MORE THAN JUST GHOST LORE IN A B A D P L A C E 55
emotional life leading him back to the emotionally charged city of New York,
the city of pain, mourning and death.
It is in the city of New York, on the thirteenth floor of the Dolphin Hotel,
that he faces the real horrors of his life: his melancholic desire for a complete
family life, his still unprocessed mourning for his daughter Katie, and his guilty
conscience over not having tried harder to save his daughter’s life and his
marriage. In order to succeed in his unconscious attempt to detach himself from
his still too dominant nostalgia for the past, he has to test reality in the seclusion
of “a poisoned room” (King, Room 477), in which internal psychological
processes take the form of ghostly apparitions and become external dangers
stimulating the desire for as well as provoking the fear of death. Even though
Mike Enslin does “have visions and epiphanies which change everything”
(Sullivan 2) around him, the ghosts in Hafstrom’s film differ from those
described by Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, or Henry
James, as they are more than a spiritual power, an evil force, or “a traditional
medium of communicat ion between the past and the present, the dead and the
living” (Briggs 111).
MOVING TOWARDS AND INTO THE ROOM 1408
Similar to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977), Sara Laughs in Bag o f
Bones (1998), the summer cabin in Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990), or the
pink villa in Duma Key (2008), the hotel room 1408 is another “Bad Place”
(King, Danse 264) within King’s fictional world. Like many haunted houses in
ghost stories, gothic novels, or horror films, room 1408 “stands for the
unknown, for ignorance that threatens the safety of the occupants” (Ruffles 104)
by absorbing, transforming and setting free “the emotions that had been spent
there” (King, Danse 265). As such, it is a personalized space that somehow
holds all of its occupants’ hopes, fears, and desires. In regard to Mike Enslin, it
is a space that he unconsciously fills and fuels with re-occurring thoughts and
emotions from the past provoking weeping or laughing fits and extreme changes
in his mental and physical condition.
As a “Bad Place,” room 1408 imposes a mental, a physical, and an
emotional threat to Enslin’s being. The room becomes “a protagonist in its own
right” (Ruffles 104). It becomes Enslin’s main antagonist. Whereas King’s
manuscript ends without defining the antagonistic evil of room 1408,
Hafstrom’s film provides (at least) suggestions of how to understand these evil
forces. Hafstrom turns away from King’s original text in which nothing is
familiar and moves toward the re-occurrence of the repressed that now reappears
in an unfamiliar disguise. In other words, Hafstrom exchanges King’s
unidentifiable textual gore with a cinematographic representation of Enslin’s
repressed past—the true ghost of the “room on the thirteenth floor” (King, Room
478). By doing so, Hafstrom achieves three things: First, he challenges the
viewer’s understanding of ghosts in a film of the twenty-first century; second, he
alludes to the possible meanings of King’s text depending “upon a complex