1408

I guess you could think of this as The Shining Lite. (Hey, is that a pun?) That movie dealt with a haunted hotel, this one is just a haunted hotel room. (A suite, actually, and quite a nice one before the SFX people get at it.) But that makes it a little more manageable. The Shining was filmed twice, and the problem in the first was that it’s such a sprawling novel—like most of Stephen King’s work—that even a genius like Stanley Kubrick wasn’t able to get a handle on the whole thing. Still, his version was better than the slow, turgid, and overlong version King caused to be made for television some years later, still steamed about Kubrick’s version.
This is a real rip-snorter, notably lacking in the goofy monster type of scare. You realize quickly that the most horrible things happening here are in the protagonist’s own mind, which is always scarier than external stuff. John Cusack has never turned in a bad performance that I can remember, and he’s in top shape here, having to carry scene after scene all by his lonesome. The SFX are good, and the gradual build-up of terror is handled quite well. Highly recommended, if you don’t scare easy.