1408

Content Warning: The source material features discussions of suicide, self-harm, and distressing imagery. It also includes ableist language, specifically the author’s use of the r-word.

On its surface, “1408” presents itself as a story about a man who learns that the haunting he once considered to be a hoax is, in fact, real. However, the conflicts of the story, its shifting points of view, and reliance on verisimilitude and allusion reveal that “1408” is more critically about Idealism Versus Cynicism and how this relates to Belief and Superstition.

While the story is told over four sections, there are two major conflicts that drive its plot. In the first conflict, protagonist Mike Enslin has set out to stay in the allegedly haunted room 1408 at the Hotel Dolphin but is continually blocked by the hotel manager, Mr. Olin. Enslin believes that Olin is employing various methods to scare him out of the room. This only strengthens Mike’s desire to stay and vindicate himself. Near the end of the second section, Mike becomes convinced that none of his suspicions are true. Instead, he realizes he is engaged in the second major conflict of the story, which, to his resistance and initial lack of awareness, begins from the moment he enters 1408. This conflict is a battle of endurance between Mike and the room itself, which threatens to destroy him by altering its physical details and driving him to doubt his perception of reality. It is heavily implied that this is what caused some of the previous guests to take their lives in the room.

The shift in conflict represents the shift of Mike’s belief in the paranormal. Before he acknowledges the malevolent entity of the room, he ascribes all of his strange experiences to natural or artificial phenomena. Early on in his stay, he sees the slanted door of 1408 and makes the assumption that it was built as a “unique greeting; it appears to have been set crooked, tipped slightly to the left” (385). The door straightens and slants once again, which causes Mike to feel sick. Immediately, he blames Olin, thinking that all of the manager’s ghost stories had conditioned him to expect it. When Mike sees a security camera in the hallway, he imagines Olin and a security guard laughing at him. While it seems as if the room, a character in itself, is resisting his entry or warning him to stay away, Mike is concerned about the way he appears and fears embarrassment. This social response obscures his awareness of the unsettling reality before him, true to Gothic tradition, and is at odds with what the reader can likely assume about room 1408.

Mike continues to blame Olin as he experiences the effect that 1408 has on him. While attempting to compose himself, Mike tells himself that he won’t allow Olin to be vindicated. He then connects the sensation of poison gas in the room to something Olin had said earlier in the story. As a skeptic, he would rather view Olin as an active antagonist in his journey than admit that there was any truth to Olin’s warnings. By using a protagonist who so strongly resists the possibility of the supernatural, King creates a horrific narrative that the reader feels compelled to believe because it cannot be disproven by Mike.

Mike’s skepticism is deeply tied to his cynicism. He is introduced as a writer who has found success from writing a series of travelogs on haunted places, but Olin correctly suggests that Mike doesn’t believe in any of the subjects he’s written. Mike admits that none of his past experiences have led him to believe that ghosts haunt any of the locations he’s visited. In this sense, Enslin’s career has been built on exploiting his readers—those who do believe in the afterlife. Their willingness to affirm their belief system with his work has sustained him for several years. As someone who tried to get his start writing stories and poems he did believe in earlier in his career, Mike has had to break away from his idealistic vision of a writing career to sustain it.

On the other hand, Mike’s skepticism also operates as a kind of protection. For as long as he doesn’t believe in spirits or the supernatural, he can convince himself that nothing bad will happen and he can continue to live off of his book profits. Mike repeatedly disregards the pattern of deaths that have happened within the room as a stray statistic. As he comes to experience the reality of 1408’s terrors, his cynicism is replaced by the unwavering certainty that something he cannot explain has power over the room. Knowing that he must revisit his experience of the room in order to write about it, Mike gives up the idea of writing altogether. He knows that 1408 is haunted but cannot write a single word without “feeling cold all over his skin and being nauseated deep in the pit of his belly” (402).

“1408” does not make an argument for or against skepticism as much as it pushes an openness to the idea that people can validate contradicting beliefs through experience. The constant shift in narrative perspective demonstrates this by viewing the events of Mike’s stay through the eyes of those who have limited knowledge of what really happened. Mike’s perspective dominates most of the story, especially in its first two sections. Yet the second section also introduces the contents of the minicorder as an alternative to his perspective. This sudden retrospective narrative indicates to the reader that what will happen in the following section is eventful and frightening, foreshadowing the disturbing sequence in the room. The story continuously references the listener of the tape while also providing the details that the minicorder isn’t able to archive, especially Mike’s interior monologue. 

In the third section, the perspective shifts to follow Rufus Dearborn, who briefly functions as a witness to 1408’s strange light as Mike exits the room. Dearborn is compelled to make sense of what he sees but is stopped short by Mike. Finally, in the fourth section, the perspective considers the events through the eyes of Mike’s agent, Sam Farrell, who enters the story as a complete outsider to 1408. Tellingly, he wishes for Mike to write a book about his experience in the room while being repulsed by the raw contents of the minicorder tape. While Farrell is still interested in turning a profit at the expense of the presumably gullible readers, Mike is no longer willing to do this. Mike has undergone a transformation of character, uninterested in reproducing his first legitimate supernatural experience for pay.

All of these perspectives are able to coexist in the fabric of the world that surrounds 1408. Farrell is not inclined to believe that the entity that inhabits the hotel room is real, but this does not invalidate any of Mike’s new convictions, even as his memory of 1408 fades away. Dearborn, on the other hand, is closer to Mike and Olin in that he has experienced the terror of 1408 for the briefest moment, though not enough for him to conclusively say what he saw.

The coexistence of contradictory beliefs is typical to the very premise of the ghost story, as well as of horror fiction. In reading or hearing a ghost story, the reader is invited to suspend any disbelief in ghosts. Similarly, horror fiction offers its readers an implausible entity, such as a vampire or a person brought back to life, and invites them to fear these beings as though they were real. Without the openness to the encounter with these imaginary beings and situations, the reader becomes similar to Mike at the beginning of the story, dismissing every part of Olin’s warnings. The only thing that successfully convinces Mike to open himself to 1408’s implausible entity is direct experience. Consequently, the story gives the reader access to all of these perspectives so that the reader’s experience becomes as direct as possible.

King also relies on verisimilitude and allusion to render the experience of the story more vividly and give the sense that the Hotel Dolphin and 1408 exist off the page. It also allows the reader to feel that Mike’s work as a writer is in conversation with the popular culture surrounding hauntings and ghost hunting. Sensory details, such as the perfume of the blond woman in the lobby, whose “light, flowery smell […] seemed to summarize New York” (366), heighten the reality of the hotel, evoking the environments of real-life luxury hotels in Manhattan. At another point early on, Mike remembers the night he visited the grave of the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer to write one of his earlier books. This allusion characterizes Mike as a seasoned ghost hunter, one who isn’t fazed by the macabre history of the sites he visits for the sake of his audience. Other allusions go on to evoke tropes in popular horror stories, films, and series.

When Mike’s strange experiences in 1408 begin, King uses the same devices to tap into a third major theme in the story, Fear of the Unknown. None of Mike’s experience aligns with the usual characteristics of any paranormal investigation he has ever heard of before. There are no disembodied voices, hot or cold spots, or even any spectral visions. Instead, Mike perceives morphing images, spatial distortions, and an angry voice on the telephone. This is enough for both Olin to declare that “there are no ghosts in room 1408 and never have been” (374), which is echoed by Mike after the fact: “It was never human […] at least ghosts were once human” (403). 

Moreover, King capitalizes on Mike’s fear by using sensory details, like the wallpaper that feels like skin in Mike’s hands or the floor that goes soft under his feet. Mike also compares certain objects in the room to objects in popular culture, such as the slanting door, which reminds him of the film House on Haunted Hill and episodes of The Twilight Zone. When he later picks up the telephone, he hears clicks that remind him of Wheel of Fortune. These comparisons, which function as a defensive mechanism for Mike, fall apart at the end of his stay, as he describes the room as “Moorish” (397), referring to the aesthetic principles of North African Muslim culture and Iberian Muslim culture, before realizing that the word isn’t right for how the room feels.

The experience in room 1408 changes Mike forever, and in ways he cannot fully comprehend or describe. The memory of the event itself fades, and Mike only knows he has no interest in reproducing the memory in all its horrific detail. This lack of detail given to the reader, in both the events within the room and the retrospective view of Mike, allows them to make assumptions about the horrific details but not enough to completely reveal the “monster” and alleviate the mystery of the story. King’s ability to break down the mental defenses of his characters and expose them to an event that changes their life forever, while using the keystone elements of Gothic literature, is a hallmark of his writing and the horrific short story “1408.”