The story does well in providing the protagonist with a painful past and with a longing for the other side that's at least as intense as the audience's.
At times, it seems like a metaphor for a bad LSD trip. But it's also a chamber of hallucination, a space outside time, and a place where the unconscious is unleashed. In a sense, the triumph of the film is that, having grabbed the audience through its sure-fire cleverness, it engages and holds attention through its complexity.
#Hollywood horror movie room 1408 skin#
From start to finish, it remains a pleasure to watch our hero get tortured, and the movie's frights are well-earned: "1408" gets underneath the viewer's skin in a psychological way. Director Mikael Hafstrom ("Derailed") never resorts to the cheap device of trying to shock us with disgusting visuals - or scare us by threatening to disgust us. Though "1408" is a more genuinely scary movie than most horror films, it maintains a certain geniality with regard to its audience. Once Cusack has that key in his hand, the audience is in for the duration. Laugh at the obviousness of it all - I did - and yet include yourself in the joke, because there's no walking away from this one. This is the old stuff, the good stuff, the tried-and-true stuff of shrewdly accomplished audience manipulation. Yet Mike Enslin, a popular true-horror writer and debunker, checks in for the night, anyway. One woman went insane and blinded herself after 10 minutes. Fifty-six people have ended up dead, some of suicide, the rest of supposedly natural causes. The care that went into "1408" is especially appreciated, as a perfectly acceptable horror movie could have been made on the basis of its premise alone: There's an evil room - 1408 - in a New York hotel. Remembering that horror movies are essentially stories of the spirit, the filmmakers provide enough rough gothic poetry to answer the yearnings behind horror - the audience's desire for a world beyond this one. It puts in motion an irresistibly watchable situation - and then delivers by giving us more than just the clever setup. "1408" is one of the good Stephen King adaptations, one that maintains its author's sly sense of humor and satiric view of human nature.
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