Most ghost stories bore you with a long setup before getting down to the good stuff.

“1408” is just the other way around. The first half-hour, when director Mikael Hafstrom and three writers (working from a Stephen King story) are putting all their ducks in a row, is terrific. It’s smart, clever and subtle.

The actual scary part is a letdown.

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) writes ghost guidebooks – tours of cemeteries, country inns and old lighthouses where the paranormal is said to run rampant. But for all the nights he’s spent in “haunted” rooms, he’s never actually encountered a ghost. Mike’s a glum cynic who, in the wake of his young daughter’s death and the breakup of his marriage, doesn’t believe in anything.

Then a mysterious postcard arrives telling him to check out Room 1408 in New York’s Dolphin Hotel. A little research reveals numerous suicides in the room, beginning just weeks after the hotel opened in the 1920s. Guests have thrown themselves from the windows, slashed their wrists and necks, hanged themselves from light fixtures and drowned in the bathtub.

Still dubious but with his curiosity piqued, Mike travels to the Big Apple, where the desk clerk at the Dolphin tries to give him a different room. This leads to the film’s best scene.

During a sit-down with the manager, Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), Mike learns that the reported deaths in 1408 are but the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of “natural” deaths as well. Nobody has ever stayed in 1408 for more than an hour and come out alive.

Since Olin came on board, he’s refused to let anyone stay in the room, which is cleaned once a week by a team of maids who are never left alone and who must complete their work in just a few minutes.

This sounds to Mike like an elaborate scam created to generate publicity for an old hotel. He demands the key to 1408. Olin tries to bribe him with an expensive bottle of liquor. Mike is smugly adamant. What’s the big deal, anyway?

“It’s an evil (blank)ing room,” Olin hisses in reply.

That encounter is so sharply written and deftly played by Cusack and Jackson that the real meat of the story – what happens to Mike in 1408 – feels more like an afterthought.

At first, the room looks normal. But then the clock radio resets to 60 minutes and begins counting backwards. Ghostly apparitions take headers to the street below. Walls crack and something like blood oozes out. A painting of a seascape inundates the room with a wave of water, then the temperature drops to well below freezing.

The door won’t open and a call to the front desk results only in a chirpy female voice informing Mike he can check out at any time … through the window.

Pretty soon Mike is a believer. The question now is how he’ll survive the night.

“1408” isn’t really scary, not in the heart-clutching manner of, say, the original version of “The Haunting.” Director Hafstrom (“Derailed”) takes a funhouse-ride approach with big set pieces – fire, water, snow – and an ingenious fake ending that will have most moviegoers guessing.

There’s plenty going on, but the movie is too busy to be truly disturbing. It has too many distractions to really home in on what’s important – Mike’s mental state.

Cusack, quite possibly our most personable actor, goes through the expected stages of sarcasm, cynicism, curiosity, alarm and panic.

But as for that persistent sense of dread that great horror generates, “1408” comes up short.

Focus on film

WHAT: “1408”

RATED: PG-13 for disturbing images, language

RATING: 2½ stars

RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, 34 minutes