Given the question: Build a movie plot around this: Allan leaves what next to a heater? Paint cans and thinner.
The answer is:
Allan leaves paint cans and thinner next to a heater one night, which causes a fire that kills his father and disfigures his sister, Katherine. He goes hysterically blind. After an eight-month stay in the mental hospital, Allan begins to come to terms with his resentful feelings toward his father and sister, and with the guilt that caused his blindness. Now he can see blurry images. He takes his doctor's suggestion that he talk about his feelings into a tape recorder. He tells the machine about his sister's mysterious new boarder, Harold Dennis, a university student who only speaks in a whisper due to a throat injury. He tells the machine how ambivalent he is about Olive, the woman to whom he was practically engaged before the accident. His finds his resentment over his sister's near-incestuous relationship with their father has not gone away, especially after learning of her work raising money to get the great professor's name on a new wing of the library. Allan learns that Katherine's boyfriend, Eric, had gone to Australia just after the fire, supposedly to make his fortune. Allan wonders if her disfigurement was the main reason he had left.Olive tries to repair her relationship with Allan, but her insistence that he join her in a ride downtown goes badly. He's waiting for her in the car when he gets the idea that a group of students are laughing at him. And then the roomer comes up and whispers to him menacingly. Despite his near-total blindness, he gets behind the wheel and drives off. He soon crashes into a street lamp, but without much damage to himself or the machine. But it's clear he's not well enough to be out in public.Things grow worse for Allan. He's sure the roomer is out to murder him. And who is this roomer anyway? Allan can't really see him. Is he really this Harold Dennis, or is he Eric, the boyfriend supposedly in Australia? His nerves grow worse. When a delivery boy comes to the door, Allan is so frightened that he accidentally slices his hand with a kitchen knife. Later, his fears drive...