Living spaces in Roman Polanski’s fright films aren’t exactly designed for comfort. They’re full of spy holes and secret passageways; the walls are thin, the doors often barricaded. Then there are the people who dwell in them, a troubled lot, to say the least. In Polanski’s view, man is not an island — he’s a little shop of horrors.

He — and, just as often, she — is also terrified of the people next door. This fear makes perfect sense in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), in which the neighbors are satanic witches, and “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), in which they’ve got a real thing for human blood. When it comes to the mentally unsound protagonists of “Repulsion” (1965) and “The Tenant” (1976), on the other hand, it’s pure paranoia. But the wonderful thing about these four films, which are screening today and Wednesday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is that they get deep under your skin either way.

Polanski, 73, is not the man he was when he made them. Facing a statutory rape charge in 1978, he fled to France; after nearly 30 years without a great film, the “Chinatown” director earned an Oscar, in absentia, for his 2002 Holocaust drama “The Pianist.” But in his youth, Polanski was the crown prince of highbrow horror, the heir apparent to Hitchcock and Buñuel, slipping an uncanny sense of dread into ordinary-seeming tales the way the sneakiest bogeymen emerge from the shadows.

Insanity descends this way — deliberately but terrifyingly — on the virginal young beauty Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) in “Repulsion,” the first feature film Polanski made outside his native Poland. Assaulted by visions of male aggressors and cracking walls in her London apartment, Carole spirals into a nightmare of sexual violation, violently lashing out against anyone who enters.

Like the haunted Parisian flat in “The Tenant,” hers is a large apartment — huge, by modern New York standards. And yet Polanski’s unsettling camera angles and chiaroscuro lighting (“Repulsion” is the only black-and-white film in the series) transform the film into a Freudian oubliette.

Claustrophobia conquers all in these films, which explains why “Rosemary’s Baby” also feels like it’s set in a prison, though it was shot at the Upper West Side’s palatial Dakota. Similarly, “The Fearless Vampire Killers,” which follows the fruitless efforts of a professor (Jack MacGowran) and his assistant (Polanski) to rid a remote backwater of the undead, takes place almost entirely in a low-ceilinged inn and a forbidding castle, despite an inviting snowy backdrop that could host a fairy tale.

This Central European-flavored comedy wasn’t very successful in its time, and it remains one of Polanski’s lesser-known works. It’s also the odd one out in this series, dominated as it is by an impish sense of humor that makes only sporadic appearances in the “apartment trilogy,” as the other three films in this series are sometimes collectively called. Polanski once described “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (which was released in America with the alternate title, “Pardon Me, but Your Teeth Are in My Neck”) as a “cartoon with people,” but although the film lampoons certain clichés of the vampire genre, it is more sincere than today’s smirking horror-movie parodies. The low-angle shot of Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne) descending, with the gently falling snow, through the inn’s roof is one you won’t soon forget. And the romance between Polanski’s greenhorn vampire hunter and the maiden played by Sharon Tate, his wife at the time, has gained a tragic dimension since the actress’s brutal murder in 1969 at the hands of the Manson family.

The vampire killers are neither fearless nor competent, and this fuels much of the film’s humor. But it also reflects Mr. Polanski’s conviction, evident in so much of his work, that the demons always win in the end. In Polanski’s world, as one film scholar has observed, “Only the wicked have the strength that comes from unity of purpose.”

The fact that the director’s mother died at Auschwitz helps explain how he might have arrived at this position, and eerily, the ritualistic slaying of his wife — eight months pregnant at the time — bears it out. The “Manson Family” massacre occurred one year after the release of “Rosemary’s Baby,” Polanski’s unforgettable depiction of a bright, expecting young housewife (Mia Farrow) who is victimized by a cabal of Satanists, and it seems fair to say that never in the history of the movies has a director’s life so horrifically imitated his art.

But that relationship cuts both ways. Like many of Polanski’s films, both “Repulsion” and “The Tenant” — a Kafkaesque tale of a young Polish man (Polanski) who is convinced his neighbors are trying to drive him to suicide — are about the foreigner’s unease in a strange city. Polanski’s films terrify because the anxieties they enlarge are so familiar: Every mother knows what it’s like to carry a human life in her belly, and few urbanites are indifferent to the threat of having their domestic space penetrated. If there’s one question that sums up the neuroses on display in these films, it’s “How did they get in?”

Doorbells don’t exist in these films. Like the dripping faucet and the ticking clock — two of Polanski’s favorite aural motifs — the sound of a fist on a door heralds the onset of madness with a metronomic insistence. Polanski once admitted he prioritized atmosphere over plot in his work, and it is this excruciating attention to detail that gives his horror films their mark of distinction. Each of them provides at least one major goosebumps moment, but only after coaxing the viewer to enter a dream world where the air is heavy with doubt and fear. Usually, that world doesn’t look like much more than a one-bedroom.

Today and Wednesday (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).