The latest in our series of writers recommending lesser-known films available to stream is an ode to an unnerving chiller starring Ruth Wilson

There wasn’t a lot of Shirley Jackson in Haunting of Hill House, Netflix’s sensationally scary but very loose adaptation of the prolific American suspense writer’s most famous novel. Mike Flanagan, who wrote and directed the miniseries, drew clearer inspiration from a different master of the macabre – the King, instead of the queen, of bestselling horror fiction. For a closer approximation of Jackson’s uniquely unsettling voice, that gift she had for raising the hairs on the back of a reader’s neck, look instead to a more compact ghost story released by the same streaming service two years earlier. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House isn’t officially based on any of Jackson’s more than 200 published tales. All the same,...