Film Clips	1408 by M. Faust

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Trailer for "1408"

If I were director Mikael Håfström, I’d be pretty pissed off at the Weinstein brothers, who produced his horror thriller 1408. (He certainly wouldn’t be the first.) I don’t know that the Weinsteins particular mucked around with the film, but they certainly did it a disservice with a trailer that gives away everything the movie tries to keep mysterious. Based on a Stephen King story that bears more than a passing resemblance to The Shining (with a tip of the hat to his story “The Ledge” as well), 1408 is named for a room in a proper Manhattan hotel where the management refuses to let guests stay. This comes to the attention of Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a cynical writer who gave up novels for a comfortable living writing cheesy guides to haunted houses. Not that he’s ever found a genuinely haunted one. Needing an ending chapter for his upcoming guide to haunted hotels, he forces his way into a night in 1408, over the sincere pleas of manager Samuel L. Jackson, who tells him that no one has ever lasted an hour in the room. That Mike is in for a nasty night is no surprise, even if you haven’t seen the trailer: It wouldn’t be much of a movie if he just watched TV all night and left in the morning. Håfström adeptly sets up all of this: The movie opens with classic fright film atmospherics, and the relatively lengthy scene between Cusack and Jackson is both ominous and a delightful little actors’ duel. And when Mike gets into 1408 and dares the room to do its worst, we the audience are not disappointed with the results, at least not for awhile. But a horror movie can only coast on arbitrary shocks for so long before it has to justify itself, and that’s where this falls short. If you’ve seen the trailer you already know what haunts Mike’s past; if you haven’t, it’s not all that shocking. If 1408 is eventually a disappointment, it’s largely because it’s so good at what it does prior to pooping out in the home stretch—and that still leaves it a cut above the abattoir tours that otherwise pass for horror movies these days.