He’s souring on this suite

EVER feel like the walls are closing in on you? Take that feeling and multiply it exponentially to get a taste of what happens to the character played by John Cusack in the occult thriller “1408.”

“The room moves, it freezes, it’s on fire, it’s underwater,” Cusack says. “Everything that could possibly happen, happens.” There is “kind of a vortex” in the room where “this thing, this personality, this demon, whatever it is, resides.”

The film -- part summer popcorn fare, yet also aimed at adults who thrive on mind-twisting “Twilight Zone” episodes -- is based on a Stephen King short story about a writer (Cusack) who researches paranormal occurrences.

He checks into Room 1408 in a New York hotel, determined to debunk rumors that there is some sort of monster residing within its walls. Samuel L. Jackson plays the hotel manager who, Cusack explains, keeps the room’s secrets and “has to clean up the mess and also protect the world from the room.”

Cusack says the thrills begin almost from the moment the door opens and he makes the trailer-worthy remark, “Come on, this is it?” “And then it starts,” the actor says, “and when it starts, it does not let up until it is over.”

What’s in the room is not really a ghost, he notes. “The room has a presence, it has its own personality. The room knows how to scare you. It knows what’s in your head and in your heart.” Cusack calls the filming a “high-wire act” where many of the scenes involved “just me and the room.”

The challenge facing Cusack and director Mikael Hafstrom was how to make a horror movie in just one room knowing “there is nothing to cut away to.”

“I liked the challenge of that,” Cusack says, adding that he weirdly started identifying with the room so much that he wanted to return to it whenever they went elsewhere to film. “It was like the Stockholm syndrome,” he says with a laugh.

So, does Cusack believe in the supernatural?

“I’m not skeptical about these things,” he says. “It takes more work not to believe in it. I don’t know about the stuff in this movie, but I don’t think we’re alone in this universe.”

MGM plans to release the Dimension Films movie July 13.

-- Robert W. Welkos