1408 may seem like a cliched, shallow, Hollywoodized attempt at horror that owes its whole existence to a short story by Stephen King and the films of the genre that preceded it. But that’s a surface appraisal. In reality what lies beneath the surface of this film is a brilliant examination of what a person’s life amounts to when it reaches its end, what binds us in our own personal hell and, overall, what a person needs to do in order to escape that hell.