The Asphyx AKA Spirit of the Dead; The Horror of Death (1973)

Directed by: Peter Newbrook
Starring: Robert Stephens, Robert Powell

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Christina: What exactly do you photograph?
Hugo: You wouldn't believe me if I told you...

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In The Asphyx - a British horror film set in the 1800's - scientist Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens) inadvertently discovers that photographs taken the instant before a person's death reveal a black smudge near the body. When Hugo finds the same black smudge on a video recording he made of his son's boating-accident death, he theorizes that the smudge is actually a person's Asphyx... their Spirit of the Dead... coming to claim their soul. Hugo makes a second discovery when he videotapes a public execution... his camera's phosphorus-based spotlight can physically trap the Asphyx and prevent it from taking the soul. Of course, this is actually a curse for the condemned man, who swings and twitches at the end of the hangman's noose until Hugo turns off the spotlight and allows the Asphyx to do its job.

Hugo decides to test whether a person's Asphyx can be permanently trapped, rendering that person immortal. Hugo's initial experiments, with a guinea pig and a homeless vagrant on the verge of death yield varying results. The guinea pig's Asphyx is successfully sealed in a metal vault, but the vagrant's body is so physically ill that preventing the Asphyx from ending his life is - like the criminal at the execution - is physically tortuous.

Satisfied that a immortality can be obtained, Hugo decides to trap the Asphyxs of himself, his adopted son Giles (Robert Powell), and his daughter. Of course, the Asphyx only appears when death is imminent, so Hugo starts to build various death machines in his basement... electric chairs, guillotines, gas chambers... to be used on himself and his children. But after he successfully induces his own Asphyx to appear by electrocuting himself, you wonder why Hugo would use less-foolproof devices like the guillotine for his children. The film ends in a very Twilight-Zone reveal that was probably more effective to audiences in the early-70's who hadn't seen a similar twist dozens of times.

The Asphyx is in the Fangoria book of 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen... there's a lot of good films in that book, but for some reason, this one didn't do it for me. I'm not sure why, but I've never really liked period horror flicks... even movies like Cronos, that everyone else seems to love. One of the main problems with the film is that the acting is overly melodramatic - getting so over-the-top in some scenes that you wondered if the filmmakers were intentionally parodying the situation. In addition, like I mentioned in the last paragraph, when Hugo realizes that it's relatively safe to electrocute yourself, it makes no senes that he would put his daughter in a guillotine and try to manually catch the blade before it chops her head off. Also, and I didn't mention this before, but there's a cheesy love story between Giles and the daughter, and although Giles is adopted, the two were apparently raised as brother and sister... yet we're supposed to buy into this epic love that they share. Overall, the film is worth a mild recommendation, if only for the great death machine sequence at the beginning of the film's third act.

- Micah