1408 Movie Review and Analysis Starring Samuel L Jackson and John Cusack

1408 is a movie adaptation of one of the short stories from Stephen King's book ‘Everything's Eventual'. It is one of my favorite stories from the book, along with the brilliantly chilling ‘The Road Virus Heads North' (The one with the painting, anyone else read that?) so I was really looking forward to see how it played out on the big screen. Let me first start by saying, John Cusack was great in this movie. Many of his scenes (In fact nearly all of them come to think of it) were acted out on his own, in a hotel room with no-one else around and yet he manages to keep you entertained and almost as freaked out as his character is through out the majority of the story!

It takes a great actor to be able to do this without losing the viewers interest and I think Cusack pulled this off incredibly well. The plotline is simple, John Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a writer who investigates supposedly haunted hotels around the world and then writes about them for books and newspapers. Enslin is a troubled guy, we realise this pretty early on; his daughter died when she was very young and he and his wife are separated and not on great speaking terms. When Mike hears of a room numbered 1408 at ‘The Dolphin Hotel' he cannot resist checking it out for himself in hope of finally finding real paranormal phenomena.

The manager's apparent reluctance to have him do so only adds to his intrigue and when the two meet up Mike is warned of the room's deadly past. Samuel L Jackson plays Gerald Olin the hotel manger who does everything in his power to warn him of the deaths that have previously happened there but the investigator in Mike refuses to back down, he's convinced that the manager's stories are simply the same old scares he is used to being fobbed off with by previous hotel owners he has encountered, desperate for the extra trade that a good ghostly review can do for their business.

Mike eventually checks into the room and is almost immediately thrown into the terror and turmoil that lurks behind its doors. What I loved about this movie, and I'm sure some of you will agree is that it did a fantastic job of building the tension and then running with it. Some of the early scenes in the hotel room had my heart racing and I love that fact that although it had a few of those classic ‘jump from your seat' scares the majority of them were psychological, creepy and down right freaky stuff! The early tension and brilliant scares were somewhat spoiled for me however when things began to get a little loopy.

Bleeding walls, the scene in which John Cusack gets a teensy bit cold and resorts to making a camp fire in the middle of the hotel room for warmth, stuff like that! They were fun to watch, don't get me wrong, and the effects were great but I did feel that the sense of creepiness had disappeared leaving me feeling a little let down. It does recover well from this though with some pretty cool twists and turns that keep you guessing until the end. I thought it was a shame that we didn't see more of Sam Jackson's character as he was great to watch, but I guess with the plotline being the way it is that would have been hard.

The whole film had a very strong essence of ‘The Shining' about it and whilst it didn't quite manage to live up to such a classic it was refreshing to see a horror movie that really tries to get into the heads of the viewers and provides psychological scares as well as the obvious jumpy moments. After watching the movie it really got me thinking as to how scary hotel rooms actually are. You never know who has slept there before you, if they were sick, dying, mentally ill - OK I'm stretching here but you catch my drift,lol. 1408 is a refreshingly different kind of horror movie to the ones we have recently seen come out of Hollywood, I'd recommend it to fans of John Cusack and Stephen King or anyone who likes supernatural, psychological horror movies. I hear they are also set to make a movie adaptation of another Stephen King book; Cell. That should be interesting and I can't wait to see what they do with it. Feel free to leave your thoughts on 1408 and Stephen King movies here!