The Thing in the Upper Room

A young English painter, broke and stubborn, takes the cheapest room in Paris: a top-floor lodging shut and shunned for years, whose last tenant shot himself as the police beat on his door. There is nothing to see, nothing to hear, only a pressure in the air that he is determined to call imagination. Then come the crushing headaches, the dreams he cannot remember, and the crooked Malay dagger with a red stone eye that will not stay in the drawer where he puts it.

Restrained, patient Edwardian horror, where the dread arrives through ordinary things: a chair that has moved, a bad night's sleep, an evening newspaper bought on the way to dinner.