"1408" is the latest story by Stephen King to make it to the big screen, and it's quite similar to one of the first King movies, "The Shining." There's a cynical writer — John Cusack this time, instead of Jack Nicholson — who goes to stay at a spooky hotel, but it's OK, because he doesn't believe in ghosts.
Cusack, deploying all the smarminess he can muster, plays Mike Ensulin, a travel writer who specializes in books about haunted hotels and "Ghost Survival Guides." The trouble is, he doesn't believe in any of it; having visited every "haunted" location in America, he's never actually witnessed any paranormal activity.
Then he discovers the Dolphin Hotel, smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, where there's a room, No. 1408, that's supposedly so horrific that the hotel won't even let anyone stay there. The hotel's manager (Samuel L. Jackson) warns Ensulin of the 56 mysterious deaths that have occurred in 1408: heart attack, stroke, throat-cutting, jumpers, even drowning, which is mighty hard to accomplish in a hotel room.