passage, documenting the nerve games the room starts playing on its new resident, is a visual textbook in disorienting Mike and the audience. Not the revelation of the boogie man, but the dawning suspicion, then the sureness, that everything in these familiar surroundings is subtly, horribly off.
Hâfström, a Swedish director making his second movie in English, knows that a horror film's greatest weapon is the viewer's apprehension: the fear of what's to come. The year's second highest-grossing horror movie (after Disturbia, another guy-trapped-in-a-room thriller), 1408 marks the genre's continuing rehabilitation from lovingly detailed mutilation back to the honorable business of scaring the audience witless with, for the most part, indirection and innuendo.
#Hollywood horror movie room 1408 professional#
In other words, Mike is your basic Stephen King hero: he has the professional motive and expertise to explode the legend of 1408 as well as the emotional susceptibility to buy into it. He's come from his new home in California back to his old city, New York, whence he abandoned his wife (McCormack) after the death of their 10-year-old daughter (Anthony). If superstitious people are afraid of a building's 13rd floor, why would they check into a hotel room on the 14th floor which is just the 13th, with a markup? Room 1408 (the digits add up to 13) in Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel is said to have a cursed history: 56 deaths in 95 years, says the place's manager (Jackson, who's billed above the title but is here basically to warn the hero against undergoing exactly the ordeal we came to see).Ī reputation for mayhem is just the sort of cachet that appeals to Mike Enslin (Cusack), a writer of spookraking haunted-house exposés. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Jasmine Jessica Anthony Director: Mikael Hâfström Writers: Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, from a story by Stephen King
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