Film One of King's better takes on Lovecraftian horror, badly translated to film
Stephen King rarely dips into the Lovecraftian well; most of his stories revolve around the strongly drawn, compelling characters which are arguably his greatest strength as a writer. Probably for that very reason, when he does play the "universe full of vast, deadly, incomprehensible horrors" card, it doesn't always work out well for him.
"1408" is one of his better efforts — perhaps his best yet — in this rather difficult realm, largely because it's a lot subtler than, for example, "Crouch End". Instead of explicitly invoking Yog-Sothoth and so forth, King simply draws the reader a concise, compelling picture of a deadly genius loci and lets it speak for itself. The film expands considerably on the source material, and therein lies its fatal flaw; King's story, hardly more than an extended vignette of three characters — Olin, Enslin, and the titular room — gives just enough detail to get the point across, and leaves the rest to the reader.
Unfortunately, the screenwriters fail to recognize that much of the story's virtue lies in its concision; in the effort to eke a feature-length film out of it, they lard it with a lot of unnecessary and pointless fillips that take away most of the punch. The result is a fairly generic and frankly somewhat dull psychological horror flick which, despite a couple of genuinely effective moments, leaves the viewer with no lasting impression save a vague sense of two hours wasted.
The film is an interesting study in cinematography, and possibly of interest to students of the field. The story is worth any reader's time, as is most everything else in Everything's Eventual, the anthology in which it appears.
Film Straightforward, Generic Horror
1408's plot is relatively straightforward, with the numerous twists the story takes being sadly predictable. This reduces the movie to nothing more than a series of terrible things happening to a man - a potentially engaging narrative, if only the movie gave us any reason to care about the protagonist or his fate. It should be noted that this is no fault of the actor, who gives an excellent performance. And while it is not unusual for a horror movie to have a shallow plot and boring characters, there is nothing in 1408 that is particularly frightening, at least not to anyone who has seen a horror movie or two before.
Film Possibly my favorite Stephen King horror concept.
Stephen King has already made the most famous scary hotel story, so to even approach the concept again, he'd have to do something different with it. And oh boy, does he.
Writer Mike Enslin lives a lonely existence making airport-grade haunted travel guides, and has few fans...and those who are fans liked his older, personal novels. One day, Enslin gets a note telling him about 1408, a room at the Dolphin Hotel that nobody has ever survived a night in. Steadfast manager Olin warns Mike that it isn't any familiar phenomenon you could chalk up to ghosts—it's just an "evil fucking room". And that's just what we get.
As Mike, having bullied his way into staying, discovers, the room is perhaps atmospherically lacking, but normal. And still, the yellow coloring and decor all serve to make the space uncomfortable. Soon, impossible events start to occur, jolting Mike, and he realizes Olin was absolutely right.
1408 isn't haunted, per se, no matter how typical of hauntings things start out. 1408 isn't really a room. It's a pocket of its own reality, such that anything experienced or perceived past the threshold is subject to doubt. The outside may not even be "outside" anymore, and the space warps over time. The room also seems to have a cartoonish spitefulness in its precise torture of Mike, demonstrating its sentience in such pinpoint cruelty that it's nearly ridiculous. But the surrealist oppression where its boundaries and the nature of what outside factors are real or not keeps it scary. 1408 is like the narrative side of the SCP media catalogue, detailing an anomaly from a personal lens. The film is always creepy and keeps you on edge, and a few revelations about how encompassing and deceptive the room is are chilling in execution.
The story progresses as an allusion to Dante's Hell while also unpeeling the past of Mike Enslin through conjurations of the room as psychological torture. Mike's stay in 1408 is a journey of conquering his demons to defeat the room itself, as if the room is a Hell he needs to prove himself unworthy of. He even learns about the room after nearly drowning, setting up an afterlife parallel early, though I don't think this is to say Mike ever actually dies—just that his living experiences in this horrific space are a metaphorical death and damnation.
This film is mostly a standout to me for the concept of 1408 itself and its strong exection, but that's a big standout and the rest of the film is good, too. King managed to do two great scary hotels that feel nothing alike.