1408 the movie
I thought I have had my share of horror movies about 10 years ago when Event Horizon spooked the then 11-year-old me really badly, not through gruesome images but by putting me on a ride into the unknown. Everyone is afraid of the unknown, and that, Mikael Håfström knows and delivers great in the movie 1408 — you don’t know what you are going to expect next, but you know it’s going to be spooky (read: The Ring).
The best part about this show is that the character is actually alive in the sense that John Cusack builds up the character well enough for us to root for his survival and to feel for him when he was desperate to leave the room. Gradually we learn to care and feel sorry for him as the story develops, especially when we learn that he had not faced the fact about losing his daughter to some terminal illness. And this is very important because with most other horror movies I would not care a hoot about whether the characters live or die (hint: Hostel).
Furthermore, this horror movie does not scare you through cheap tactics. It is genuinely scary in the sense that it’s mind-boggling, which makes it sound very dumb because you are scaring yourself the more you try to figure out what happened and what’s going to happen. But in my book, that goes a long way.
All that said and done, Mike’s reactions to the environment were believable as he tried to calm himself down and think of explanations with regards to what were happening to him — the strange clock and mysterious figures, etc. And the environment was pretty believable too though the movie is pretty contradicting when you apply logic — one moment it’s telling you all the scary events are hallucinations when Mike Enslin talks to the fridge and in the end, he heard his daughter voice over the tape recorder. This irony leaves much to be desired but the overall will not disappoint.
If you are afraid of horror (with gory and cheap scares) movies, give this a try. It has its fine share of cheap scares but still one of the finest horror movies I’ve seen in years with regards to plot and character-building. And I’m not just saying.
9.5/10.