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1408

 1408
type
TVTItem
 1408
label
1408
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page
FourteenOhEight
 1408
comment
A short story written by Stephen King and an unusual variation on the classic haunted hotel room, 1408 tells the story of Mike Enslin, a professional supernatural investigator/debunker and horror writer who stumbles upon something much worse than a ghost in the titular room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York City.The story was included in the Everything's Eventual collection and adapted into a film of the same name.
 1408
fetched
2024-02-17T16:31:09Z
 1408
parsed
2024-02-17T16:31:09Z
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processingComment
Dropped link to ShaggyDogStory: Not a Feature - ITEM
 1408
isPartOf
DBTropes
 1408 / int_2f75473
type
Number of the Beast
 1408 / int_2f75473
comment
Number of the Beast: See Evil Phone's quote above. "Six! Six! This is goddamn fucking six!" Additionally, earlier in the call, it screams "This is six! Six! Eighteen!" 3 x 6 (three sixes) = 18.
 1408 / int_2f75473
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 1408 / int_40cc0c7e
type
Bittersweet Ending
 1408 / int_40cc0c7e
comment
Bittersweet Ending: The room melts and distorts near the end, and is about to consume Enslin. Enslin sets himself on fire, and the room lets him leave. Enslin is saved by another hotel guest who happened to be walking by with a bucket of ice water. Enslin doesn't publish his story, the recordings are intact but useless, and he has third degree burns, scarring him for the rest of his life. He retreats to a house in Long Island where he lives out a lonely life, has health problems, and is completely traumatized by his 70-minute stay in room 1408. Still, the room seems to be at least temporarily incapacitated, and Mike still fared much better than any 1408 guest prior to him.
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 1408 / int_4dbd3706
type
Clap Your Hands If You Believe
 1408 / int_4dbd3706
comment
Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Inverted. Mr. Olin, the hotel manager, begs Mike Enslin not to stay in Room 1408, and says that after reading Mike's books about spending nights in supposedly haunted houses and castles, he gets the impression that Mike has absolutely no belief in the supernatural. Olin thinks that this will make Mike's stay in 1408 that much worse — as he puts it, any amount of ghosts could have paraded past Mike without him ever noticing, but the thing in 1408 does not care if you believe in it or not. Unfortunately for Mike, Olin is right.
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1408 / int_4dbd3706
 1408 / int_586624e5
type
Genius Loci
 1408 / int_586624e5
comment
Genius Loci: The room doesn't have anything evil in it. The room itself is evil. Considering the larger King canon, there's a good chance that it's a thinny.
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1.0
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1.0
 1408
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 1408 / int_5c059fbd
type
Twin Telepathy
 1408 / int_5c059fbd
comment
Twin Telepathy: Invoked. The pair of maids best capable of resisting 1408 consisted of twins.
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1.0
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1.0
 1408
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1408 / int_5c059fbd
 1408 / int_5d86966a
type
Man on Fire
 1408 / int_5d86966a
comment
Man on Fire: The way that Mike escapes from the eponymous room is by setting his lucky Hawaiian shirt on fire, and he speculates that the entity dwelling in the room prefers its prey raw and had no interest in absorbing a burned man. Mike needs a few skin grafts but only avoids more serious injury because another guest on the same floor happened to be walking back from the ice machine, and he dumped his bucket of ice onto Mike's burning shirt.
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 1408 / int_603b77ec
type
Savage Wolves
 1408 / int_603b77ec
comment
Savage Wolves: When Mike flips through the dinner menu, the thing changes in front of him every time he closes his eyes briefly. The last time it shows a young boy being Eaten Alive by hungry wolves.
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1.0
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1408 / int_603b77ec
 1408 / int_6841f7f5
type
Evil Phone
 1408 / int_6841f7f5
comment
Evil Phone: The phone shouts numbers at him in a voice that sounds like 'an electric hair-clipper that has learned how to talk.'
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1.0
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1408 / int_6841f7f5
 1408 / int_7a143509
type
Shell-Shocked Veteran
 1408 / int_7a143509
comment
Shell-Shocked Veteran: The Evil Phone in the room was correct when it said "Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room"; Enslin becomes totally paranoid after his experience. He cannot sleep in strange places, he can't answer the phone, he can't allow any light from the sunrise or sunset into his room (as it reminds him of the colors in the room), and he is an all-around broken individual.
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 1408 / int_7a9bc66
type
Fictional Colour
 1408 / int_7a9bc66
comment
Fictional Colour: After a cleaning lady was momentarily locked up inside room 1408, she was rendered blind and could only see "the most awful colors" that she had no name for.
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1.0
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 1408 / int_7e07f634
type
Paranoia Fuel
 1408 / int_7e07f634
comment
Paranoia Fuel: invoked Discussed in King's notes. King states that hotel rooms are inherently creepy due to the fact you have no idea who else has come and gone from them before you came, and who will come and go after. Any number of those people could have been sick or insane at the time they stayed, and several of them have probably already died.
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1.0
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 1408 / int_8774fb47
type
Eldritch Abomination
 1408 / int_8774fb47
comment
Eldritch Abomination: Olin was telling the truth when he said the room doesn't have ghosts. "At least ghosts were once human. The thing in the wall, though... that thing..."
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1.0
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 1408 / int_895ec17
type
Only in It for the Money
 1408 / int_895ec17
comment
Only in It for the Money: Enslin started out his career trying to write things that he sincerely believed in like poetry, but it didn't grant him any success compared to his books about supernatural investigations, which he approaches very cynically and with no belief in the possibility that any of it could be real.
 1408 / int_895ec17
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 1408 / int_8a4988bb
type
Mind Rape
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comment
Mind Rape: Whatever is going on in 1408 is at least partially, if not completely, a mental effect. The easier one's mind is to undermine, the faster 1408 will manifest its full power. Anything that increases a person's morale can stave off the effects of 1408 a little — groups of people fare better than people alone, and good friends fare even better. However, as noted by Olin, disbelief in the room's power does not help and actually makes things even worse — presumably because an unbeliever will not bother with putting up mental defenses until it's too late.
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 1408 / int_99298c71
type
Better to Die than Be Killed
 1408 / int_99298c71
comment
Better to Die than Be Killed: It is likely that the people who have jumped out of the window of 1408 did so to escape the Eldritch Abomination within before it could take them.
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 1408 / int_9a692ae9
type
13 Is Unlucky
 1408 / int_9a692ae9
comment
13 Is Unlucky: 1+4+0+8=13. And because of the way floors are numbered in the West note  many hotels label their 13th floors as the 14th due to the real-life belief in this trope , it's actually on the 13th floor.
 1408 / int_9a692ae9
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 1408
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 1408 / int_9bee1a7f
type
Eldritch Location
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comment
Eldritch Location: It's a room that warps, melts, threatens you over the phone and may or may not want to eat you.
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1.0
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 1408 / int_9bfb2f41
type
Dead Guy on Display
 1408 / int_9bfb2f41
comment
Dead Guy on Display: A variation. Once the paintings in the room change, a group of people can be seen on the boat. Mike somehow becomes aware that these people are the room's victims. And while their physical bodies have long been disposed of, it's hardly a stretch to think that some part of them may have indeed been forever claimed by the room.
 1408 / int_9bfb2f41
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 1408 / int_abdf7d09
type
Weirdness Censor
 1408 / int_abdf7d09
comment
Weirdness Censor: Brought up by Olin during his conversation with Enslin. Olin believes that the reason Enslin has never encountered a ghost, despite spending a lot of time in supposedly haunted places, is because he does not believe in them. He also says that this will not help Mike in Room 1408, and he is absolutely right.
 1408 / int_abdf7d09
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1.0
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 1408
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 1408 / int_ad1db87c
type
Oh, Crap!
 1408 / int_ad1db87c
comment
Oh, Crap!: From Mike after the room service menu spontaneously changes content and languages, and shit starts to get real:
 1408 / int_ad1db87c
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1.0
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 1408 / int_afe98316
type
Talkative Loon
 1408 / int_afe98316
comment
Talkative Loon: Enslin becomes this while in the room. Listening to his minicorder recordings doesn't help anyone understand what happened in there — it's all bursts of disjointed yammering about fuming oranges, Orpheus, and wolves on the turnpike.
 1408 / int_afe98316
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1.0
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1.0
 1408
hasFeature
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 1408 / int_b3bdf232
type
Alien Geometries
 1408 / int_b3bdf232
comment
Alien Geometries: The door to 1408 is first crooked to the left, then it's straight, then to the right, then both. Each time, it changed when Mike looks away. And the room itself also takes on some extremely alien geometries near the end. Mike finds "Moorish" the closest thing he could come up with to pinning a word to it. King's text calls it "a melting, rotting cave full of swoops and mad tilts."
 1408 / int_b3bdf232
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 1408
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 1408 / int_b98a8902
type
Soul Eating
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comment
Soul Eating: Implied. The victims of 1408 seem to die of "natural causes" such as heart attacks, their bodies intact, but there are strong implications the room eats its victims in some way, especially with the imagery of the paintings and the menu turning into an illustration of a boy being devoured by a wolf.
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1.0
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 1408 / int_c75df49a
type
Shout-Out
 1408 / int_c75df49a
comment
Shout-Out: The Haunting (1963) gets two of them: one is a specific reference when Mike is thinking about the paintings changing, and the other is a subtle reference to "Mike's 70-odd (very odd) minute stay" in the room.
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featureApplicability
1.0
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 1408 / int_ccc73c34
type
Spooky Painting
 1408 / int_ccc73c34
comment
Spooky Painting: The evil room features several framed pieces of drab hotel art (a woman in an evening gown, a boat and a poor-quality still-life). At first, they seem mundane if somewhat off-putting. They later change to become menacing as the hotel room subjects the main character to more and greater horrors.
 1408 / int_ccc73c34
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 1408 / int_d010df5
type
Domain Holder
 1408 / int_d010df5
comment
Domain Holder: Outside of his office, Olin is an inconsequential little man who is completely dominated by Mike. Inside his office, he suddenly acquires a powerful presence and personality, to the point that Mike spends the entirety of the interview on the defensive, and Olin even manages to make him seriously reconsider his decision to enter 1408. Of course, unlike the titular room, Olin's office is completely mundane (at least probably, one never knows what kind of long-term effects being exposed to an Eldritch Location can have on a man and his surroundings), but its effect on Olin's composure is so drastic that it evokes this trope nonetheless. And then of course there's whatever abomination has made Room 1408 into its lair.
 1408 / int_d010df5
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 1408 / int_dd608032
type
Hell Hotel
 1408 / int_dd608032
comment
Hell Hotel: Room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel. Only one room is actually a portal to something hellish, the rest of the hotel is quite pleasant and the manager tries his damnedest to make sure no one but he and a select few of the staff go into that room.
 1408 / int_dd608032
featureApplicability
1.0
 1408 / int_dd608032
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 1408 / int_feaf5424
type
You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious
 1408 / int_feaf5424
comment
You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Mike asks that Olin call him by his first name instead of Mr. Enslin, to which Olin replies that he would feel uncomfortable doing so. Later, in a last, desperate attempt to stop him from entering 1408, Olin appeals to Mike using his first name.
 1408 / int_feaf5424
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 1408 / int_ff769d04
type
Thin Dimensional Barrier
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comment
Thin Dimensional Barrier: Room 1408 is where mundane reality intersects too closely with something awful.
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1408

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 1408
hasFeature
Alien Geometries / int_559fab69
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hasFeature
Antagonist Title / int_559fab69
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hasFeature
Evil Phone / int_559fab69
 1408
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Fictional Colour / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Genius Loci / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Hell Hotel / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Man on Fire / int_559fab69
 1408
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Most Writers Are Writers / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Room 101 / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Savage Wolves / int_559fab69
 1408
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Short Story / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Talkative Loon / int_559fab69
 1408
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13 Is Unlucky / int_559fab69
 1408
hasFeature
Word-Salad Horror / int_559fab69