THE ASPHYX

The Asphyx publicity picture (© Peter Newbrook/Cinema Epoch United Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

It took several weeks between buying it, chatting about it on Facebook, and actually watching it, but on 23 November 2019 I finally sat down to view the rare, reconstituted uncut version on DVD of a supremely classy and highly unusual British horror movie from 1972 - yes indeed, The Asphyx.

Based upon an original idea by Christina and Laurence Beers, directed by Peter Newbrook, and starring Robert Stephens and Robert Powell, The Asphyx tells how Stephens's Victorian-era rogue scientist character, Sir Hugo Cunningham, deeply interested in psychical phenomena and early photography, discovers via his photographs that every person at the moment of their death is visited by their very own spirit of death, a spectral entity known as the asphyx, and that if their asphyx can be trapped and held prisoner indefinitely, that person will be immortal. Some wonderful steampunk scientific apparatus to achieve this exceedingly fraught, dangerous task by Cunningham and his assistant Giles (Powell) is featured, but as might be expected, not all goes to plan - indeed, their plans soon go horrifically awry.

Visually, it is a beautifully-filmed Hammer-like feature film in the classic Gothic genre, and its plot a highly original concept in moviedom at the time of its release. Having said that, many years ago I had read a sci-fi novel from 1981 by Ian Watson entitled Deathhunter that utilised a somewhat similar plot line, so for that reason The Asphyx story was not as startling for me as it would otherwise no doubt have been.

My DVD is the collectible 2-disc version, containing both the cut but gorgeously-preserved UK version (its uncut version is lost), and the same version but with several minutes of additional footage inserted that had been extracted from the uncut but less-gorgeously-preserved US version in order to reconstruct the lost uncut UK version - this latter reconstructed version being the one that I watched tonight. The inserts were readily recognisable by virtue of their inferior viewing quality, but that was far less significant than seeing how they fleshed out certain segments of the story.

I first learned of The Asphyx over 40 years ago as a teenager, but never succeeded in catching it on TV, so my viewing of it last November was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition, and did not disappoint - it was definitely well worth the wait!

The entire UK cut version of this movie can presently be viewed for free here on YouTube.

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My paperback edition of Ian Watson's sci fi novel Deathhunter (© Ian Watson/Corgi Books – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)