Halloween in July?

By some Howard Hawksian rule of horror movies where all you need is three good scares and no exceptionally dull moments, 1408 is a good horror film.  If much of a movie is going to be spent in the company of only one actor, John Cusack is a reasonably good choice–expressive, charismatic, and likable but still enough of a jerk to be unpredictable.  And if you’re going to go all-in on a fun B-movie feel, spooky rather than restrained, of course Samuel L. Jackson is going to be your designated hotel manager who Provides an Ignored Warning.

The problem is that the film’s style and ambitions aren’t on speaking terms with each other.  1408 is rollercoaster horror, good cheesy fun, except for when it wants you to seriously care about John Cusack’s dead daughter or his troubled relationship with his father.  Cusack’s Mike Enslin is a Hollywood-style skeptic, one who doesn’t believe in God or ghosts not because sometimes people don’t but because he has suffered significant trauma.   This is the kind of heavy-handedness that you don’t want or need in a plotline that quests futilely after emotional impact.  It might be more forgivable if the subtlety-via-sledgehammer-blows were the only times the movie tried for subtlety at all–then it could all be fun camp, where even the seriousness is Sturm-und-Drang.  But the movie actually does go for a few graceful touches in its most effective scares–a recurring, slyly mocking musical cue; a hotel room fire safety map that gets blacked out–and that’s what causes the real difficulty.  These scenes ultimately feel like escapees from some better movie, and they’re good enough to suck the dubious fun out of corpses chasing people around in vents and delicately-handled enough to make it irritating that the movie couldn’t use that same delicacy on those little matters of plot and character.

The end result is a perfectly okay movie that could, with a few alterations in either direction, have been a good one.  On a craft level, I always find this particular kind of swing-and-miss interesting.  Where did they go wrong?  Where did they go right?  The solutions we come up with can reveal some of our tastes–what we’d call a good movie, what we would love even in an out-and-out bad one–in a comparative vacuum.

To leave the vacuum, though, I’ll always get a kick out of this particular 1408 exchange:

“You do drink, don’t you?”

“Of course, I just said I was a writer.”