John and Pam have bought a terrace house in a village, and move into it with their little son. In the middle of the night Pam notices that a man is peeping at them from the pavement outside. When he reemerges on the same spot in daytime, she starts becoming nervous. When she later bumps into the same man in the local supermarket, she gets terrified. She tells her husband that when she was 14 years old and lived in an orphanage, a 25 year old man courted her, gave her lots of presents and finally wanted to marry her. She tried to avoid him, he raped her, and it all ended with him being imprisoned. She is sure that he now has come back. Step by step the foreigner escalates his terror against the couple, ending in an attempt to murder John. By sheer luck John is saved, while a colleague happens to be killed instead of him. As a final stroke the stranger tries to capture Pam in her home at night and kidnap her. When John and Pam try to call for help, they find out that their telephone line is cut off, and their car tires punctured. They can just sit in the darkness and wait for the stranger to arrive.