Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Mike didn't destroy whatever was haunting the room at the end of the movie; he set it free.
The bricks that appear to seal off the room have 'burn me alive' carved into them, which the movie makes a point of having him notice twice. He thought that he was heroically sacrificing himself to kill the evil force by destroying the room, but it actually put the idea into his head on purpose because once the room is destroyed (or rather, destroyed by something "real" instead of its own powers; as Mike said "fire is real") the ghost or whatever it is is no longer trapped within it and can go out in the world as it pleases. Its attempts to stop the fire by turning on the sprinklers were actually it goading him into making the fire larger by making him think it was working, since initially it wasn't strong enough to completely destroy the room.Its earlier attempts to drench and freeze him were also working towards that goal, since he had no way to keep himself warm apart from making a fire. Which did work slightly, except that he only made a tiny one instead of a large blaze.
Expanding on that...
- That actually makes since in the Director's Cut ending. Where after the room burns down, and Mike dies. As Mr. Olin is listening to Mike's audio tape in the graveyard, he sees a image of Mike's Corpse grinning at him. It was set free (In that ending's continuity)
And expanding on THAT
- All four endings seem to point to the possibility that the room is free.
- In both endings where Mike survives, he plays the tape of his conversation with his daughter. In one ending the wife hears it and in the other she doesn't. However it shows that what happened in that room really did happen, at least, to him.
- In the other ending where he dies, Sam somehow gets a hold of the manuscript of 1408 and as he reads it, voices can be heard drowning out all sound. It's implied that his office becomes the next 1408.
- All four endings seem to point to the possibility that the room is free.
The entity in the room has possessed Mike.
Once released from the burning room, the entity had to hide somewhere to recoup its strength, as the process of losing its previous home for the past 54 years took a lot out of it. So it entered the handiest new host - Mike. It knew that once the fire alarm was set off, people would be evacuated, and once Mrs. Enslin arrived (brought by its hijacked video chat instructions) she would make sure the rescue team knew Mike was up there. Mike laughing like a maniac in the burning room was the sound of all the entity's plans coming together like a well-oiled machine.The point where it makes itself known to the audience is at the very end, when the interference that was distorting the salvaged tape recorder suddenly goes away, and we hear the sound of their dead daughter, clear as a bell, on the tape. Either it voluntarily removed the distorting effect, or else it manifested that remembered voice in the device.
All the suicides through jumping out the window have been partially-successful possessions that went wrong at the last moment.
While it could be reasonably theorized that the people were just trying to escape the "Groundhog Day" Loop, it is also plausible that 1408 was riding along, trying to get out as well. The trouble was, it was unable to fully take control to force them to do what it wanted, but it could use its talent for the Mind Screw to make them more receptive to possession. What it needed afterwards was not somebody trying to escape (as its express check-out system is necessarily fatal), but somebody leaving involuntarily, or at least not under their own power. 1408 allowed Mike to take away that recording of his dead daughter's voice as a reward for being the first to escape its clutches.
... turning the room into the Genius Loci equivalent of Jigsaw. 1408 works exactly the same as Silent Hill.
Only 1408 is its more subtle, smart cousin. Or, alternatively, 1408 is a Silent Hill town in a larval stage. It feeds off of death and/or tragedy. Silent Hill has had more victims, hence the size. The only reason 1408 hasn't expanded at a wildfire rate is thanks to the efforts of the hotel's manager, who makes sure it never gets a surplus of agony or death that it'd require to grow.- Or if we accept the notion of parallel universes existing, 1408 is this universe's equivalent to Silent Hill, or how the town manifests in that universe.
1408 is somehow related to IT
Both are experts in the arts of Mind Screw and Mind Rape, both use their victim's primal fears and insecurities against them, and both seem to be able to warp reality around them to their existence. 1408 was, unlike It, somehow trapped in that one location.- IT also appears to have little or no influence outside Derry, perhaps 1408 is an area for one of IT's supposed children, who needs much fewer victims in its young age.
- In that case the horribly colored light mentioned in the novella, which briefly starts to entice a bystander, could be a developing form of Deadlights.
The true form of 1408 is that thing in the vents.
It'd work well with the last theory. Besides, when Mike begins to burn the room down, the thing in the vents is the one to yell at him. Why doesn't the room use an illusion, the TV, or even the radio? Simple, because the room wanted to say it itself. All the people who have died in 1408 are still trapped there.
Consider Mike's visions (hallucinations?) of the previous victims. Each of these is a victim who decided to take advantage of the room's "express checkout"... and is now trapped in the room, reliving their hour of hell over and over again. How many times has that one woman thrown herself out the window? How many times has the sewing machine salesman slashed open his throat? How many times has that one victim drowned in his chicken soup? The room is a thinny.
You enter the room and find an evil entity on the other side of the door. This makes sense if it's a small thinny that takes you to a place where everything is malevolent. Perhaps a guest bedroom in Le Casse Roi Russe? Mike was in no physical danger at all.
Everything that happened in the room was an illusion, created from his darkest fears and regrets, so everything that goes on during his stay is in his own mind. The wound he gets from the window could be explained away as just a wiggy window sash, but notice how quickly everything else is "reset" once the countdown is over. That said, though, being dragged kicking and screaming through one's own personal hell, illusion or not, did put him in quite a lot of psychological danger... 1408 is an Eldritch Abomination.
... or at least a part of one that feeds on fear and anguish and any other negative emotion you can think of. Imagine an impossibly huge creature, living just under the surface of what we recognize as reality. It has a number of tendrils, each ending in a mouth of sorts, which it extends to the surface (our world, for those of you keeping score) to feed - not necessarily on meat, though this is often a nice bonus - but on emotions, which it needs to survive. Each mouth is not really an orifice as we might recognize it, but it takes the shape of something we might find comfortable and familiar, like an ordinary hotel room. Like many species of ambush predators, this functions as a lure to get its prey inside, and once the trap is sprung, it begins to feed, injecting a number of illusory tortures into the mind of its prey in order to get what it needs to survive. Destroying 1408 only cripped one such mouth, and it has more... If someone who was completely satisfied with their life tried to stay in 1408...
- Possibility 1: They would have a pleasant stay in a perfectly ordinary hotel room, because 1408 has nothing to feed on.
- Possibility 2: There would be a blank wall behind the door. 1408 simply isn't interested in this prey.
- Possibility 3: There would be an empty black void behind the door. No fears or regrets, no manifestation.
- Possibility 4: It would ultimately kill 1408.
Building on the above...
The only certain way to kill 1408
Have an experienced Buddhist monk stay the night there and contemplate Mu all night. The room wanted to be killed
It showed Mike "burn me alive," which given its general reality warping properties, it did not have to do. All the people it's killed, it was trying to make them fight back but they were all too weak. The room was in as much pain and misery as the people in it, and now it's at peace.- Now that we have a trope for this, it's the location version of Tortured Monster.
The room itself sent the postcard.
Both endings show that the room can manifest some of its power outside itself. If this is the case, it could also prevent itself from being covered up or shut down, or could just move somewhere else. Since when were you under the impression there were any limitations on its powers? Movie!Mike was having a crisis of faith after Katie died.
I know Mike was an atheist when everything started, but bear with me. Mike didn't believe in God or any sort of afterlife, which made Katie's illness and death doubly hard on him. He turned to investigating haunted sightings in the hopes of gaining proof - any sort of proof - that there was some form of existence after death, so he could rest assured that Katie Enslin didn't simply cease to exist when she died. His sensible mind simply wouldn't allow him to take things on faith, but despite the stories he was told, he saw no proof that there was an afterlife. In the middle of all the hell 1408 put him through, he did finally see proof of the paranormal, therefore proof of an afterlife, and therefore was reassured that the flame that was Katie Enslin lived on somewhere. That was his daughter the room brought back.
The room has brought shades and ghosts of people who have died in it, in addition to recreating or duplicating many people. How do we know it didn't just bring her back to torture him?- This is entirely possible... and you are depraved for putting that thought into my mind.
1408 is an insane TARDIS!
It's been established that TARDISes are alive and have personalities. It wouldn't be much a stretch to say some could go mad and homicidal. Perhaps it was a survivor from the The Last Great Time War. Maybe it lost its Time Lord. Maybe it killed its Time Lord. Makes me wonder what that thing in the vents really is...- Maybe the thing in the vents is its Time Lord...
- Man, this actually would fit.
Alternatively, it's an extremely broken, much smaller version of the hotel from the God Complex, and the thing in the vents is a dying Minotaur.
- It would be dying since Minotaurs feed on faith, and the healthy-ish one in The God Complex went through three victims in two days. It's starving to death because a) Olin is keeping the room from pulling in too many people, and b) because the room is malfunctioning badly enough that the circuits are unable to deduce which people have a strong faith to fall back on and which do not, and also goes over the top with the whole "nightmares from the id" thing. The rooms in the only-slightly-broken hotel produce one thing per person, and are supposed to get rid of the thing once the person is dead. 1408 produces as many things as possible per person, but, unlike the hotel, is able to remove these things when it's finished. And since the Minotaur is too weak to kill its victims itself, 1408 does that for it, as it's established that the prisons do not allow the Minotaurs to die, even when they want to. Because of this and the Body Horror of shrinking from starvation, the Minotaur has become vicious and unhinged, hence why it attacked Mike when he entered the vents (also because it's hungry, and crazy enough to hang on to any food offered it tenaciously).
1408 is a being like the Overlook Hotel.
Here's the theoretical stages of development for a Genius Loci in the Kingverse:- Stage 1: 1408. A single room possessing an alien, but malevolent, intelligence.
- Stage 2: The Overlook Hotel. After feeding for a while, the room's influence expands to encompass and entire building. IIRC the weird mojo in Overlook seemed to start out in a single room, but after a while the whole hotel turned bad.
- Stage 3: Derry. By this time people don't really notice the thing feeding, since it's always been like that. Pennywise is just a limb or extremity, something it uses to feed.
the woman who was locked in the bathroom was there for much longer than a few minutes.
Who knows how long she'd been in there, when you take into account the resetting?? He never escaped.
It would be just like the room to pull that stunt twice just for extra punch. In the alternate ending the twist would be that Samuel L. was actually the victim the whole time. His punishment is knowingly subjecting people to the room no matter how hard he tries to get people to say no. 1408 is canon with Silent Hill.
Silent Hill exists in that continuity. But a bunch of loggers were traveling through Silent Hill, and chopped down some trees and took them out of the town (Because Silent Hill allowed them to) the trees were brought to whatever city the hotel is in (Maine?) and were used to build walls in many of the rooms. Silent Hill was seeped in the wood, and traveled from the wood, through the hotel centering on one spot. 1408. So basically 1408 is a compressed version of Silent Hill.
Whatever 1408 is, it isn't actually evil, it's altruistic.
Whatever 1408 is, it's a purely spiritual entity. It know, not believes strongly, but actually knows, what happens when you die. And apparently, whatever is on the other side is better than life. Or it seems that way to something that was never alive. It understands human pain and anguish intellectually, but having never actually experienced them first hand, doesn't fully understand the impact it has on the psyche of it's victims. It just shows you how much your life sucks and that you should kill yourself, because it knows you'll be better off once you do, like a doctor cutting off a gangrenous limb before a patient dies completely. Only in this case, the gangrenous limb is the physical body.
Mr. Olin is the one in the room.
At the end of the movie, he hears the Katie's voice on the tape. That should be impossible unless he is in the room. He admits that he has entered the room in the past, even if only for a few minutes. The room doesn't care how long you've been in there; as soon as you take a step in, you're trapped. Mike drowned at the start of the film, and is in purgatory.
If you think about it, the near-drowing scene at the beginning serves no purpose if it wasn't all just a dream. Mike died and is in purgatory, but overcomes them at the end and is allowed to leave the room and go to Heaven.- There’s a few details that could hint at this: The boat painting, Mike hearing the sounds of waves, being drenched & cold
- In said drowning scene, both times, there’s no explanation for how he got back to shore. He goes under, comes to on the sand with someone walking up to discover him.
The entire film takes place in the room
Mike has been in the room since before the movie began, and it's just him reliving chapters from his life over and over between bouts of torture and mad psychological torment. The room was never limited to just the room.
In addition to the mysterious origin of the postcard, there's also the fact that the room hasn't simply been excised, that we know of. Also, Mr. Olin was only manager during the most recent four deaths, so we must wonder what happened to the previous manager(s), and the thoughts of the company that allows this room to exist. Quite possibly, the room reaches out from its confines, either mentally or physically, allowing it to either continue or grow. This may also be evidenced in it planting the thought of arson in Enslin's mind, and the tape in all film endings. (Short story) There really is a toxic gas in room 1408
Some of the effects of being in room 1408 are consistent with being poisoned by a gas leak.- Mike suffers vertigo, hallucinations, confusion, and weakness, all of which are consistent with hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide poisoning.
- The air in the room seems stale to Mike.
- Hydrocarbon poisoning causes heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events, which is consistent with the thirty "natural" deaths recorded in the room.
- Getting closer to the room, closing the door, and staying longer all make the effect worse.
- Mike starts thinking that Olin must be gassing him when his Sanity Slippage inside the room starts getting worse.
Mike survived because he believed in his lucky Hawaiian shirt
Mike jokes about how he's going to be okay because he has his lucky Hawaiian shirt, but he's not entirely kidding - and in the end it's setting his shirt on fire that lets him escape. Room 1408 initially did not think Mike was worth the trouble
Assuming Mike's interaction with the technician is not a fabrication of the Room, than the Room knew that Mike was a cynic who was aware of the backstory of the Room and did not want to bother with Mike Enslin since he would be a much tougher target to drive insane than other guests. Hence its attempts to scare him off multiple times, such as by looping him to the elevator, leaving the chocolates on the bed, turning up the heat, temporarily jamming the door, asking if he would like to "check out" and fixing the toilet paper. Neither Mike nor Olin mention these kinds of stories since the Room usually prefers outright killing/maiming to scaring, so it seems the Room treated Mike differently than other guests by giving him constant outs. This may be because it primarily relies on psychic attacks, and someone who would be aware that the Room is evil and trying to get him to commit suicide was far harder to attack on those grounds. It's only after Mike pushes it too far that Room 1408 feels that its been sufficiently challenged, and tries to take on the task of driving Mike crazy.- As further evidence of this, when creating an hallucination of Olin, the Room seems angered that Mike thought he could handle being in the Room despite the warnings. This makes it seem as though the Room is enraged by his hubris and would have initially preferred if he just stayed away.
