The Asphyx



AKA: The Horror of Death

Sir Hugo Cunningham is a Victorian scientist studying what happens to the soul after death. Studying a group of pictures taken with a special camera at the time of people’s death, all with strange smudges on them, Hugo believes them to be evidence of the soul exiting the body. But after capturing the tragic death of his son and wife with his new, personally made video camera, he instead realized that the smudge is not exiting the body, but going towards it. After a series of experiments using a guinea pig, Hugo realizes the truth: what he’s captured on film is not the person’s soul, but an Asphyx, a spirit of one of the dead, trapped in inhuman agony until it possesses a vessel upon their death. But what’s more miraculous than discovering the existence of the Asphyx, is discovering that if you manage to trap the creature, then the Asphyx’s victim cannot die, essentially making them functionally immortal. Elated by this discovery, Hugo sets out to prove his theory correct…with disastrous consequences.



After last month I’ve gotten a little sick of serial killers. So I’ve decided to watch some sci-fi as a bit of a palate cleanser. First up is The Asphyx, a strange little British sci-fi/horror film from 1972. I didn’t know what to expect from this one, but I picked it because I liked the look of the weird creature seen on most of the promotional material and put it on hoping it wouldn’t outright suck. And thankfully I was fortunate in that it didn’t suck. But like most of the things I watch, it had its fair share of problems too.


As you will all see in this Powerpoint presentation.

For the most part the movie is solidly okay. Or at least it starts out that way with all the character intros and the story setup. In many ways it very much feels and acts like your typical British horror film from the 60s and 70s done by Hammer. So by that I mean the picture looks very nice and crisp and bright and colorful, I can hear everything just fine, and all the actors are very posh and professional. So technically speaking it gets two thumbs up. Hell, even their effects are pretty decent for the time, so even the little monster… Er, spirit…. Thing, looks pretty good, even though we know it’s nothing more than a squirming projection.


Okay, their little puppet isn’t that impressive, but I still kinda like it.

Except this isn’t a Hammer film, so you shouldn’t expect any real gothic-like imagery. Unless of course you count the GIANT stone family crypt they have in the basement, because I guess every noble family in Europe has one of those. Or more likely the studio already had that particular set-piece assembled and they didn’t want it to go to waste, but I digress. BEYOND THAT THOUGH, most of the movie is more sci-fi steampunk-y. Meaning there’s a lot of contraptions and junk, and rather than giving you some bullshit supernatural explanation for things going on, they give you a bullshit science-y explanation for the things going on instead. Like how the hell a glorified spotlight powered by water and crystals (wut?) can somehow trap a spirit in a wooden box. And no, they don’t explain how that’s supposed to work. They just spout out a bunch of pseudo-science gibberish and hope you don’t know enough to know better and ignore it. So it’s best just to go along with it and try not to dwell. And don’t try to look up any Greek stories involving the Asphyx either, because those don’t exist. They made that up for the film too. If you google it you’re just going to get results for this film and the name of a Dutch death metal band (awesome name choice, guys). Point is, the film is kinda full of crap, but it also isn’t as dark and dreary as one might expect.


I say as I post a picture of the most gothic-looking chick in the movie that I can find.

So thankfully the movie looks good, but the problem with it lies primarily with the story. And it’s not even necessarily that it’s bad per say, it’s more that it just gets a little too predictable about halfway through. Because you think it’s going to be about this guy discovering this spirit thing and figuring out a way to stop it and yadda yadda yadda. But then it just turns into your standard “creepy mad scientist who’s obsessively trying to become an immortal” story instead. So, boo to them making the story more boring.



And the worst part is, that the whole thing actually feels kinda forced. Because Hugo starts off the movie by telling his son how they have responsibilities and they need to use their privilege to help others, and then later he shows disgust at the thought of a public hanging and calls it barbaric. But then his wife and son die and his personality does a 180, and suddenly his “responsibilities” become the familiar ‘I have to personally lead the world into a new era’ type of bullshit, and now he’s more than willing to try to kill people, just so he can try to get the Asphyx to show up. And I get that this personality change is due to a tragedy, and that the filmmakers are trying to show parallels and junk, but I feel it’s really better, narratively, to ease the viewer into those types of transitions. Because otherwise it just feels like the character just shot themselves in the foot for no reason.


And why does every bloody man in this movie have the same haircut?!

What I was particularly puzzled by though (and partially amused by, I can’t lie), is that after he’s gone “mad” why he seems to lose all sense of reason, and the movie not only becomes ‘let me try to almost kill everyone I love to make them immortal-’ but also ‘-and I can’t make it dull, so let me experiment with a bunch of different ways to knock them all off, too! Ha ha!’… Okay, so he doesn’t actually say anything like that. But he might as well have, because there’s no other explanation I can think of for him to use so many various methods like poison, electrocution, gas and a bloody guillotine (!) to kill people with, other than the dude was just fucking bored. I mean, he already proved that the poison/antidote method worked just fine with the literal guinea pig. What the hell was the point in making the deaths more and more complicated and dangerous as time went on? With all the additional gimmicks and moving parts, that’s not just a recipe for disaster, it’s just plain stupid. Especially from a guy who clearly likes to plan and is supposed to be a logical man of science. I mean, I know the likely reason is that the filmmakers just wanted a bunch of different “exciting” death contraptions to put in their film. But again, from a story perspective, this is really, REALLY dumb.


I mean, I can’t be the only one who thinks this all feels overly complicated, right?

So ultimately, The Asphyx is… Okay. It looks great and the acting is decent, and I like the general gist of the story. But there are simply too many weird plot elements at play here to make it a truly great film. It still ends up being kinda fun though, even with the oddness and predictability. And it’s also a pretty easy movie to watch too, as long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about how the hell that stupid camera and projector are supposed to work. So if you just want a simple, old-timey British sci-fi/horror film to watch, then this one ain’t too bad. But if you want something with a stronger story that makes a bit more sense, then you’ll want to look elsewhere.

The Asphyx is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Asphyx is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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