Pacing & Backstory: For those of you that have read the short, you know that it is short even as shorts go. I spoke of pacing, and I frequently do, because there are some works, both in film and fiction, that leave a person just breathless (watch The Descent if you want to know what I mean). "1408" was one of them. It starts practically mid-conversation as Olin tries to convince Mike not to enter the room, and doesn't stop until the room spits MIke into the hall. That intense conversation is actually well reproduced in the movie-version.

Unfortunately, it doesn't occur until the movie's second act. Preceding it, the filmmakers have added: an uneventful false stay at a B&B, an uneventful surfing accident (uneventful in that our hero emerges unscathed), an uneventful conversation with Mike's publisher. Sensing a theme? The backstory adds nothing. While I acknowledge that a story as short as "1408" requires some padding in order to make it to the big screen, the padding should mean something. Add more scares. Prolong the scares. Whatever. Don't give me pointless surfing scenes. If I was in the mood for that, I'd watch John From Cincinnati (which is awesome, btw). Similarly, do not completely halt the film in the middle for an enraging fake-out non-ending. It isn't entertaining (if the film had really ended that way, believe me, my reaction here would be way worse), and it isn't scary.

Lighting: This should have been a no-brainer. The short story describes the light in 1408 as the red-orange glow of an Australian desert sunset. It speaks at length as to the oppressive sense of wrong that light cast on the entire room. If the film could have brought anything to life, one would think it would have been that. Isn't that what film is good at? Instead, you get flat, ordinary ambient light, that alternately shifts to a hospital blue.

Sense of Space: I'm not a claustrophobic person, but that sense of the room closing in, of corners rounding off, seeming to melt, was enough send my blood racing when I read the story. The film takes the opposite tack, expanding the room, in fact taking Mike completely out of it from time to time. The room is, from time to time: the ledge outside of the room, a vast hospital bathroom, and all of California. For a movie about room 1408, Mike is, from the viewer's perspective, outside of the room for a good deal of the time.

Effects: At some point, the room randomly fills with water, and alternately, explodes. Why this happens, I don't know. It isn't scary, though it is rather loud. I think the water had something to do with the surfing, but since that wasn't particularly disturbing in the first place, recalling it from within 1408 did nothing for me.

There are ghosts, yes, and sometimes alarmingly. But for the most part, they look like the black and white projection ghosts found in Disney's Haunted Mansion and/or Tower of Terror.

One of the other more convincing parts of the story was the "sound" of it: Mike's increasingly incoherent babbling into his micro-cassette recorder, the inhuman counting he hears on the phone, the sludging wet of his footsteps on (and almost in) the carpeting. All things that, one would think, could be easily represented in film, and all things that are, in large part, abandoned for it.

Many other small, environmental details were left by the wayside as well. Crooked paintings and doorways. The plum on a plate (the plum isn't real). The unpleasant tactile nature of the walls and bedspread.

Not all of the additions were bad. I liked the Rear Window-esque moment Mike has with the fellow across the way. I liked the urgent crying of the baby next door, serving both to fuel a sense of unease, along with the torturous notion of the real world, of escape, being mere inches away with no way to reach it.

In general, however, the adds didn't really add anything for me, where the subtractions were greatly missed.