Streamin’ King: Can You Last More Than An Hour In Room ‘1408’?

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching 1408, the 2007 film based on the story from 2002’s collection Everything’s Eventual. Spoiler-light until noted otherwise.

THE GIST: Horror-tourism writer Mike Enslin (John Cusack) checks into a verrry haunted New York City hotel room where 56 people have died and “nobody lasts more than an hour.” The spooky stuff in room 1408 goes on for about an actual hour, during which time Mike gets a Tragic Backstory.

PEDIGREE: Stars Cusack and features Oscar nominee Samuel L. Jackson with small bits from Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub, and The Wire‘s Isiah Whitlock Jr. Directed by Sweden’s Mikael Håfström (Shanghai, Bloodline), penned by Matt Greenberg (Halloween H20, Reign of Fire) and the screenwriter duo Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Goosebumps), with a score by Oscar-winner Gabriel Yared (The English Patient). Was the No. 2–earning Stephen King movie of all time until this fall’s It, grossing $72 million in America and $132 million worldwide. (It‘s now sitting on $653 million; The Green Mile made $287 million.)

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Probably yes, at least once or twice. It’s interesting to see someone simultaneously revere, sizably expand upon, sanitize, and Hollywood-ify one of King’s most twisted miniature thrill rides.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? 1408 is good, even if it’s neither a terrifying horror movie nor a haunting meta commentary (a la The Shining) nor a true surrealist mindfuck. (In the story, Mike, beginning to trip ghost-balls, considers how this “had nothing in common with any haunting or paranormal event he had ever read about,” and King certainly set out to do the same, and achieved it, on the page). It’s good. Not much more, not a lot less.

One of King’s main gripes with Stanley Kubrick’s Shining is that Jack Nicholson tips Jack Torrance’s crazy-hand too quickly versus Novel Jack’s slow-boil. In 1408, by minute 45, Cusack’s pithy, unflappable Mike has suddenly and entirely melted down. He sells some of it well—then oversells the hell out of a bunch more. He and the movie start reaching for generic antics at the exact same pace. But the exchange with Samuel L. Jackson’s cautionary hotel manager is great and too quick.

SPOILERS BELOW

The part where Olin’s in the fridge isn’t so hot, but it gives us that legendary freakout from Cusack, so let’s be twice as thankful Jackson signed on.

The film’s early minutes are its best, which is an issue when what happens in the room is what makes “1408” a short story you can’t forgot, a narrative trauma your imagination can’t get rid of. Here, room 1408’s goofy ghosts are made to look like crackly old TV specters that would have no problem getting work at that institution Mike jokes about, Disney World’s Haunted Mansion. Where the inventiveness of “1408” was devilish and maniacal, many of the movie version’s creepy moments are pulled from the bargain bin; climbing between windows on a ledge, blood oozing from walls, porcelain, dead kids no longer dead. It’s annoying how the room gets so methodically, stages-of-grief–ishly dressed up in each elemental condition available to a $25 million picture with one star—make Mike hot! Now soaked! FROZEN! DRENCHED! Apocalypse-dusty!—and it’d be amazing to know the general hotel room destruction budget. $10 mill?

One genuinely amazing moment is Mike reuniting with his dead daughter for that achingly loving moment only for her to die again, in his arms, with Cusack moaning, “You can’t take her twice.” (Shades of Bill and Georgie in It.)

10 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. In 2016 Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack reteamed for Cell, with a script King adapted from his novel. If it’s even half as good as the novel, it’s a 2.5-alarm garbage fire.
2. 1408 originated in King’s exalted memoir/how-to book On Writing, where he created an example, the start of “The Hotel Story”—”undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts”—to show how he then edits a first draft.
3. A few of Cusack’s lines he tells his recorder about hotels’ inherent creepiness come from the intro King wrote for the final “1408” in Everything’s Eventual. (Every story gets an intro, it’s awesome.)
4. As a whole-story-basically-in-one-room-with-one-person tale, the 1992 novel Gerald’s Game was considered unfilmable for decades before writer/director Mike Flanagan finally got the support to make his excellent Netflix original film this month. But 1408 expanded its source material with the Gerald’s format: memorable repartee, one person/one-room predicament, flashbacks give meaning to predicament/character, writerly epilogue. And it was the No. 2–earning King movie for a decade. It’s ridiculous Jessie Burlingame had to wait on the bench that long.
5. 1408 co-writer Matt Greenberg also scripted 2014’s Mercy, an adaptation of King’s 1984 short story “Gramma,” and was an uncredited writer on Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest.
6. Isiah Whitlock Jr. had a recurring part on this year’s TV series adaptation of The Mist. 
7. Mike encounters a standalone door in the middle of the room, an important Dark Tower device originating in The Drawing of the Three and also appearing in the film.

8. Re: The Dark Tower‘s omnipresence: Mike’s novel The Long Road Home shares a title with a 2008 Marvel Comics TDT adaptation.
9. Mike says the scariest place he’s been is up in King’s Maine turf, over in Bar Harbor. The “McTigue wedding night murders” are made up.
10. Speaking of: Mike’s T-shirt says Wicked Quick, which is evidently a brand, but also just a very Maine thing.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Unremarkably average. 64 on Metacritic, 79% on Rotten Tomatoes.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “1408”: King debuted the story in an audiobook three-pack called Blood and Smoke. He then collected it in Everything’s Eventual, which aside from 1408 has only yielded the film Riding the Bullet.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: Hang on to some of that waxy dyed Halloween candy you for some reason don’t hate, ’cause we’re doing Children of the Corn. The 1984 adaptation of the short story from ’78’s Night Shift has gotten seven screen sequels and a remake and is…a lot to take in. You’ve been warned.

Zach Dionne is on Twitter and also totally stunned by Joe Hill’s new novella collection Strange Weather.

Watch 1408 on Showtime