The horror films directed by Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1960s and ’70s deliberately put coherent story lines on the back burner, the better to concentrate on shocking scares and uncomfortable atmospheres. The British director Peter Strickland is one of several current European filmmakers to embrace the mode of horror that Bava, Argento and some of their lesser-known contemporaries pioneered. His new picture, “In Fabric,” is his fourth feature and his most impressive, engrossing, imaginatively unchained work yet.

After an opening sequence in which a series of fake ads announce a season of sales at the fictional (thank God) department store Dentley & Soper’s , Marianne Jean-Baptiste appears as Sheila, a bank clerk looking for a fresh start. Her husband has left her, her tetchy adult son still lives with her and she’s tired of tedium. Dating through the classifieds (the film is ostensibly set in 1982), she’s looking for a hot dress, and she finds one, a red number, at D & S. She buys it despite the ultra-baroque sales pitch of a clerk, who’s dressed, like all her colleagues, as if she stepped out of a Velásquez rendition of a funeral.