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Popular Culture Review
invocation of ideas of similarity [with] and difference [from]” (Sanders 22) the
textual source; third, he creates an independent work of art.
Regardless whether King’s choice of floor and room number alludes to the
superstitious fears stemming from ancient Scandinavian folklore1, from ancient
Egyptian beliefs2, or from M.R. James’ short story “Number 13,” what matters
is that Hafstrom’s filmic adaptation differs from King’s text in the sense that the
adaptation alludes to everything that is associated with the number 13 and
King’s text does not. The illustration of the room’s hostile energy and
supernatural forces that continuously decrease its size, transform its layout from
a regular room to a stormy sea, to a field of ice, and finally to a room on fire,
visualize Enslin’s fear of destruction, of great suffering, and of approaching
death. At the same time, these happenings represent Enslin’s conflicting
emotions including not only the fear of but also the desire for death, a desire that
has been nourished by his extremely guilty and melancholic conscience.
Hafstrom’s film illustrates that Enslin’s obsession with death is set into
motion through what Sigmund Freud once called ‘hyperremembering’ and
defined as “a process of obsessive recollection during which the survivor
resuscitates the existence of the lost other in the space of the psyche, replacing
an actual absence with an imaginary presence” (Clewell 44). In other words,
Enslin’s profound mourning of the death of his daughter does hinder him “to
adopt any new object of love” (Freud, Mourning 244). It lets him turn away
from the realm of the living and towards the realm of the dead; not in order to
understand the spiritual implications of the afterlife (like many characters in
Walter de la Mare’s ghost stories), but to prolong the interaction with what he
has lost.
On several occasions does the film reveal Enslin’s “clinging to the object”
(Freud, Mourning 244), for example when he imagines a crying baby, “sees”
Katie on the TV screen, or believes to hold her revived body in his arms. Instead
of resolving his trauma and processing his mourning and resulting melancholy,
Mike Enslin unconsciously seeks the reception of those stimuli for the purpose
of being able to relive the impulses of pleasure and psychological pain. The
unconscious extemalization of his inner excitations then leads to the
confrontation with the spirits of his own soul taking the form of the five ghostly
manifestations Enslin imagines in the room 1408.
THE RETURN OF THE DEAD AND THE REMAINS OF LIFE
In scene 10 (0:43:25-0:48:23), Mike Enslin encounters the first ghostly
apparition that, in contrast to the other four manifestations, is the only one trying
to harm him. This ghostly aggressor enacts Enslin’s pain and disappointment he
would still like to take out on everyone who was involved in the unsuccessful
attempt of healing his sick daughter Katie. Taking into account that Enslin is
ruled by many conflicting emotions and that the essence of being but also of
becoming and creating are notions that are associated with the number 1, the
existence of the first apparition “gives rise to multiplicity” (Cirlot 221) of