The Ghost Ship (1943)

The Ghost Ship (1943) is a low key Val Lewton maritime murder psychological thriller suspense film noir melodrama of high seas horror mania and psychopathy and serial killer highly focused mania, with homicidal homoerotics on the deadly foggy misty waters of the evil portions of the silver screen's fantasies of what it might mean to be on the ocean, in a kind of Conradian high modern mixup of steamer mythos at its zenith worst, its best and most deadly. The insane Captain Stone.

It isn't what you think. There are no ghosts.

Isle of the Dead (1942)

Isle of the Dead (1942) is an RKO Radio Pictures Val Lewton and Mark Robson Arnold Böcklin-inspired Boris Karloff historical Balkans War supernatural creeper mystery horror with Ellen Drew, Alan Napier, written by frequent Lewton collaborator Ardel Wray, it was the second of three films Lewton made with Karloff, and the fourth of five pictures Robson directed for Lewton.

The dead do not rest on Mark Robson's island. In Isle of the Dead (1945), what begins as a contemplation on the duties of command and the sanctity of reason unravels into a vision of mental collapse, buried trauma, and spiritual unease. 

The film, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Robson, engages its viewers in a paradox: its imagery evokes stillness, isolation, stasis, and yet its emotional and thematic resonances never cease to convulse. 

Bedlam (1946)

Bedlam (1946) is a historical shocker exploitation psychological thriller horror noir based on the drawings of William Hogarth and telling of exhibitionism, cruelty and vintage style madness, sympathy and bedlamites of yore in fig, pose, phantasy and framed with filmic license aplenty, talking much of the madness, and mildly exhibiting the standards of the earliest and most genteel modes of exploitation as cinema.

No monstrous modes of action herein but something that seems to prefigure the British Hammer films of the later 1950s and the 1960s, with a village horror kind of vaudevillian villain most mild torture and cruelty, with visions of captivity dominating the viewers delivered palette of ideas.