Mikael Håfström
1408 was so scary, I might just kill myself.
1408 is The Shining on steroids. It's The Excorsist on LSD.
It's The Ring for atheists. It's Silence of the Lambs with rabies.
It was so scary that when I got home I had to watch Napoleon Dynamite and make fresh guac for an hour just to keep from shitting myself.
It was like being on a thrill ride that's broken and the carny-on-duty is Ozzie Osbourn after an heroin-enhanced orgasm.
It's The Omen with clown suits. It's the musical version of Saw III.
It's Hellraiser on fire and holding a machine gun.
It's Darren Arronofsky directing a Kafka play with a knife to his throat.
It was so unsettling that I plan to sleep the rest of my nights in a gurney.
If you plan to see it, don't wait to rent the DVD. Get your money's worth and see it in the theatre. Two of the things that made this movie so thrillingly terrifying is the use of the big screen close-ups of John Cusack's frantic and trembling face, and the audio effects, which sounded like George Lucas frothing at the mouth during a hail-storm.
If there's one theme that the horror genre of every medium knows works like a nightmare, it's little girls. And I don't mind saying that the Little Girl Quotient of 1408 hovered somewhere around a factor-8.5. And by that I don't mean for on-screen time. I mean for potency. As for as on-screen time, the little girl in 1408 follows the Jaws, Alien 1 tradition of being scarier for the time she's NOT on screen.
Which is not to say that the little girl is the monster here... That's the best part. There really IS no monster, just the evil hotel room and John Cusack's pysche as it batters itself, juggling terror, guilt, suicide, hopelessness, trauma, sorrow, fear, malice, nihilism, regret, torture, and hell.
The plot? It's basically John Cusack is a skeptical ghost-hunting author whose life's been sucking the big one since his young daughter passed away of some god-given make-a-wish fare (perhaps lung cancer, since our pro-tag doesn't smoke 'anymore'?). All you need to know is that he goes to stay at this haunted-assed room because it's known to be extra-haunted, and will make for a good final chapter of his next book.
And exactly how bad-ass is this now off-limits hotel room that is appearently so evil that it makes the Amityville Horror seem like a beej and a sandwich? So bad-ass that Samuel L. Jackson himself got chopper'd in to the cast in order to orate to john exactly how severe a fisting this room is going to give him if he says.
At this point, it seems there's no way that
the room/rest of the movie is going to be able to live up to /overcome/ be taken seriously, especially after a grimicing Sam Jackson tries to bribe Cusack with a bottle of aged brandy into NOT staying in the room so that Sam won't have to "clean up the mess"...
This movie's balls SOMEHOW manage not to out-grow it's brains. Somehow. Despite it's indeed thrilling composition, and thorough badd-assery, it manages to be genuinely scary on a sincere, personal level. Is it simply because the protagonist is played by every film student's man-crush since 1986? I sure hope so! But I'm not telling you any more, go see for yourself, and then have fun on vacation this summer!
Posts
