1408 and the Structure of Haunting

Stephen King’s short story “1408”, initially included in his 1999 audiobook collection, Blood and Smoke, and then incorporated into his 2002 Everything’s Eventual, is a fairly run-of-the-mill haunted hotel room story. As King puts it in his short introduction to the story in the latter collection, “every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room at the Inn” (457) and this intended as his contribution to the category. In Mikael Håfström’s greatly expanded cinematic adaptation of the film, released in 2007 and starring John Cusack as protagonist Michael Enslin, the story becomes much, much more than that. Indeed, the film becomes a profound meditation on temporality, mortality, and the persistence of the past into the present as Enslin is forced to contend with a supernatural force that dangles before him the possibility that death is not the end of existence. The crux of the film is Enslin’s nihilistic response to his daughter’s death some years before. In the present of the film, Enslin, who has become estranged from his wife, is a popular writer of guidebooks to haunted places—despite not believing in ghosts himself. What quickly becomes clear to the viewer, however, is that Enslin is desperately searching for any sign that death is not the end and that his daughter continues to exist in some form somewhere. Although Enslin does not initially believe in ghosts, he is nevertheless haunted from the start by the absent presence of his daughter Katie. He cannot exist in the present because the past exerts an iron grip on him. Indeed, curiously like Bruce Willis’s character Malcolm Crowe in another supernatural film, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), Enslin is, in a way, already dead without knowing it and is just driving aimlessly without any real destination looking for anything that will allow him to believe there is more to our experience than what we can see and feel. Enslin’s story, I will argue, is the nature of haunting in general: the often-toxic hold of the past upon the present that deprives a character of a future. In Derrida’s meditation on haunting in Specters of Marx, the time of haunting (referencing Hamlet) is always “out of joint”. 1408 renders this out-of-jointness of haunting literally by progressively unmooring Enslin within both time and space as his experiences are supernaturally manipulated. Increasingly, he cannot find his footing within either time or space, flashing back to the past, then disappearing into a kind of limbo. In the end, the evil of the “evil fucking room” (as Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Gerald Olin, memorably describes the room) is the agonizing evil of hope as Enslin’s experience (regardless of which of the film’s three endings one prefers) seems to suggest the agonizing possibility of something beyond the end, but without ever really confirming it. Toxic nostalgia in this way is always a haunting from and by a future yet to come.