The Films of Val Lewton - Part Fifteen

The Ghost Ship (1943) - Part Three

Pockmarked Angel

With the ship in dock, First Officer Bowns and deckmaster ‘Boats’ look on with undisguised contempt as Tom goes to shore in his civvies. At the offices of the Dunham shipping line, Tom asks company agent Mr Roberts about making a complaint about Captain Stone, who it is revealed is ‘an old friend’. The swiftly convened hearing finds Tom alone in his suspicions. The incident with the hook is blamed on him since he was the one who conveyed the Captain’s order not to fasten it and his pact of silence with Sparks leads them both to bite their tongues when the Greek claims that it was the Captain who saved his life. From the perspective of the world on shore, Tom’s claims seem like paranoid delusions. The pocket world of the ship suddenly seems remote, like the fog of a half-remembered dream dispersing upon waking. The Captain on shore is a different man from the Captain aboard ship, his power and authority dissipated and dispersed in the wide and busy connections of the world at large.

Mr Roberts has told the Captain that ‘Ellen will be wanting to see you’. But it is Tom that she meets first, another indication that, as the Captain has asserted, they are in some ways shadow selves. She is gazing longingly up at the ship as Tom descends with his suitcase in his hand. He confesses to her that he is leaving the ship and she offers him a lift to the hotel in her carriage. Ellen provides a female, and therefore in the context of the world of the ship, an outsider perspective. She evidently sees Tom as a younger incarnation of Captain Stone. She gently mocks his, and by extension the Captain’s intransigent and inflexible attitude, its inability to admit fallibility and thereby the chance to learn from mistakes. ‘I didn’t make a make a mistake; I couldn’t make a mistake; I’m the Captain – I’m Authority’ she chides. Her voice has the worn quality of weary understanding. She describes the Captain as ‘lonely, austere, bitter – without family or friends’ and warns of the danger of ‘condemning yourself to a bloodless, ghost-like existence’. This is the provenance of the ghost ship of the title; a ship peopled by living spectres, in thrall to their sublimated drive to power or to a superstitious belief in the mechanisms of a pre-ordained fate. Ellen vows to change this, to draw Tom and the Captain to ‘embrace warmth and life’. She hints at some change in personal circumstance which means that ‘I can now. I have the right’. She claims rights over the Captain in much the same way as he has claimed rights over the lives of his crew, but she is talking in terms not of authority and control, but of connection and partnership. We see once again the dangers of isolation, the imperative need for the society of others and for genuine communion. For love. Captain Stone follows in the line of Lewton characters such as Dr Galbraith in The Leopard Man and Jacqueline in The Seventh Victim who have become detached from any meaningful external relationship, seemingly contradicting John Donne’s assertion that ‘no man is an island’.

The Captain confesses as much to both Mr Roberts and then to Ellen, who we recognise now as the woman in the photo which lay on the chart. ‘I’ve lived a lonely life’ he says to Mr Roberts, before revealing his growing paranoia. ‘People seem to be turning against me – the boy, some of the crew’. Mr Roberts advises him to ‘see a good doctor’ and ‘find new interests’ but The Captain offhandedly rejects this admittedly rather patronising advice. ‘There are no new interests. Just authority’. The Nietzschean will to power has effectively taken him over, becoming his sole raison d’etre. From displacement activity it has hardened into a rigid carapace which has suffocated all other motivations and emotions inside. With Ellen on deck, we learn that his name is Will, a startling use of a real name denied the sailors at sea, who are distanced from each other either by dismissive nicknames, surnames or titles of rank. She reveals that after a long time, she has finally won her divorce, but does not receive the joyful response she hopes for. ‘Will’ (another symbolic name?) admits to his fear of madness, to the ‘feeling that I don’t know myself’. As Will rather than Captain Stone, he can allow such a display of vulnerability. This is the split personality which leads to such feelings of estrangement. As soon as he is back on board, in the shrunken universe circumscribed by the boundaries of the ship’s hull, he will become Stone again, compelled to control every aspect of his world.

Nazi bullies

Tom comes across Sir Lancelot being picked on by a group of leering German soldiers, who are by implication Nazis. This serves to highlight the fact that (aside from the observation that Nazis are racial supremacist thugs) Captain Stone is not himself of that stripe. An authoritarian with fascist tendencies but without a racial dimension to his Darwinian view of the inherent superiority of a select ruling elite. Tom wades in to defend the gentle Sir Lancelot from these fascist Neanderthals and is knocked senseless in the process and mistakenly carried back on board ship, which debarks before he comes to. He goes to see the Captain but is studiously ignored, before finally being given the foreboding line previously delivered to Louis, which effectively sealed his fate. Tom is sent to Coventry, given the cold shoulder by all aboard. When he tries to convince Sparks that the Captain is out to kill him and asks to send a wireless message, he is curtly told that all such messages have been banned unless the Captain personally approves them. The borders have been shut down.

an unlocked door

At night, Tom discovers that the locks have been removed from his door and later that the clasps have been taken off from his porthole window. He improvises an alarm system from torn sheets, and we get our first ‘bus’ as a cup smashes to the ground. Several instances make it clear that he is being watched, and he creeps out to the Captain’s room to break into the armoury. But such a move has been anticipated and the Captain confronts him with a gun. He tells him that he is teaching him a great lesson, that ‘authority cannot be questioned’. Guns are never actually used in the film. As has been noted, the weapons are tools put to destructive use. Here the gun is a demonstration of superior force, the fascistic maintenance of control through fear and violence. The Captain reveals the sinews of his philosophy once the skin of nebulously noble rhetoric has been stripped. ‘Who’s crazy?’ he says in a strained voice which belies the need for an answer. ‘You, who defied me and are helpless? Or I , who control your destiny and the destiny of the Altair and all the lives on board?’ He further expounds his Nietzschean ubermensch philosophy in all its raw misanthropy. ‘Men are worthless cattle, and a few men are given authority to drive them’. He would not have bothered to step in to save Sir Lancelot, merely observed with interest as the lower orders, driven by petty and unimportant pack instincts, tore each other apart. Tom, who did intervene in this situation, declares his faith in man. ‘You can’t prove that to me – even with a gun’. This amounts to throwing down the gauntlet. The Captain needs to assert the superiority of his world view so issues a challenge to take part in what amounts to a philosophical dual, a clash of beliefs. This is like an invitation to take part in a deadly game, reminding us of the chess board which lies ready at the start of the film. Any game the Captain plays he clearly has no intention of losing, since this would challenge his authority and his belief in his inherent superiority. ‘See if they’ll stand up with you against authority’, he contemptuously commands Tom.

No-one will listen to him. He attempts to steal a large needle used in the fixing of a steel rope, another tool which can be turned into a weapon, but the Captain is there to catch him out. He turns to Sparks, pleading with him that ‘I’m desperate’, but receives the cold response ‘I don’t know anything’. Sparks receives a telegram from Mr Roberts expressing Ellen’s concern for Tom. The Captain’s reply that he is not on board effectively severs him from even these close friends. He is now wholly self-contained, the impervious monad, cut off from all human relationship. All that is left is the will to authority, to control all elements of the world in his purview. We see the Finn in profile on the deck, and as Tom nervously walks past, they exchange a glance. This moment of wordless communication is enough for Finn to read him, and we hear is dreamy inner voice once more. ‘I know this man’s trouble. I see the Captain’s hatred. I know and I will watch…I will watch’. Finn thus becomes Tom’s guardian. Existing beyond the level of language, he sees things more clearly without the hypnotic fog of words, the linguistic labyrinth. They communicate on the level of empathy. He can recognise Tom’s isolation and the fear it engenders because he has experienced it himself. His considered, slowly articulated thoughts are also able to read the burning chaos of the Captain’s suppressed rage, but he is wholly in command of his own feelings and is not infected, either by anger or fear. He is a strange angel.

Back in his room, Tom finds Sparks, whose suspicions have finally been sufficiently aroused by the Captain’s mendacious response to the wireless telegram to offer help. He goes off to deliver the telegram to the First Officer, but meets the Captain outside. The two walk off slowly into the shadows, side by side. It is the walk of a condemned man and his executioner to the gallows. It is a mark of the all-pervasive air of pre-determined fate aboard ship that even Sparks, the sceptical intellectual, bows to the will of the Captain’s Authority, to its almost supernatural claim over the lives of the crew. He surreptitiously drops the telegram, however, which Finn picks up. He is, however, illiterate. All standard channels of linguistic communication are closed to him. When Tom is told by the Captain to send a wireless message conveying the news of Sparks’ murder, he assaults him, accusing him of murder. He is tied up and sedated by the crew and held in his cabin. Meanwhile, Finn brings the telegram to First Officer Bowns, with the Captain surreptitiously spying in the background. He thus overhears Bowns admitting of the possibility that he is mad, ‘if the boy is right’.

an unheeded aphorism

In the confines of his quarters, this phrase loops in his head, as if echoing in a vast empty space, but with the interrogative ‘if’ removed so that it becomes an assertion. The Captain is being confronted with his own madness, which he has privately confessed (to Ellen) that he fears being overcome by. He sees his face reflected in his aphoristically self-instructive sign, behind the words ‘who does not heed the rudder shall meet the rock’. But he is far beyond the flexibility and openness to change which this counsels. Enraged by such an unpalatable self-revelation, he tears the sign from the wall and picks up a large knife, the emblematic tool/weapon the artistic arrangement of which was the opening image of the film. From this moment of inchoate rage, we cut to Sir Lancelot singing a light calypso, articulating the crew’s wilful blindness to the tyranny to which they have been alerted. ‘I like me singing, I like me fun, I like me good old West Indian rum’. These distractions serve to divert the attention from the necessity of engagement, of taking control of your own fate rather than waiting for it to hit you on the back of the head with the full force of an untethered grappling hook.

Power relationships

In Tom’s cabin, the Captain stands over his bound form with his very large knife poised over his throat. It is as foretold in shadows by his first meeting with Finn. This is an unvarnished portrayal of power relationships, of unquestioned, unchallenged authority poised over a subjucated and passively obedient class of willingly controlled sheep, ready at any time for the slaughter. It is the embodiment of Captain Stone’s philosophy. The knife is also undeniably phallic, its exaggerated size and the rigidness with which it is gripped putting it beyond claims that sometimes a knife is merely a knife. There is an obvious master and slave relationship hinted at here (one that has failed, hence the intent to murder) and perhaps even an implied element of homosexual desire. Would this explain the Captain’s failure to be overjoyed at the news of Ellen’s divorce, and add a further dimension to his inner torment? We’ve already seen hints of same sex relationships (with a domineering element) in The Seventh Victim, so maybe this isn’t such a fanciful conjecture, a retrospective application of a modern day sensibility. After all, any such relationships would certainly have to have been carefully inserted inbetween the lines in this era.

At this point Finn bursts in and a knife fight ensues, agonisingly played out in complete silence. Finn’s hand is wounded by grasping the sharp end of the knife, a recurrence of the image of the tool turned against its user. The Captain’s knife is grasped firmly in his white-knuckled fist, only finally released in the final relaxation of death. The fist grasping the knife could be a pictorial emblem of authority imposed through force, reproduced on flags and on uniforms. The final shot of the Captains corpse focuses on his stripes, the symbol of rank which has come to define his life. Finn’s voiceover concludes the final duel, in which he has stood in for the helpless Tom. This was a duel which Tom could not fight, anyway, as it required, on its philosophical plane, someone else to validate his humanist faith in man. As they stand side by side in the steering room, his inner voice intones ‘the boy is safe and his belief in men and men’s essential goodness is secure. He stands beside me in command. All is well’. He smiles for the first time, continuing ‘and we are homeward bound to San Pedro’. Both the physical and philosophical duels have been won. Finn and also the late Sparks have provided proof that Tom’s faith in man is not without ground. Back in port, the blind singer is still playing his pitch at the foot of the gangplank, his presence effectively bracketing the film. Tom once more pitches him a coin ‘for luck’, but his luck is this time sought on shore. We see the shadow of a woman greeting him. It is Ellen’s sister, who she has set up for a date. These are the shadows of what might have been for the Captain, but for Tom, they are shadows which can be made real. He has escaped from the trap of the ghost world into which the Captain had faded. Tom greets her with an arm around the shoulders, immediately establishing contact, and the two shadows walk briskly away from the ship, the blind man’s Brooklynite rendition of Blow the Man Down speeding them on their way.

Next, the exquisite childhood fairy tale and demi-sequel Curse of the Cat People.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Fourteen

The Ghost Ship (1943) - Part Two

The ship's claw

We now see the deckhands working, with an ominous looking hook on the end of a chain suspended amongst them. As Finn indicates that a wind is building up, Tom tells the Captain that he will secure the hook to make it safe, but is twice rebuffed from on high (the Captain looks down on the deck from an upper gantry). His reasoning is that this will mar the fresh paint, and he likes ‘a neat ship’. This is an indication of his obsession for maintaining absolute order, down to the smallest detail. As the night falls and the wind builds in strength, the hook begins to careen dangerously out of control, and the Captain finally gives the direct order to secure it, again from a position safely above the fray, conveying his command through a megaphone. The hook describes a wildly swaying and unpredictable course amongst the sailors, who dodge beneath and to one side in an attempt to hook it with a tethering rope. With its new coat of shiny black tarry paint, it looks like the chitinous claw of a giant insect. This is the ship turning against its inhabitants, the tools used against the users. This will happen throughout the film. Objects used as weapons are always those designed to aid shipboard labour. Their dual use shows how the constructive can swiftly revert to the destructive, particularly when people become divided and cease to work together.

Later, at the officer’s table, the Captain anticipates Tom’s objections with a pre-emptive explanation of his inaction. He refers back to his comments about the moth and claims that he has a right to do what he will with the crew ‘because their safety depends on me’. He claims that he is prepared to put himself at risk for their safety, although his removal from the arena of danger in which Tom himself was fully involved makes this a rather hollow assertion in this case. He cites the undermining of his authority as his reason for denying Tom’s requests to fasten the hook, passing the blame on to him for asking the question in the first place. With such linguistic sophistry, he uses words to create a post-facto justification for his actions. Already, the connection between word and deed is beginning to break apart. This gap is further forced open when he is indecisive over making an incision when the Greek needs an emergency appendectomy. Tom takes over and carries out the operation successfully and not a word is spoken about the Captain’s failure. Tom and Sparks (who had been relaying medical instructions via the wireless) make a pact of silence at Tom’s suggestion. Tom is still sympathetic to the Captain, but Sparks speaks contemptuously of how he will come out with ‘one of those talks he gives on authority’. The intellectual sees through the seductive mesmerism of persuasive language, put is not prepared to challenge the hollow authority which it propagates.

The Captain, after remaining incommunicado for a while, invites Tom into his quarters to explain his actions. It is almost as if he has been summoning the words in the intervening period, composing and rehearsing his speech. He tells him that he is ‘not afraid of anything but failure’, which is in effect a fear of being revealed to himself. The shell of words and rhetoric composing a rigid world view would then shatter and reveal the hollow spaces which they have been encompassing. He goes on to say that he didn’t do the operation because it wasn’t something he knew about. This suggests that he no longer has the capacity to absorb information, to expand upon his view of the world. As his name, Stone, suggests, it has become ossified, intransigent. The authority to the maintenance of which he has become obsessively dedicated has turned him into a monadic figure, detached and shut off from the world and therefore unresponsive to its signals. His response is to try to warp the world to respond to his limitations, to draw it into the oppressively heavy gravity well which surrounds his weltanshauung. The Captain re-iterates his line about Tom being ‘the man for me…a man who’d think like I think’. Tom no longer looks so entranced. The glamour of the Captain’s dictums is beginning to wear off.

On deck with Sparks

Nonetheless, when he meets Sparks, he has evidently convinced himself to give the Captain the benefit of the doubt again, reminding him of their pact of silence. Sparks observes that ‘he’s a smooth man with the words, the Captain’. When Tom continues to stick up for him, Sparks alludes to his (Tom’s) isolated childhood which has made him vulnerable to the blandishments of such an authoritative father figure, but warns that ‘there’s a friendliness that tries to get you to thinking wrong’. This is the false companionship which we’ve encountered in The Seventh Victim, the company of lost souls. It’s a relationship which seeks to reproduce and proliferate a philosophy which will spread out into the world, sweeping up the isolated and powerless with its reassuring certainties, then using them for its own ends.

On deck, Sir Lancelot sings the old shanty ‘Blow the Man Down’. There is a poetic rhyming here with the recurrence of the song which we first heard the blind man sing on the docks. The associational link with blindness is carried over into the close up of the measurements being made on the nautical charts. The rational dividing of course and distance is immaculately observed by the officers, but the underlying forces of irrationality which are emerging in the ship’s power structure are ignored. As the crew take a break, they are informed that the Captain is not happy with the cleanliness of the deck; ‘the Captain wants a clean ship’. The same obsession with cleanliness which was put above the safety of the crew. The constant cleansing of the ship is an external manifestation of the mental cleansing the Captain applies to himself, expunging any considerations which sully the purity of his central conceit, the driving force of his hunger for absolute, unquestioned authority. To this extent, the crew’s cleaning of the ship amounts to a self-administered brainwashing, an acquiescence to the demands of authority whatever they might be, even if they lead to their own destruction. They are led to believe that the will of Authority (or the Captain) is the will of Fate.

Finn’s still, moonlit face is shown as another moment of punctuation. He looks across the ship and out to see, his pockmarked face, thrown into shadowed relief, making him look like a weatherworn figurehead. He seems to be awaiting something, looking out for something on the horizon. It is a look which portends death. On deck the following day, Louis, after a bout of griping, is encouraged as a dare to put the point he has been making about the need to put into port when the crew is short to the Captain. When he agrees, Finn, toying with his knife (the tool which can become the weapon of offence or defence) looks downwards, as if in sad recognition of the sealing of a fate. The Captain’s response is one of indirect, or passive aggression as he calmly states that ‘there are Captains who might hold this against you’. His contained rage at the questioning of his authority is expressed in the snapping in half of his pencil. Louis, we sense, is a man whose time is marked.

Trapped in the Chain Room

As he cleans the chain in the anchor room, the Captain walks past and shuts the door which allows him egress. It is an act of completely casual opportunism. He is walking past and sees the chance to determine Louis’ fate and does so without a second thought. This reflexive action is the enactment of the philosophy which he has been expounding. He is the agent of fate and has the self-determined right to be so according to his dictum about having power over the lives of his men. The thick links of the chain coil down about Louis, increasing in pitch and volume as it grows shorter outside and drowning out all his cries for help. The man who has tried to assert his rights under law is buried in chains. This is almost like an exaggeratedly cruel visual pun on Marx’s famous exhortation ‘workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’ Here again, the mechanisms of the ship are turned against the crew and prove to be the means of their death. Whilst not as upfront and obvious as it is in Battleship Potemkin, there is definitely a point being made about class oppression here. The crewmen are destroyed by the tools and mechanisms with which they work. And they conspire in their own subjugation by failing to unite and challenge the tyrannical authority which cares so little about their wellbeing.

...You have nothing to lose but your chains

When Tom opens the hatch and discovers Louis’ body, he is immediately confronted in the corridor by the Captain who tells him to ‘get that cleaned up’. He makes no distinction between the men and the elements of the ship which they operate. When Tom points out that this was a human being, he coldly responds ‘he was a troublemaker’. ‘Death is so absolute’ he declares with Nietszchean loftiness of a psychopath. The problem of dissent has been dealt with quickly and efficiently. This is Tom’s moment of epiphany, the revelation of the truth behind the seductively intoned rhetoric. ‘This is what you meant when you said you had rights over the lives of the crew’ he says with accusatory disgust. Abstract philosophy has become concrete, as Nietzche’s epigrammatic grandstanding morphed over time into Nazism. Words which have a hypnotising cadence and a promise of noble intent are translated into ugly action which was there between the lines all along.

But Tom’s attempts to reveal what he has discovered about the Captain’s philosophy of absolute power and his application of it fall on deaf ears. The inertia of established hierarchies swiftly exerts itself, the need to maintain positions which have been attained over time paramount over other concerns. The First Officer dismisses him out of hand and Sparks doesn’t want to know. ‘I like my job and I want to keep it’ he states with disarming self-interest. He maintains the non-involvement which he has demonstrated before, the disengaged intellectual reluctant to leave the tower of his learning. The ship approaches the island of St Sebastian, possibly the same one on which the action of I Walked With a Zombie took place, with Sir Lancelot singing a celebratory calypso. In such sunny climes, and with the prospect of shore leave ahead, Tom’s warnings stand little chance of being heeded. Like St Sebastian himself, he is a lonely outsider, isolated and viewed with contempt for beliefs which he refuses to relinquish.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Thirteen

The Ghost Ship (1943) - Part One



The Ghost Ship, the second film which Lewton made with director Mark Robson which was released in 1943, was for some time a ‘lost’ picture, due to the actions of a couple of opportunistic hacks who sued for plagiarism. Lewton refused to back down in the face of what he saw as blatant extortion and settle out of court, but inexplicably failed to win the day in court. As a result, the film was put out of circulation for some time. It’s interesting that it should be a film which is in many ways out of step with the body of horror films upon which his reputation rests which should disappear to resurface for later rediscovery and positioning within what had by then become an established canon. Is it a horror film at all? It certainly circumvents any expectations the title might give rise to in the light of Lewton’s previous RKO pictures. In many ways it is a brisk and efficient thriller, its nautical setting merely serving as an atmospheric backdrop. But all the familiar Lewton themes are there. The danger of isolation and the importance of human connection; the hierarchies of power and the abuse of authority; the capacity for self-delusion and the use of language to perpetuate it; the play of the forces of superstition and rationalism. The atmosphere of fateful foreboding which imbues the film takes it a step beyond the realms of realism, and the ship itself becomes a gothic hulk, it’s various apparatus coming to life in threatening ways. It is the haunted house which contains the conditions of madness to which those who inhabit it for too long succumb. So yes, a horror film in the same sense that we will see that Bedlam is a horror film. The terror is of a world in which madness and reason have become inverted.

The film opens with a shot of a shop front which features an array of knives, displayed in a fanned display, like fetishistic totems. They are being sold for utilitarian use, but throughout the film, the sailors’ tools and mechanisms are turned against them, the means of labour becoming the means of death. In front of this sailors’ outfitters a blind zither player sings ‘Blow the Man Down’. He is the first of the characters we meet who fulfil the standard trio of the deaf, dumb and blind, although the deafness in this case is more wilful than real. The two who suffer from actual deafness and dumbness seem to have a more acute perception of the world and what lies in the hearts of men than those who have their full complement of senses and communicative capacity. Our protagonist, Tom Merriam, walks on to the scene and deposits a coin in the singer’s cup and receives a piece of wisdom in return. ‘It’s only the old ones know there’s nothing but bad luck and bad blows at sea’. The Altair, to which Tom is heading, is ‘a bad ship’. This immediately sets up the opposing forces of superstition, of the ‘old ways’, and the modern outlook of rationalism, of the world inherited from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.


Tom leaves the singer at the foot of the gangplank which leads up to the Altair. He pauses before ascending. This is a threshold moment, the gangplank being a bridge between two worlds. The blind singer is the guardian at the gateway to the world of the shore, and as Tom steps on board, there is the man known as The Finn, played by Skelton Knaggs, a remarkable presence here and in Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. He is the guardian of this second gateway, standing whittling away with his knife (already the knives have emerged from their deceptively decorous display behind the safety of a plate glass window). Both are creatures of the borderlands, set to their roles by stunted senses and vocal incapacity which leave them attuned to other channels. In response to Tom’s request as to the Captain’s whereabouts, he gestures with his knife, the shadow of which seems to cut Tom’s throat. This prefiguring of the Captain’s menace and his eventual assault on Tom lends Finn an air of almost supernatural intuition. It is as if he can conjure shadows of the future from the darkness.

As Tom heads off, we hear the first of Finn’s inner voiceovers, which punctuate the film in much the same way as we have seen Lewton use visual punctuation and recurring symbolic objects in previous films (the statue in I Walked With A Zombie and the fountain in The Leopard Man). As he stares fixedly into space, we hear him dreamily intone ‘this is another man I can never know because I can never talk with him. For I am a mute and cannot speak. I am cut off from other men’. Again, the recurring theme of the isolation of the individual, whether imposed or self-created, is elucidated. But Finn shows a strong sense of self-knowledge. His sadness at the solitariness his condition imposes upon him is tempered by his assertion that ‘in my own silence I can hear things they cannot hear, know things they can never know’. The camera slowly glides in towards his face as he speaks, as if trying to penetrate this mysterious inner world of heightened perception. Finn is often cast in a radiance of milky moonlight, his face illuminated whilst others remain in darkness. He often seems to be almost a holy figure, and it is he who eventually emerges as Tom’s guardian when everyone else turns a deaf ear to his pleas. That this inner resolution and self-knowledge arises from his ‘own silence’ emphasises the self-deluding and obfuscatory nature of language in the film. In many ways, the fog with which the ship is often enshrouded is a fog of words.

Tom pauses outsides the captain’s cabin as if this is some sacred space, an inner sanctum which must be entered with due reverence. He is drawn away by another voice and watches as the hold is covered, a veil drawn over the dark abyss at the heart of the ship. He returns to the cabin, his position in the hierarchy precluding participation in such manual labour. The captain is not their, but his presence is imbued in various symbolically weighted objects. Indeed, he is evidently someone well acquainted with the self-conscious accumulation of personal mythology and philosophy boiled down to aphorism, as the board on the wall with the assertion ‘who does not heed the rudder shall meet the rock’ attests. There is a sense that the seemingly casual arrangement of possessions in the room has in fact been carefully laid out to create an impression. The chessboard in the foreground laid out for a fresh game and the photographic portrait of a woman laid out on a nautical chart next to dividers for measuring distance both say something about a character with a coolly distant view of authority and a clearly differentiated separation of life onshore and at sea.

The Captain (who introduces himself with the hard, self-contained and unyielding name of Stone) descends into this room from above, as if from a higher plane. He declared to Tom that ‘I chose you’ and that ‘your history could have been my own at your age’. There is a clear line of descent being manufactured here, almost as if he is declaring Tom to be his inheritor, someone in whom he can imbue his worldview. His assertion that ‘we’ll get on’ is not so much an invitation to as an insistence upon friendship. When Tom reaches to grab a moth which flutters around the light, Captain Stone stops him with the first of his portentous utterances on authority: ‘you’ve no right to kill that moth. It’s safety doesn’t depend on you’. It’s a statement whose significance does not become apparent until it is revealed through the translation of words into action.

When Tom is shown to his quarters, he is told that the last third officer had died in this room. The steward observes that ‘he didn’t want to as he was funny’. This is a curious statement as it suggests that some crewmen might actively welcome death, an attitude which we’ve seen several characters adopt in Lewton’s films thus far, most starkly in The Seventh Victim. The fact that his humour is the predominant characteristic which the steward remembers gives us a retrospective hint as to why he met his end. We soon learn that Captain Stone doesn’t like jokers. Humour and mockery is a challenge to the assumed superiority of authority, which is undermined by the refusal to take it seriously and drawn out to a display of its latent violence in order to enforce obedience through fear. Charlie Chaplin’s caricature of Hitler may not have materially helped to defeat the Nazis, but it did make it difficult to watch his ranting diatribes with the sense of dread which might have been felt before his rhetorical gestures were so ably parodied.


The crew come on deck to the rough sounds of rural bagpipes. The player is known as ‘Scotty’ although he is in fact Greek. ‘In home country we play it to the sheep’ he observes, and indeed the bellows of his instrument is barely modified from the innards it’s been created from. The ship’s cargo is also to be sheep hides and other animal-based products. So we have an ex-shepherd and the by-products of slaughtered sheep. The symbolism is immediately followed up on as ‘Boats’ reads out the ship’s register. Paulo Lindstrom, who is identified as ‘The Finn’, puts his hand up, and his muteness is automatically viewed with suspicion, marking him out as a troublemaker. Difference is seen as dissent here. ‘Parker, Louis’ gives out with a camp ‘here, teacher’, which Captain Stone notes from on high as he smokes his cigar. We immediately recognise that he has no time for levity, which again represents possible dissent and a tendency towards troublesome individuality. ‘Billy Radd from the Trinidad’ marks the second appearance of Sir Lancelot in Lewton’s films, following on from his appearance in I Walked With A Zombie, and he is again given the opportunity to air his mellifluous talent for the calypso (represented on many a recording). The marked presence of Billy Radd and the Greek and various other nationalities marks this out as a ‘ship of fools’, a vessel which is a microcosm of the wider world. The symbolic use of such ships dates back to the sixteenth century, when Sebastian Brant’s The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde was published, and is generally aimed at a satirical reflection of the times. In the case of The Ghost Ship, this obviously means a time of war, and the portrayal of tyrannical authority and the failure to challenge it cannot help but be seen within that context.

The roll call ends when George Jensen fails to answer his name and his dead body is discovered in the light of a swinging lamp, shadows waxing and waning in much the same manner as they do at the climax of Psycho in the basement of Mrs Bates’ house. The Captain seems wholly unperturbed by this fatality, and it is left to The Finn’s voiceover to act as punctuation, a vocalised title card, to the scene. ‘The man is dead. With his death, the waters of the sea are open to us, but there will be other deaths and the agony of the dying before we come to land again’. Finn slowly turns to look at those beside him as if to pick out who will be the next sacrificial victim. He appears as some kind of prophetic oracle, able to read the tides of fate on which they sail. The whole scene creates a ritualistic atmosphere, the death seen as a necessary offering to the gods of the sea. It is as if ancient rites are being observed, the rational materialism of the modern world abandoned for the cyclical time of harsh and unchanging natural forces.

The ship is seen, as it often is, enveloped in fog. This serves to emphasise the fact that it is isolated in space and time, a world unto itself with its own rules, cut off from the social and political interactions which bind the wider world together. Captain Stone emphasises this as he and Tom stroll the deck. ‘In San Pedro I was just another captain’ he muses with apparent joviality. ‘At sea I am THE Captain’. Two sailors re-iterate the point as they coil the rope, one insisting that it is done according to the direction of the sun’s movement as this is the ‘law of the sea’. When his shipmate dismisses this as superstitious nonsense with no basis in logic he is told that ‘aboard ship, you’d better believe in the Captain and forget logic’. The Captain is the deity of this circumscribed realm, a gnostic demi-god whose word is law. Most crew members seem to take this as a given, an a priori assumption about the nature of things. Tom and the Captain discuss the nature of authority, after Tom admits that he just can’t see himself in terms of his rank. Captain Stone tells him that the difference in rank is like the difference between man and boy, and man and officer. To him, rank is a natural signifier of inherent superiority. As if inferring such superiority on him, he tells Tom that one day ‘he’ll learn to take great joy in it’. This hints at an element of sublimation in his pursuit of power which has already been symbolised in the woman’s photograph lying on the chart next to the dividers, and which will become more explicit later.

Tom meets ‘Sparks’, the communications officer, whose casual display of Latin knowledge (he immediately christens Tom ‘Tertius’, or Third) marks him out as an intellectual. Few people are called by their real names onboard. It is as if they have been reborn once they have left shore. Sparks is disparaging about the Captain, saying that what he has to say should be taken ‘cum grano salis’, with a grain of salt. But he has an intellectual’s distance from actual direct engagement, preferring to criticise at second hand. This disengagement is clearly more critical at a time of war, and his character thus becomes emblematic in that sense. He is openly friendly towards Tom, however, who defends the Captain by saying that he likes his way of talking, ‘the things he has to say’. He has been seduced by language, in other words. They agree to play cards, a game a few ranks down from the chess which we have seen set up in the Captain’s quarters, for which he has extended no invitations to play. The Captain, we grow to suspect, would not want to risk any possibility of losing.