John Brahm is not exactly a film school luminary, but he made his mark in 1940s Hollywood, showing a sharp eye and psychological acuity during his seven years with 20th Century Fox. Most of his long and prolific career — he died at 89 in 1982 — was spent elsewhere. Born in Germany, he thrived for two decades as a theater director, until the collapse of Weimar. Then he moved to London, where he worked as an editor and writer before landing a directorial assignment in 1935: a remake of D.W. Griffith’s silent “Broken Blossoms,” from which Griffith had bailed.

Two years later, Brahm arrived in Hollywood to shoot programmers for Columbia, and two years after that, Daryl Zanuck signed him to Fox. When Brahm’s contract lapsed, Brahm turned to television, where he directed dozens of episodes of key 1950s and 1960s series: crime, suspense, Westerns, science fiction — name a program and he probably had a hand in it. Meanwhile, his sporadic film work declined to camp exertions such as “The Mad Magician” (1954) and “Hot Rods to Hell” (1967).

In the mid-1940s, however, Brahm made some of the most stylish thrillers of the period, and for these he is justly, if somewhat esoterically, treasured. They include “The Lodger” (1944), “Hangover Square” (1945), “The Locket” (1946), and “The Brasher Doubloon” (1947).

Brahm’s name appears nowhere on the cover of a DVD set released today by Fox, yet “Fox Horror Classics” is his work. It collects his two finest films, “The Lodger” and “Hangover Square,” along with his Fox debut, a needlessly resurrected werewolf-in-the-family-closet saga, “The Undying Monster” (1942). If they had called it “Fox Suspense Classics,” the title would have allowed the inclusion of the rarely shown “Brasher Doubloon,” a version of Raymond Chandler’s “The High Window” in which George Montgomery’s dim Marlowe is offset by a smart script and a ferocious Florence Bates. (“The Locket” was not an option; Brahm made it at RKO.)

The chosen films, which are bannered as “A Terrifying Trilogy of Terror,” are not without horrific touches, but they are concerned less with the dismemberment of victims than with the misery of human monsters who are not accountable for their depredations. Scotland Yard assures the strangler of “Hangover Square” that he isn’t to blame. Even Jack the Ripper (the eponymous Lodger) is presented as more bent than evil. Is it his fault that the Bible tells him to fillet fast women?

“The Undying Monster” matches the others on two counts beyond the director’s hand. All three films are gaslight melodramas, set at the turn of 20th-century England, and all the villains are beside themselves — lycanthropy being the original schizophrenia. Unfortunately, it’s a lousy denouement, when everyone keeps muttering about mysteries beyond the ken of man and Scotland Yard vows to prove murder, only to find a wolfman at the door.

Brahm opens “The Undying Monster” with a superb tracking shot of an old mansion, the camera circling the room at midnight, stopping for each of 12 chimes, then continuing its tour, gliding over sprawled bodies that, as the butler enters, rise and yawn. It’s the only savory shot in a picture done in by bad writing and stupefying performances.

Still, the professional gloss provided by Brahm and his camerman, Lucien Ballard, encouraged Zanuck to reunite them for a far more important and expensive update of Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s 1913 novel, “The Lodger.” They were aided by Barré Lyndon, a British dramatist with crime on his mind (“The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse” and “The Man in Half Moon Street”), as well as the composer Hugo Friedhofer, and Laird Cregar, a brilliant young hulking actor and master of psychotic mood changes.

Cregar, whose film career lasted only five years, didn’t need tufts of hair to show that the moon was full or the testosterone rising. His eyes, enormous yet slightly slanted ovals, were bay windows into his soul. His voice, a velvety baritone, measured his tenuous grasp of reality with unnatural understatement. He had already displayed his talent in diverse films, including comedies, but it was his performance as a deviant police officer in “I Wake Up Screaming” (1941) that alerted audiences to a disturbingly novel personality in the movies.

“The Lodger” is Cregar’s peak achievement, a courageous display of Grand Guignol venting, mired in homoerotic incest, desperate sexual longing, and religious dread. Cregar chose to go all out, and Brahm let him, shooting him from below and above so that he either hovers or cowers. Everyone else is shot in a flat light, but when Cregar’s character appears, the black-and-white contrasts increase and the images resonate as if willed by the Ripper.

Brahm also underscored the parallel forces in Lyndon’s script: increasing discord between Eros, represented by Merle Oberon’s music hall performer, and Thanatos; between those facing the future (Oberon’s character) and those with only a misspent past (a marvelous vignette concerning the slatterns, Jenny and Wiggy); between healthy misgivings and delusional greed — the Ripper’s landlady needs the rent money, which allows her husband to ignore his complicity in their reduced station.

The climactic chase is full-bore expressionism, with Cregar’s hunted killer climbing spider-like through lacy chiaroscuro, his half-moon eyes strangely illuminated, the entire crushing finale shot from his point of view. The ending, which involves a standoff that is silent except for the Ripper’s panting, is masterful. “The Lodger” was a huge hit, and Zanuck wanted another just like it.

What he got was even better — Brahms’s masterpiece — but at the cost of Cregar’s life. Cregar had urged Fox to buy Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel, “Hangover Square,” but when he saw that Lyndon’s script shifted the setting from modern London and Brighton to the gaslight era that Hamilton, as the author of the twice-filmed play “Gaslight,” had done much to popularize, he refused to appear in it. A suspension changed his mind, but while preparing for the role he embarked on a zealous diet that he hoped would save him from a career of crazed heavies.

As a result, his face was slightly gaunt and his bulk occasionally receded into the folds of his costumes. Though always focused and frequently inspired, especially when making transitions between his George Harvey Bone, benign composer, and Bone’s murderous alter ego, Cregar lacks the sullen charm and aggressive certainty of his best work. He feuded with Brahm, whose control of the material is immensely skillful (the bonfire scene is unforgettable), and died before the film opened — at 31, of heart disease induced by the relentless dieting.

Commentators often assume that the story in “Hangover Square” was backdated to 1903 to mimic the look of “The Lodger.” This seems not entirely fair. Hamilton’s perverse novel, with its canvas of hysteria and dissipation, of sexual manipulation and political fury, simply could not have been set in modern times during the war — unless it was situated in an Axis country. Even so, this is a violent, morally contentious film in which the audience is fully complicit. The killer is tormented by a femme fatale — played by lovely, undervalued Linda Darnell, whose character, Netta Longdon, goes up in flames, as Darnell herself did, 20 years later. Her demise is not only inevitable, but desirable.

Netta’s crime often registered as a capital offense in wartime Hollywood, when so many women were left to their own devices. She is a ruthless climber who toys with the affections of a great, if lethal, composer while bestowing her favors on a mustachioed fancy man. Of course, she has to go. The audience is primed to feel a lot less concerned for her than for Bone, who exits in his own vainglorious, blazing inferno.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”