Villian(s)  Death spirit

Actor(s):  Robert Stephens, Robert Powell, Jane Lapotaire, Alex Scott

Brief Description  The Asphyx (1972), also distributed under titles like Spirit of the Dead and The Horror of Death, is a highly original British Gothic horror and science fiction film. Directed by Peter Newbrook and shot by the legendary, Academy Award-winning cinematographer Freddie Young, the movie blends Victorian spiritualism with early technological innovation. It explores the dark consequences of a mad scientist's obsession with capturing the physical manifestation of death to achieve immortality.

Plot:
The film opens briefly in the modern 1970s before flashing back 120 years to 1875 Victorian England. Sir Hugo Cunningham (played by Robert Stephens), a wealthy philanthropist and amateur scientist, is obsessed with photographing the dying. He notices a recurring, mysterious "smudge" or dark apparition hovering around individuals at the exact moment of death. His colleagues believe it is the soul leaving the body, but Hugo discovers otherwise. Using a primitive moving picture camera he invented, Hugo captures a family boating accident where his wife and son tragically drown. Upon examining the footage, he realizes the smudge is not leaving the body, but desperately flying toward it.

Through further research, Hugo deduces that the entity is an Asphyx—a unique "death spirit" from Greek mythology that arrives to claim a person at their moment of demise. Crucially, Hugo discovers that if an individual's specific Asphyx can be captured and contained, the person cannot die and becomes completely immortal. Hugo builds a specialized vault and figures out that the Asphyx (which visually manifests as a screeching, non-corporeal creature) can be trapped using the light beam of a phosphorus lamp. He successfully tests this by capturing the Asphyx of a guinea pig, rendering it immortal. Eager to share eternal life with his family, Hugo successfully traps his own Asphyx.

To capture an Asphyx, the subject must be brought to the absolute brink of death so the spirit appears. Hugo tries to immortalize his daughter, Christina (Jane Lapotaire), using a rigged guillotine mechanism. The experiment goes horribly wrong, and Christina is accidentally decapitated. Grief-stricken, her fiancé and Hugo's assistant, Giles (Robert Powell), commits suicide. Desperate to join his family in death, a ruined Hugo tries to open his vault to release his own Asphyx. However, Giles had previously mixed up and destroyed the combination code to the safe. Hugo is doomed to live forever, trapped in his grief. The film ends by looping back to the 1970s. A decayed, wandering Hugo survives a horrific modern car accident completely unscathed, left to walk the earth eternally alongside his immortal guinea pig.