How Did ‘1408’ Become Stephen King’s Most Successful Horror Film? – Film School Rejects

A quick refresher on the state of the horror genre in 2007.

While the jury is still out on the rest of 2017, you can make a pretty solid case that 2007 was the second-best year for Stephen King movies. The best is not up for debate: 1983 featured the theatrical releases ofThe Dead Zone,Christine, andCujo, forever marking that as the peak of Kings cinematic successes. As a runner-up, though, 2007 was no slouch. That year featured the release ofThe Mist, the rare King movie to be held in some circles as an improvement on the source material, and1408, the highest-grossing Stephen King horror adaptation of all time.

If youre like me, that last nugget might have caught you by surprise. Even acknowledging that box office numbers are difficult to compare across eras inflation and Hollywoods increased emphasis on opening weekends makes comparing 1983 to 2017 misleading at best its still a shock that none of Kings better-known horror stories hold that title. Not the originalCarrieor the 2013 remake. NotMisery. NotPet Cemeteryor even the original theatrical release ofThe Shining. At $20.6M, the opening weekend for1408is far and away the best of Kings career, with onlyMiserycoming within 10 million of the movies total domestic gross of $71.9M.

This all begs the question: how did1408become the highest-grossing horror film of Stephen Kings career?

At first glance, it doesnt seem to make a lot of sense.1408 is based on one of Kings short stories, not one of his novels. That approach of adapting his shorter works (including novellas) had always worked well for the authors dramatic adaptions Stand By MeandThe Shawshank Redemptionremain beloved to this day but the idea that Kings breakout film would be devoid of any of his signature characters or landmarks is a strange proposition. Theres also the fact that1408is essentially a chamber horror movie with a few expensive special effects thrown in. Did audiences really feel this strongly about 100 minutes of John Cusack wandering around his hotel room with bulging eyes? The movie would seem a little old fashioned no matter what decade it was released.

Heres where context matters. As critics, we like to claim that we set aside all of our cinematic baggage the moment we step into a theater, but its harder than you think to divorce a film from the context surrounding its release. Take a movie likeWonder Woman. No matter what your feelings are on Patty Jenkinss superhero film, theres no denying that it rode a wave of DCEU criticism and demands for more female-driven superhero movies into theaters. That context affected how it was received by audiences. If youre a fan, you would argue thatWonder Womanfinally delivered on many of the things youd hoped to see from Hollywood for years. If youre a skeptic, you might say that it at least disrupted the routine for summer movies and offered us a fresh take on a familiar format. They say that the one constant in life is change, but if you watch hundreds and hundreds of movies every year, change is a pretty good constant to have.

1408wasnt released in a vacuum, either. Kings adaptation hit theaters at the height of public hand-wringing about torture porn, the then-in-vogue subgenre or mode of horror cinema often credited to popularity of films by Eli Roth and James Wan. Major news outlets such as NPR and the BBC had published articles asking pointed questions about the movement, and Hollywood showed no signs of slowing things down. The year prior to1408s release had seen an influx of particularly shocking horror movies; big-budget remakes ofThe Hills Have EyesandThe Texas Chainsaw Massacrehad pulled in tens of millions of dollars at the domestic box office, while more traditional torture-porn entries likeSaw IIIandHostelhad finished among the years highest-performing films. Critics even asked the cast and crew of 1408to weigh in on the current state of the horror genre.In an interview with Collider, producerLorenzo di Bonaventura described his film as attempting to go beyond the call to the extreme, arguing that the genre was big enough for movies that had something emotional to say.

Read between the lines a little bit and its not difficult to see writers simultaneously responding to both the movie and the genre in their reviews of 1408.The New York Times praised the film for its old-fashioned restraint. CinemaBlend, which also praised the movies restraint, called it a humble little horror thriller.Empire, despite an overall mixed review, noted that1408is proof that you dont need piles of body parts to make a scary movie. In fact, so many critics used1408as a staging ground for attacks against contemporary horror movies thatRolling Stones Peter Travers used his own review to defend Eli Roth. The fact that1408is relatively free of gore, Travers wrote, has encouraged some critics to use it to attack what they call the torture porn of such directors asHostelsEli Roth. Context matters for any new release, but sometimes audiences and critics coalesce around a movie they might not otherwise admire because it seems to answer a question on everyones minds.

So thats perhaps the real reason why1408broke out at the box office: it was the right movie for the right moment. As studios finally embraced the depravity of video nasties in their big-budget releases, audiences and critics alike found the slightly stodgy scares of1408to be an oasis in the midst of shockingly violent horror. And so it was that an old-fashioned movie about a man, a ghost, and a tape recorder became one of the surprise hits of the summer.

Follow this link:
How Did '1408' Become Stephen King's Most Successful Horror Film? - Film School Rejects