John Cusack lives a real nightmare in “Room 1408”. A film adapted from a short story by Stephen King which echoes “Shining”, to which Mikael Håfström’s feature film also refers several times.
Room 1408 : a stay in hell
John Cusack lives an eventful stay in the heart of a New York hotel in Room 1408. In this 2008 feature film by Mikael Håfström (Slippage, The Rite) and based on the new 1408 by Stephen King, published in the collection Everything is fatal, the actor lends his features to Mike Enslin. Since the death of his daughter, this writer surveys many haunted places in the hope of having proof that ghosts and spirits really exist.
Blasé and convinced that the afterlife is a hoax, Enslin agrees to rent room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, where more than fifty people have died in strange and often inexplicable circumstances. Warned by the director of the establishment Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), the author does not take him seriously at all, convinced that he is about to spend a night like the others. After settling down, he witnesses increasingly disturbing phenomenawhich upset all his beliefs.
Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub and Isiah Whitlock Jr. complete the cast of this adaptation. For his short story, Stephen King is inspired by several accounts by parapsychologist Christopher Chacon. The latter investigated in particular theHotel del Coronado from San Diego. In 1892, Kate Morgan rented a room at this establishment, assuring the staff that a man was about to join her. Five days after her arrival, the 24-year-old young woman committed suicide and several people have since seen her ghost in the corridors of the hotel.
Several references to shining
Room 1408 obviously echoes one of the major works of Stephen King in which a man gradually sinks into madness. The fall of Mike Enslin makes echoing that of Jack Torrance in shining. Several nods to the novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film are also hidden in Mikael Håfström’s feature film. The most obvious is that around a man named Grady, the first victim of room 1408.
In shining, Grady is the former caretaker of the Overlook Hotel and the father of the terrifying twins, partly responsible for Jack Torrance’s rampage. Philip Stone plays him in the film with Jack Nicholson, while Michael Monks lends him his features in Doctor Sleep.
Mike Enslin also mentions “rivers of blood” when he records himself on his tape recorder, shortly after entering room 1408. An expression reminiscent of the hectoliters of hemoglobin pouring from the elevator into shining. Finally, when a firefighter tries to enter the haunted room at the end of the feature film, he uses an ax identical to the one grabbed by Jack Nicholson to kill Shelley Duvall and the young Danny Lloyd. A tool that Ewan McGregor also uses in Doctor Sleep.
