1408

Mike Enslin is a cynical writer who debunks haunted locations for a living — he stays the night, nothing happens, he writes the book. He has made peace with not believing in anything. When an unsigned postcard arrives warning him to avoid room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York, he files a legal request to stay there. The hotel manager Gerald Olin meets him in the lobby and tries everything short of physical force to make him leave: hands him a file of 56 deaths in the room, offers him a $2,000 bottle of cognac, tells him plainly that the room is evil. Mike records the whole conversation and checks in.

The room starts quietly. A chocolate mint on the pillow. The clock radio switching on by itself, playing "We've Only Just Begun." Then the window slams on his hand. The temperature drops. The exits stop working — the door opens onto a brick wall, the ventilation shaft loops back, every escape route folds in on itself. Room 1408 is not haunted in the conventional sense. It is a contained space with its own appetite, and Mike is now inside it.

What follows is sustained psychological assault. The room cycles through Mike's history — his estranged wife Sarah, and above all his daughter Katie, who died of cancer when she was a child. The room produces her. It produces versions of the past that Mike cannot dismiss as illusion because they are accurate in ways only he would know. His professional armor — the notebook, the recorder, the practiced skepticism — disintegrates. There is nothing to debunk. The room simply is.

Mike deteriorates. He tries to contact the outside world; calls connect to the dead. He tries to document what is happening; the evidence keeps resetting. Time in the room is not linear — the clock counts down from sixty minutes and then starts over. He has been in there for much longer than the clock suggests.

In the end, Mike sets the room on fire. He cannot escape it; he can only destroy it. He survives, burned, by jumping from the window. Later, his wife Sarah comes to collect his belongings from storage and finds a tape recorder among them. She plays it. On the recording, beneath the chaos of Mike's last hours in the room, she hears their daughter's voice. The room was real. All of it.