With literally dozens upon dozens of his literary works currently in various stages of development across film and television, never mind the fact nine feature-length and seven episodic adaptations have been released in the last five years alone, the Stephen King business is booming bigger than it ever has before.
As a result, countless page-to-screen translations end up being lost to the sands of time as newer, shinier toys come along, which leads us nicely onto 2007’s 1408. Despite being one of the highest-grossing and best-reviewed King movies ever made, director Mikael Håfström’s intensely atmospheric supernatural psychological horror doesn’t get anywhere near the love or adulation it truly deserves, besides the odd surge on streaming.
However, horror fans will no longer stand for the unfair overlooking of a tautly-paced, expertly-acted, and eminently creepy genre flick that’s been sitting in the shadows of irrelevancy too long. Or at least, that’s what we can infer given that close to 200 Redditors have decided to contribute to the discourse lauding 1408 as an unsung cult classic.
John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson star, with the former as an author who built his career on debunking supernatural shenanigans, with the latter managing a supposedly-haunted hotel. As you can imagine, there are indeed spooky things going on at the Dolphin, which begins to plunge Cusack’s Mike Enslin into a nightmarish stay he finds himself woefully ill-equipped to handle.
$133 million at the box office on a $25 million budget coupled with a 79 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, indisputably makes 1408 top-tier King. And yet, it still doesn’t get the love it deserves.