1408

When reviewing a new Stephen King adaptation, the standard thing to do is point out the hit and miss nature of the many adaptations that have gone before. That's the extent of my bowing to tradition on that score; point given. The latest addition to this canon, '1408', is the tale of a debunker of the paranormal staying in a purportedly haunted hotel. Received wisdom (and something King himself often agrees with) is that King takes standard tropes of the horror genre 6 vampires in 'Salem's Lot', a haunted house/hotel in 'The Shining' - and injects new blood into them. Here is another case in point.The tale of the sceptic spending a night in a haunted room is an old one ( tales by W.W. Jacobs, Sir Walter Scott, and W. H. Hodgeson immediately come to mind). However, this is a gross simplification of King's work, and he has come up with more than his fair share of original stories too - a possessed car in 'Christine', a rabid St Bernard in 'Cujo'. His haunted places such as the Overlook Hotel, or its little brother, Room 1408 in The Dolphin, are rarely simply haunted places. Like Christine, they are 'born' bad, inanimate objects imbued with an alien malignancy (a more humdrum instance of Lovecraft's cosmic evil, you might say). Room 1408 causes death and madness from the outset and as such is not above using the victim's own mind against them.

Here it helps to have a strong central performance to anchor the psychological games being played, and John Cusack, as the investigating writer, delivers. He adds a class to the movie, it doesn't really warrant. (Samuel L. Jackson, good though he is, doesn't really deserve the half of the poster he gets; in every scene, this is resolutely Cusack's movie). It's just a shame that the result is so unoriginal. This is partly the fault of King's story which is at heart a shopping list of his past ideas. Besides the obvious 'Shining' examples, we get the ledge walk from 'Cat's Eye', and even an axe wielder, cigarette gimmick and lost manuscript from 'Misery'. The standard family tragedy is trotted out once more for some character development, lending Cusack the humanity his smart-aleck patter might otherwise hide. Len Cariou gets wheeled on as Cusack's father, but there is a feeling here that what had been intended as a more relevant part of Cusack's history has been removed, or at least pared down.

In the end then, '1408', is a popcorn movie, full of bumps and screams, but lacking any intellectual bite. Fine, you say, all I want is a frightfest; leave the philosophising to the others. Fine, but when you do leave the cinema you won't have Cusack's dictaphone to remind you of what you've just been through. You'd probably need it.