto the floor, he says "It's good to be back." Then, after standing up and taking a moment, he looks to the minifridge and mutters "alcohol".
When he opens the minifridge, he finds Mr. Olin inside talking to him, asking him what he wants, and eventually goading Mike to scream at him and ransack the minifridge in his rage.
"If something should happen, if I should slip and fall, I want it known that it was an accident. The room did not win." The irony being that if he was to fall from the 13th floor his recorder would sure as hell break apart into pieces.
In a twisted sense, the call from the "hotel receptionist" Mike gets after the clock resets to 60, especially because the voice maintains a warm, friendly tone throughout:
Mike: Why don't you just kill me?
Phone: "Because all guests of this hotel enjoy free will, Mr. Enslin. You can choose to relive this hour over and over, or you can take advantage of our express checkout system."
Enslin's reaction to the howling of O'Malley's living corpse in the vents after he's set the room on fire. At this point, he's so completely resigned to his fate and tired by all the crap he went through that merely he quips "keep quiet, you bastard" in utterly nonchalant manner.
Enslin insulting Mr. Olin on his tape (describing him as "the hideous Mr. Olin") for absolutely no reason. In the ending where Enslin dies, Olin himself thinks it's Actually Pretty Funny!
The Short Story
In the original novel, the menu sequence begins like this.
The stuff about the Turnpike Wolves is disturbing, but also pretty funny.
"Remember that if you try to solve the puzzle and fail, you will be put out into the snow beside the Connecticut Turnpike and the wolves will eat you.”
In the short story, there's something darkly hilarious about almost everything Mike winds up saying.
Orpheus on the Orpheum Circuit.
Fuming oranges.
That's not a real plum. That's a plastic plum.
A meta example: In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Steve includes a short excerpt from "1408," as part of one of the appendices teaching the aspiring writer a lesson on editing one's work. (It's the scene in which Mike speaks with Olin in Olin's office.) In the excerpt, the hotel manager's name is "Ostermeyer" instead of "Olin." Why the change? By the time Steve had finished the story, he'd found out that it was probably going to be part of the audiobook Blood and Smoke, which he was going to narrate himself. And, he says, "I didn't want to be sitting in a room saying 'Ostermeyer, Ostermeyer, Ostermeyer' over and over. So I changed it."
