In the Rosia Montana project debates, the divisions among politicians, citizens, local villagers, institutes and NGOs concerning the exploitation of gold and silver using cyanide in the Apuseni Mountains, Romania, have repeatedly led to postponements of a final decision. To generate those responses, I argue that the term intermedial horror best describes the process through which the film produces feelings of uncanniness by tapping into tropes common in print and audiovisual media. Through specific examples from the story and the film I showcase how terror, horror, and gross-out are presented to the viewers, while at the same time the film stays faithful to the original material. I use Stephen King’s short story “1408” and its film adaptation (2007), as King is an author who has enjoyed and encouraged numerous transformations of his own work.

This essay will be primarily concerned with how the transformation of the medium affects the atmosphere the writer is attempting to create, the efficiency of the adapted work in relation to the original and the reformulation of Gothic conventions as a means of emanating the desirable effect to the targeted audiences, readers and viewers. The Gothic as a mode also undergoes various transformations in the last fifty years due to the impact several literary theories have on it and the continuous media evolution. At the same time the adapted material has different sets of standards to be considered a success, especially taking into consideration a different medium’s conventions and limitations. The adaptation of a work from the page to the screen offers a variety of challenges which affect the story’s cohesion and possibly mutate the desired effect the creator of the source material intended.

1408 by Stephen King