Noah's Reviews > 1408

Frightened by the bite, though / It's no harsher than the bark / The middle of adventure / Such a perfect place to start (505 – Arctic Monkeys).

You know how every YouTube video's comment section is now full of bot comments collecting "likes" by saying easily digestible relatable phrases like “anybody here in [enter year here]?” Because damn, scrolling down any music video from even a year ago and seeing a wall of the same comment is almost as maddening as staying in room 1408 for a couple minutes (#segue). Yeah well, I think it would be kind of funny if I started doing that from now on. 2025 anyone? Anyone reading 1408 in 2025!? This was a trip, so let’s talk about it! In 1408 we follow Mike Enslin, a schlock horror writer who travels around getting material for what he calls "book essays" that chronicle his first-hand experiences in dealing with the supernatural. And because Buzzfeed wasn’t around back then, good ole Mikey has to do all the heavy lifting himself; camping out in graveyards, sleeping in creaky old houses, braving ghoulish haunts, the works! You know how it is, “very superstitious, writing's on the wall!” And it’s because he finds himself stuck, his writing forever trapped in a constant loop of mediocrity, that he stumbles on the Golden Goose of all haunted kick-it spots; room 1408 of The Dolphin, a hotel situated right in New York city! Cool, one measly room being haunted in a big ass hotel doesn’t seem like a big deal, so what could go wrong? Plenty apparently, because while hotel manager Mr. Olin's pleas for him to stay the fuck away clues Mike in on the fact that there's something terribly wrong with the room, he's also aware that he may have stumbled on the best story possible for his clickbait novels. He's going in there, even if it kills him! Dun dun dunnn! Famous last words, by the way, but at least he's brave enough to do actual field research. Like, he's a writer, so he could have easily just made a bunch of stuff up. And look, a lot of the drama in the story is centered around the fact that Mike is clearly walking into catastrophe and literally everyone knows he's doomed, but what separates 1408 from a lot of other horror stories with frustratingly incompetent protagonists is that it’s also made abundantly clear that Mike… doesn’t really have much in the way of a choice in the matter. Sure, you could say that he was courting disaster by being so haughty in his disbelief towards the paranormal, but acting with blatant disregard is literally his job! How was he supposed to know that this hotel room was the one that would end up ruining his life!? I mean, me personally? I would have hightailed it out of there as soon as the creepy manager started waxing poetic about the room all but having its own evil miasma poisoning the hotel staff with various diseases over the years, but then again I wouldn’t make for a very compelling horror protagonist. I’m just saying that even though Mike acted exactly like every husband character in a found footage horror movie (disbelief in the supernatural to an obnoxious degree), he was still a fascinating main character because his desperate yearning for something to reignite the spark in his relationship with writing felt palpable enough to make his journey in room 1408 truly heartbreaking in addition to the typical devastation.

Okay, here’s the part where I tell you that I saw the movie version with my dad when I was a kid. I saw the movie version of 1408 with my dad when I was a kid. At the time I didn't even know it was based on a Stephen King novel and I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t like it very much because, well, it’s not very good, but there’s something about watching a horror movie when you’re young that informs who you’ll be for the rest of your life. Okay, that’s a little dramatic, but I do still hold onto quite a bit of fondness for the film (to the point where I’m calling it a “film” rather than a “movie”), not only because it features a really fun performance from Samuel L. Jackson as Mr. Olin (and a passable enough performance from John Cusack), but also solely for that one scene where Cusack’s Mike is trying to escape the room by climbing out of the window and signaling for help only for him to see that the person he’s looking at across the street is mirroring his movements exactly, showcasing that he is hopelessly stuck. Basically, that scene gave me nightmares, and I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t in the book version. But that's okay, because 1408 was still incredibly effective due to how relentless and unbearable it was in describing the all encompassing claustrophobia and madness that overwhelms every room guest. The cold analytical prose in the aftermath of Mike’s stay in the room juxtaposes wonderfully with the cuts to his real-time perception of the hellish experience. I’ve always thought it was a good thing that horror literature can’t rely on jump-scares to do all the work for them because they then have to actually be creative with the horror, and this book gets its point across by focusing on the grotesque. 1408 is quite short and Mike’s stay in the room is even shorter, but we still feel every minute due to the excruciating detail given to every horribly fucked up thing happening to Mike. From the creepy paintings switching every time Mike blinks to the walls taking on a skin-like texture, this is the example of how to write a frightening descent into madness. It’s all very The Yellow Wallpaper in that regard, but whereas that serves mostly as a critique of a patriarchal society, 1408 seems to work better as a metaphor for more introspective personal struggles like drug addiction, self-worth from a lens of toxic masculinity, and most of all… writers going through a terrible bout of writer’s block. The horror! Otherwise, I kind of loved how Mike only lasted for seventy minutes in the room, because while that’s good news for any of his sexual partners, it’s hardly impressive when going toe-to-toe with incomprehensible horrors. Even in the movie he went all night! No but really, the fact that this entire life-changing event happened in such an inconsequential amount of time demonstrated the overwhelming evil of the room without needing to go into superfluous detail. It’s a wonderful use of “show-don’t-tell” story-telling that emphasizes to the readers how little we really understand about… anything really, and helps to highlight an intense fear of the unknowable. Because as we all know, nothing is spookier than what one’s imagination can conjure up!

“He believed too much in nothing. Very unwise behavior. Very unsafe behavior.”