1408

All horror flicks are expressionistic, and so all the horrible stuff in them can be given at least a cheap psychological reading – the beasties and slashers and zombies doing their nasty work as stand-ins for the mind's primitive fears.













But the best of the genre tightens the screws on that equation, locking us into a place where empirical logic (“This weirdness can't happen”) loses its protective power and dream logic (“This weirdness can't be happening”) has its freewheeling way. Really wanting to get into our heads, 1408 tries awfully hard to play both sides of logic's boundary line – tries and fails, and then succeeds, only to ultimately fail again. On the whole, the frights are frighteningly erratic.











The source, needless to say, is yet another Stephen King story, where yet another troubled writer is served up as the horror's main target (speaking of cheap psychology). Even by scribblers' standards, Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a scruffy and puffy fellow, although his basic pedigree is familiar enough. You know the type: Used to be talented, once wrote a sensitive novel, but he's squandered his gifts; used to be married, but he's separated from his wife (Mary McCormack), the union done in by the death of their young daughter. Now Mike is reduced to lonely cynicism and to cranking out cut-rate books that debunk the myths of haunted houses and wandering ghosts. Sometimes, he gives readings. Sometimes, as many as four listeners show up.









Of course, our jaded debunker has yet to meet Room 1408, in a New York hotel, where none other than Samuel L. Jackson pops up as the manager, an incongruous little cameo that adds this to the scare quotient: It's a shocking waste of Jackson's gifts.








Anyway, Sam hangs around just long enough to fill us in on the chamber's hit list, its impressive résumé of unnatural deaths, and then he sets the preface: “No one has lasted in it more than an hour.” Since the movie has still got almost an hour-and-a-half to run, expect a new record to be set.















This leaves Cusack, a fine actor with a proud list of credits, to spend considerable time inside the room and alone on the screen, engaged in a solo battle with the camera. He acquits himself pretty well, although his character isn't so lucky. At first, 1408 dishes out nothing more threatening than a broken thermostat, a faulty radio, thin walls and a loose faucet – we've all checked into that stale hell. But quickly the room gets down to some seriously unnerving business, leaving Mike to spot his catatonic double staring back from a neighbouring window, to witness his resurrected daughter on the TV monitor, and, most terrifying of all, to hear his late and unlamented father speak words that few sons want to hear: “As you were, I was; as I am, you will be.”