laurel's online journal

I finally got "1408" from Netflix. The words that first come to mind are profoundly disappointed.

A little background for those just joining us: "1408" is a short story by Stephen King about a hotel room that can best be described as evil. I guess you could say it's demon possessed. (Places can be possessed as well as people, if you believe in possession at all.) This story scared me so bad that I had to sleep with the light on, and that doesn't happen much. The whole feeling and atmosphere of "1408" was so disjointed, disorienting, and creepy that it strongly reminded me of when I was a kid and having allergic reactions to aspirin my mom would give me when I was sick. She didn't know at the time that I was allergic. No one's ever figured out exactly why I had the reactions that I did, but I would have the most frightening hallucinations/delusions. Like fever dreams where nothing in the world makes sense. "1408" captured how those hallucinations felt. Anything that has the ability to scare me that badly must be worshipped because it's rare and special.

Now to the movie version. I'll never understand why people who make movies look at anything popular, such as a book or short story, and do this: "Wow, people really like this short story. They think it's really scary. Let's make a movie out of it. We'll keep a couple cool things from the story, and then take the other 99.99999% of them and completely throw them out. This thing won't even be scary anymore, just incredibly long-winded and kind of lame. That's the way to do it! No, the millionaire writer doesn't know how to write a good horror story - we must improve it by changing practically everything! People LOVE that!" :PPPPP

John Cusack is a good actor, and I was ready to accept him in this role although he looks nothing like my mental picture of Mike Enslin. I thought Samuel L. Jackson was totally wrong for the part of the hotel manager. The character was clearly meant to be a doughy, snively sort of guy, not someone with a strong personality, shouting at Mike. I just couldn't accept the changes because they were pointless. The movie had a few additions that were kind of cool. But they threw out so much great, scary stuff that I just couldn't believe it. How could they leave out things that were perfectly filmable in favor of scenes that weren't scary and dragged on forever? I could understand if the stuff in the story was hard to translate to film, but it just isn't. I don't get it!

It's such a shame. Now no one else will try to make a better film out of this because what's the point; the movie has already been made. I couldn't be more disappointed with that.

The worst thing? THEY COMPLETELY DITCHED THE RANDOM EVIL PLUM. They SUCK for that.

WARNING! Spoilers in the comments.