Noisy rather than scary

Rating: 2/10 (8 April 2008)

1408 demonstrates in many particulars how not to tell a ghost story.
The story being told, or trying to be told, is this: A skeptical ghost writer (a writer on ghosts, that is not an unattributed author) sets out to spend a night in a haunted room and finds out that it's for real--which is rather the conclusion one expects, since otherwise there would be no story. It's a story told before, and one that would in theory be simple to manage, since it contains only a few essential elements; yet every one of them is mishandled here.
The least of the movie's problems, but the one that becomes obvious soonest, lies with the main character. What is he exactly? A skeptic about ghosts. Which means that he writes skeptical books, yes? Well, no: he writes ghost travel guides with titles like Ten Haunted Lighthouses. So he poses as a believer, and keeps his skepticism to himself? Well, no again: in public appearances, he scoffs openly at ghosts. So he's a hack who affects the tone of a believer? No a third time: when he dictates notes to himself for use in the book, they're in the key of Menckenian cynicism. It wouldn't matter much to the story which way he bent, but we needed to know, so we could proceed from there.
And then there's the room itself. It isn't just any haunted room, it's a room that the hotel pretends doesn't exist, a room that has killed or driven insane all who have dared to sleep in it, the mother of all evil rooms. The movie makes this point for a good half hour before showing us the dread cubicle. Not content with showing us the writer's Internet researches and the maneuvers to which he has to resort to book a reservation, it continues to a lengthy scene with the hotel manager issuing dire warnings to the writer to stay away. In this scene the casting of the manager is crucial because he's the character who sells us the lore--the Van Helsing character--and who sells us the danger--"Wear this for your mother's sake"; the one who _believes_. And whom did the director choose to perform these two invaluable functions? Samuel L. Jackson. Now, Jackson is a good actor, in some circumstances, but he's an actor who when he believes in a thing, performs it straight, and when he doesn't, performs it crookeder than a dog's hind leg, and what he's going on about here, he obviously doesn't believe for a second. Anticipating the haunting that ensues, his scene with the writer goes on and on, around and around, long after it has made its point; and then the character, to clinch his presentation, produces a scrapbook of morgue shots of the room's earlier victims. Guess he keeps it for reminiscence' sake. Nevertheless undissuaded, the writer treks up to the room; and The Terror Begins. Or, well, not.
Note the job that the movie has set itself: it has promised not just a haunted room but the most haunted room ever, and the most deadly haunted room ever. To deliver on that, it has to show the most frightening chamber that ever was, containing the most frightening thing that ever was, and moreover, one that will explain to our complete satisfaction why the people who encounter it go loony and take out their eyes and do away with themselves. And beyond all that, the movie has (or ought) to tell us whether it's "the room" doing it, as we've been told, or some as yet unsuspected Lovecraftian entity that dwells there.
Does it need to be said that the movie fails to deliver? Of course, nothing it could conjure up could measure up to what it has led us to anticipate. The build-up was a terribly unwise tactic: like prefacing a joke by promising that it's the funniest joke you'll ever hear and that everyone who hears it laughs for weeks. Oversell. Moreover, we nver find out why the room is as it is, or just _how_ it is. One infers that what it assails each new guest with is a nonpareil...but what? the one phobia too frightening to confront? the one misdeed too enormous to acknowledge? the one memory too painful to recall? or what? One scene suggests the last, or might, if it weren't buried in a mass of irrelevant nonsense.
The haunting goes on. And on. And on--you think it's over, but no. The movie is much the same. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink (including a gollum living in the air ducts), and as it goes it keeps getting bigger, with enough catastrophe for a historical miniseries: flood, fire, earthquake...no childbirth, I don't think, but maybe I just missed it--and to ever-decreasing effect, like a horror Riverdance. Until the physical properties of the room came to exceed sensible bounds, what continued to occur to me was: why doesn't the guy bash through the wall? Indeed, at the end he does resort to destruction, of a kind, and it works. But by then there's no good reason why it should work, since nothing has worked before. There's no good reason for anything that happens in the movie.
Which makes it just noise.