I like the idea of cursed pirates, but I keep thinking that I see Pirates of the Caribbean style zombie, ghost, and skeleton pirates everywhere - Reaper has a lot of them - and even the first inspirations for something a little different that I try to think of - "The Rime of the Antient Mariner", "MS in a Bottle", Hodgson's "The Ghost Pirates", the legend of The Flying Dutchmen, and even Obed Marsh's crew from Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (or rather, the hybrid Deep One townsfolk of Innsmouth) are all inspirations for the Pirates movies, and pretty familiar and common by this point.
So, maybe there's something I might be able to invent from out of those old Harryhausen movies, like the Sinbad the Sailor movies or Jason and the Argonauts?
I recall from mythology that, for example, the crew of the Argos were afflicted with all sorts of terrible curses - being driven mad by Sirens, being turned to pigs by Circe for acting like pigs, and so on. That ship of madmen is certainly a thought - it reminds me of the term "Ship of Fools", from an allegory by Plato involving a ship run by lunatics doomed to forever go the wrong way because nobody knew what they were doing - I'd heard the story as a child, but didn't remember it well, and had somehow convinced myself that the Ship of Fools was a real thing, old ships that were turned into floating madhouses and set to sail so that their countrymen may never deal with them again. Come to think of it, sort of like the Reavers from Firefly/Serenity....
So, maybe a shipload of mad pirates... combine the idea a bit with the story "The Call of Cthulhu", with its ship of mad Cthulhu worshipers, a crew of mad pirate-cultists....
From Sinbad the Sailor, the first curse I think of is the curse of the Ghouls - who are something like evil goblins or fairies who hang out in desolate desert ruins or tombs at oases, where they wait for desperate, thirsty, hungry travelers to pass by, so that the ghouls, disguised as beautiful women, can tempt the travelers with cool water and rest in the shade of the tomb, and comfort in her arms. Should the unwary traveler drink the water, he will be eaten by the cannibal ghouls, but if he eats the food offered - prepared from the charnal contents of the tomb, naturally - or lay down with the ghoul, the man will awaken the next morning, cursed to be a ghoul himself.
So, perhaps a ship of Sinbad / Arabian Nights-style ghoul pirates, who, lost at sea and desperately thirsty and hungry and sunbaked and tired, had given in to the Siren's call of an island of Ghouls, and given in to their temptation, awakening by dawn cursed to wander the seven seas as red-eyed screaming Ghouls themselves.... I can't help also thinking of the silent film Nosferatu, with its iconic vampire riding a ghost ship without crew - they'd all been killed by the vampire - until it came ashore in London. Count Orlok makes a splendid ghoul - or maybe instead of ghouls, it's a crew cursed with vampirism:
John Carpenter's The Fog is another idea: loosely based on Lovecraft's "The Doom that Came to Sarnath", the movie features a ghost-ship full of lepers lured to wreck with a fake beacon-light by healthy townsfolk who did not want to live next to a leper colony. The ship rises up from the deep on the anniversary of its doom in a supernatural fog, with the ghastly crew of undead lepers seek out vengeance on the descendents of those who lured them to their deaths. The crew in the original movie was eerie and weird: not quite ghosts or zombies, cloaked and shrouded, hideously disfigured by leprosy and decay, and crawling with awful, slimy things from the depths of the sea, with eyes that glow with unearthly light in the fog....
Personally, of those three ideas, I like the Ship of Ghouls the best, though John Carpenter's undead crew might make a distinctive variation on usual zombie pirates. The pirate-cultists might be fun depending on what is done with them, and might do triple-duty as regular pirates, pirate-cultists, and regular cultists....
