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Popular Culture Review
Algernon Blackwood’s ghost stories, in which “trees, bushes, earth, snow, even
the wind” (Sullivan 115) function as ghosts, Hafstrom’s adaptation of King’s
text lets everything come to life: the hotel room, the walls, the furniture, and
first and foremost, the human mind. Moreover, the film director creates a full
story-line around “the intruder” of this particular.
Even though both text and film stress the fact that the story’s main
character—Mike Enslin—“is in search for another place” (King, Room 4) and
another life, Stephen King’s manuscript differs from its filmic adaptation also in
the sense that it neither provides the reader with any insight into Mike Enslin’s
emotional and mental state, nor offers a possible answer to the question why he
desires to enter a forbidden universe that has been locked away since 1978 and
that is characterized by the hotel manager Olin as evil. Moreover, King’s short
story does not elaborate on why a fiction writer who specializes in the
investigation and depiction of so-called paranormal occurrences demands to
enter a room that is not even “listed on any of the websites dealing with
paranormal locations or psychic hotspots” (King, Room 472) other than to prove
to the hotel manager and to himself that there “are no ghosts in room 1408 and
never have been” (King, Room 469).
Even though Stephen King, on more than one occasion, has stated explicitly
that Mike Enslin does not believe in any paranormal phenomena, the king of
horror fiction never grants the reader any explanation why Enslin continues
describing his ghostly encounters. The reader of King’s text gets the impression
that Mike Enslin, like the once prolific ghost story writer M. R. James, only
writes about ghostly encounters because it gives pleasure “of a certain sort to
[the] readers” (James vii). Mike Enslin’s disbelief in the supernatural and in the
natural finds a much stronger articulation in Hafstrom’s filmic adaptation of the
material. Through an “extended intertextual engagement” (Hutcheon 8) with the
source text, the director actually uses horror fiction’s conventional “theme of the
nuclear family in crisis”(Wadenius 131) as departure point for everything that
follows.
According to Hafstrom’s adaptation, Mike Enslin’s strong disbelief and
negative outlook on life—his cynicism regarding death, religion and the
existence of the afterlife—is a symptomatic expression of his anger and nonacceptance of “the limitations of the physical world” (Edwards 83). He cannot
come to terms with the fact that neither modem medicine nor he was able to heal
his daughter and to prevent her from dying. Thus, he unconsciously seeks
consolation in his unfruitful investigations of apparently haunted dwellings
whose individual stories he publishes in his books: Ten Nights in Ten Haunted
Houses, Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards, or Ten Nights in Ten Haunted
Castles (King, Room 463). Enslin’s true motivation to investigate and to
hopefully experience what King calls “phobic pressure points” (King, Danse 4)
results from something other than his apparent interest in paranormal activity
and writing: It follows from an unresolved trauma that still rules his mental and