1408 by James Ellaby

Horror films based on Stephen King stories have a very mixed pedigree. For every Carrie or The Shining, there are tons of shoddy adaptations like Cujo or Maximum Overdrive (though as King directed that himself, he can't really blame anyone else), so it is hard to get enthusiastic about yet another one coming out. With Swedish director Mikael Håfström having only released one rather tepid English-language movie before (Derailed) and 1408 hardly one of the best-known King stories even amongst his fanbase, it seemed that only the presence of A-listers like John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson would account for the film even getting a cinema release.

But sometimes appearances can be deceptive. Like room 1408 itself, the film may look underwhelming or nondescript, but there's a lot more below the surface. At a time when horror movies are all either gore-fests or just remakes of Japanese films, Håfström has decided to strip away all of the special effects and creepy children and just tell a good ghost story without any bells and whistles. He doesn't even bother to do anything scary for almost half an hour of the film, which is pretty much unheard of in most modern horror movies, but worked pretty well for that Hitchcock fellow.

As you'd expect from a short story, the plot of 1408 is pretty simple. Mike Enslin is an author-turned-hack who spends his life going from haunted hotel to haunted hotel, writing about them for a series of barely-read books. He doesn't believe in ghosts, but it's a living, eh? Despite his world-weary attitude, his interest in piqued by a postcard from a New York hotel telling him not to go into room 1408. He has to convince hotel manager Samuel L Jackson to let him stay there, not put off by the horrific tales of the 56 people who have been in there before and not lived to tell their own stories.

At first, everything seems to be going according to plan. But then the toilet paper gets folded over. For Enslin, it's rapidly downhill from there. Any film where the star is alone in a hotel room most of the time needs a great actor to fill the role, and the casting of Cusack is a masterstroke as he has the humour (there are some funny moments) and pathos to pull it off and always keep the audience engaged even when nothing more scary is happening than a radio playing The Carpenters of its own accord. And that is the thing about this film, it's about a gradual cranking up of terror rather than a man in a mask jumping out of a wardrobe.

There are some moments to make the audience jump, but it's Cusack's mental disintegration that makes the film scary and memorable, and he convinces as a cross between Martin Sheen in the hotel room scene in Apocalypse Now and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. What makes 1408 though isn't the scariness, it's the underlying tragedy behind it all that slowly emerges through the haunting visions, meaning that there really is more than just a horror film here and the emotional issues are well handled. While it might not be to everyone's tastes, it is a very well made scary movie and one to add to the list of good Stephen King adaptations.