Jackson pleads, cajoles and intimidates: Four people have died in that room since he has been manager, and those were only the accidental deaths, as opposed to the so-called natural ones. Jackson, to fork over the big brass key to the room. Who could resist such a challenge? Mike hops a jet for the East Coast - he lives in California, and we learn he's haunted by a personal tragedy that makes his return to Manhattan emotionally fraught - and goes to work trying to persuade the Dolphin's manager, an icy-elegant Samuel L. Until, that is, he receives an anonymous postcard telling him that under no circumstances should he spend the night in Room 1408, the Dolphin Hotel, New York.

That's all in a night's work for Mike, and you can see why he takes his job only semi-seriously: He carries infrared equipment with him, on the off chance that he might actually pick up some paranormal ghostie-beastie activity, but so far, nothing. John Cusack plays the ghost-guide writer, Mike Enslin: As the movie opens, we see him driving down a dark, rainy road to reach a country inn, where the owners regale him with stories about servants who hanged themselves on the premises and shove a few obviously faked photos under his nose. The film version of '1408,' from the Swedish director Mikael Håfström (who made the 2005 thriller 'Derailed,' with Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston), is a very heavily embroidered version of that story, and although most of the new inventions work fairly well, the whole thing could have been a bit more streamlined.

(In a brief introduction to the story, King said it scared him as he was working on it.) Even though King enjoys putting down rich, quirky layers of detail, the story still feels underplayed rather than overstuffed, and it's all the more unsettling for that. King's story (included in the compilation 'Everything's Eventual'), about the writer of a popular series of haunted-hotel tour guides who takes on the challenge of checking into an ultracreepy New York hotel room that has devoured anyone who has dared to spend the night there, works by suggestion rather than overstatement. '1408' seems like a perfectly serviceable little horror chiller - until you read the compact and elliptical Stephen King novella it's based on.

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