Everyone in the country appears to love this movie and think it's scary. I guess I'm too jaded - I thought it was a string of tired movie cliches that made little sense. Sure, it had it's moments and a few really made me jump, the cinematography worked well in places, and the acting was good (don't even get me started about the crappy CGI, though).

But on the whole, it wasn't very scary. For the most part, I kept waiting for the REALLY scary things to happen...and they never did.

I've begun to notice that the major difference between American horror and Japanese (or Asian, in general) horror, which I often find very scary, is that American horror likes to shock you with something jumping out at you, accompanied by a loud noise (this actually works well for us in "The Sacrifice" - most people love the "zombie hands" scene, even if they don't care for the rest of the film), whereas Asian horror likes the idea of something nasty slowly walking or
crawling across the room towards you.

They have their own cliches, which are getting a bit tiresome - long black hair creeping out of things, ghosts walking (or crawling) with disjointed or jerky movements, pretty much the same blueish ghost make-up on EVERY ghost we encounter - but I have to say I find Asian horror to be much more frightening than American horror. I'm often squirming in my seat, as the horrid thing on screen slowly inches towards the camera,
wanting to get away from it as much as the cast of the film does.

Something jumping out at me gets my heart racing for a second, and there is a certain amount of tension that builds up, because you don't know when the NEXT thing is going to jump out at you. But too frequently, what jumps out isn't all that frightening, after all - it's the jump and the loud noise that the filmmaker is counting on to scare me, and I no longer really fall for it.

I also found it disheartening that so many fans attacked the few critics who seemed to notice that "1408" makes no sense, insisting that movies about the paranormal don't HAVE to make sense. Huh? Good movies make sense, even if they're cryptic upon first viewing - "Donnie Darko", "The Shining" (the Kubrick version), these movies make sense, when you really look at them. Even if you never feel that you quite get it, you should at least feel that there is something there to get - something hiding below the surface that may be eluding you, but that you feel is there, nonetheless.

Note that these fans weren't defending "1408", saying that it DOES make sense, on some level - they were defending lazy filmmaking. They were, in essence, saying that they were perfectly willing to slap down their ten bucks for a film that's badly structured and make excuses for the writer and director, rather than demand better films. It's horror. It doesn't have to be good - it just has to have things jumping out at us.

Ugh.