My ill-advised endeavor to watch the top 200 horror movies of all time, plus 100 additions, in order to determine a definitive (read: completely subjective) Top 100 continues.

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a ghost hunter, a writer of a successful series of nonfiction books chronicling his travels to the most haunted places in America. But Mike has a secret: he has never once seen anything anyone sane would call supernatural. No ghosts, no specters, no unexplained bumps in the night. Mike is a skeptic masquerading as a pedlar of the paranormal. But he’s haunted by something of a different sort, something much more real: the death of his young daughter and estrangement from his wife. He’s also disillusioned with his work which is now threatening to collapse under self-destructive tendencies. But when Mike receives a postcard from the Dolphin Hotel that reads simply, “Don’t Enter 1408,” he thinks this might just be the inspiration he needs. The hotel manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), tries in vain to dissuade Mike from staying in that room. The hotel has closed room 1408 indefinitely after 56 deaths occurred over the years, some violent and some seemingly of natural causes—though, with such an outsized number, even the natural deaths seem suspicious. At this point, we the viewer are tempted to begin questioning who—or what—sent that postcard, if as is now obvious, it wasn’t an attempt at shoring up some publicity. But Mike, the cynic, believes that is exactly what’s going on, that Olin’s resistance is a sham meant to hype the haunted hotel. He’s about to learn differently.

Based on a short story of the same name by Stephen King, collected in his book Everything’s Eventual, 1408 follows the same basic plot of the original work, but a subplot featuring Mike’s estranged wife and deceased daughter are added to flesh out the story. The effect of this is a blunting of the original story’s creep-factor, but the exploration of a father’s grief lends some much-needed meaning to the grim festivities. Viewed from that perspective, the dread happenings in the haunted hotel room are modeled after the 5 stages of grief, which to me is a clever technique to get the chills of the short story up on the big screen for a large audience. And subsequently, 1408 is one of the better large budget, broadly appealing horror films. It harkens back to a more gothic sensibility during a time when the rest of mainstream horror was focused on one-upping the Saw franchise for gore-per-second. It seemed quaint at the time, but viewing it now in the context of this wide-ranging project, I recognize what it’s doing, and even though I liked it at the time, l appreciate it more now for the throwback that it was. It is Poe, and The Twilight Zone, and classic King. It is a type of proto-Flanagan, and I really like it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Ok, but let’s talk alternate endings. These are common for the special features section of a dvd release, but Mikael Håfström has gone a somewhat different direction. When the original cut, with the so-called “downer ending”, in which Mike Enslin dies in the hotel fire was first screened, audiences did not like it. So an alternate version was shot showing Mike saved from the fire and reunited with his wife. As the couple packs up Mike’s apartment to move him back to New York from the West Coast, he comes across the recorder he’d been using while investigating room 1408. He gets it working, and on it hears his daughter’s voice, proof that what had happened in the hotel had been real. His wife hears it too. They share this miraculous moment. It is sweet and affirming, and this is the ending shown during its theatrical run.

BUT.

This was never the ending that Håfström wanted, so on the vast majority of DVD and Blu-ray releases, the original “downer” ending is shown. Meaning that if you never saw the film in theaters, you may have never seen the happier ending. And vice versa. Also it seems the streamers show the theatrical run mostly, though not always. Complicating matters even further, there are two different happy endings in circulation, one a little more troubling than the first, in that Mike’s wife never hears their daughter on the recording.

I had the misfortune of having seen all three of these endings in the days before information like this was easily come by, and always with people who had only ever seen one ending and who swore that was the only ending that existed, and for years I have felt a little crazy when thinking about this movie, like I was the star of my own psychological horror film. Or that someone had Mandela-ed me in a frustratingly specific way, and on multiple occasions. It was only now when doing the small amount of research I do for these little write-ups that I learned of the multiple endings, and that not only was I not insane, neither were my friends. It was simply Mikael Håfström’s indecision.

Oh! Right! And there’s one more! Another version of the “downer ending” that I haven’t seen, suggesting that whatever evil lurked in 1408 followed the deceased Mike’s manuscript to his publisher’s offices. These can all be found in the wild, masquerading as the true, canonical ending. This is insanity, Mikael.