I’m going to begin this review by stating the obvious: Peter Newbrook’s horror masterpiece The Asphyx (1972) (pronounced “ass-fix”) has the best title ever. Call me juvenile, but when the serious British protagonist solemnly delivers lines like “I want you to summon up my own asphyx,” or “it is within my grasp to trap a man’s asphyx,” I can’t suppress my laughter. Yet, while the film invites immature viewers like me to engage in crude wordplay, it also solicits the consideration of more serious–albeit starkly presented–ideas. The Asphyx is an original take on the mad scientist theme that explores in a surprisingly direct way the relationship between reproduction and power. It also issues a warning–comically shrill and over-the-top as befits the genre–against the dangers of progressive thought, suggesting that if you go too far left, you might just end up on the right. The film’s concerns with technology and politics are worked out through a series of spectacular death scenes that, in their byzantine mechanics, seem straight out of The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971). And while I don’t know if Phibes influenced Newbrook, it’s clear that Hammer Productions and the work of Roger Corman did. The Asphyx’s technological concerns could have easily taken the form of a steampunk fantasy, but the film’s relative fidelity to 19th-century scientific achievements and its hardcore dedication to a Hammeresque gothicism roots it firmly in the realm of horror, a definite plus for viewers like me, who are happier in Dracula’s castle than in Captain’s Nemo’s submarine. Just because I love The Asphyx’s classic macabre flourishes–its caskets, crypts, and cobwebs–doesn’t mean that the movie is a stale rehash of old materials. Far from it. With its incongruous music, at times giallo-esque intensity, and, most of all, its singular creature concept, the film is very much its own thing, a unique treasure waiting to be discovered by a wider audience. 

At a basic level, what sets The Asphyx apart from anything that’s come before or since is its plot: It’s the late Victorian era, and Sir Hugo Cunningham, a respected country gentleman and amateur scientist, hopes to capture psychical phenomenon by taking pictures of the dying. Each of his macabre images reveals a strange dark smudge, and the Psychical Research Society, an august group to which he belongs, claims that these visual artefacts are scientific proof of the soul departing the body. But based on evidence gathered through his most recent inventions, Sir Hugo comes to a different conclusion. With his newly developed motion picture camera and light booster, he records a public execution and a fatal boating accident involving one of his sons. What he sees is not the soul ascending to heaven, but, he theorizes, a Greek god of death called the Asphyx, coming to possess the living at the moment of their demise. This Grim Reaper isn’t singular but multiple–each person has his own–and if you can capture your personal asphyx, then you can live forever. In pursuit of immortality and eternal power, the once revered community leader and beloved patriarch loses his moral compass, alienating his friends and destroying his family. 

The Asphyx is a new interpretation of a story that’s at least as old as Frankenstein: A hubristic scientist forsakes traditional or “natural” modes of human reproduction for technological ones and is ultimately punished for his arrogance. Yet, while the theme is familiar, The Asphyx is unusually explicit in its outline of different forms of biological extension and their correspondence to the exercise of power. The film opens with an almost over abundance of socially sanctioned fecundity as we learn that all of the characters are engaged to be married: The patriarch, Sir Hugo, to Anna; his son Clive to Elizabeth; and, though it hasn’t been approved yet, his daughter Christina to his adopted son, Giles. All of these unions, we are told, will produce children; and in a startlingly frank conversation, Sir Hugo and Clive discuss the connection between offspring and the family’s continued influence. According to Sir Hugo, they are living in a time of great social change, and the only way to guarantee the implementation of the family’s agenda is through the production of more Cunninghams who will, he assumes, act in accordance with his interests. 

But the attractions of bypassing this time-honored way of governing quickly become clear to Sir Hugo. While originating a dynasty would be the conventional way of extending his will into the future, immortality, he realizes, is a more seamless and efficient way of doing it; eternal life would allow him to direct the course of local affairs forever, without interruption from any upstart scions. If the movie begins with a reverence of marriage, by the end, that most traditional institution of perpetuating power has been completely displaced by scientific manipulations. Romantic partners die in experiments gone wrong, ending the three engagements with which we began; and as possibilities for “natural” coupling are closed down, the film delivers its bluntly conservative message: Tinkering with the nuclear family–that hallowed unit of generativity–brings nothing but death and destruction. 

Messing with the status quo is also morally corrosive, as the radical transformation of Sir Hugo’s character makes plain. When we’re first introduced to the Cunningham patriarch, he’s firmly aligned with progressive causes. A reform-minded philanthropist, who has invested heavily in the social safety net, he cares for the poor and advocates for a more humane justice system. But it’s his endorsement of liberal ideas with their emphasis on reason, tolerance, and innovation that ultimately provide him with a justification for torturing the terminally ill and killing his own daughter. In Sir Hugo’s unambiguous arc, we see how easy it is for the well-meaning liberal to become a murdering fascist. The Asphyx’s brand of conservative alarmism is the bread and butter of horror films (it’s the slasher’s MO),and that in no way detracts from my enjoyment of the genre in general or from this instantiation in particular. Like all horror, The Asphyx thrives in ideological extremes and, exaggerated to the point of comedy, its morality lessons inevitably subvert themselves.

It doesn’t hurt that the moralism is wrapped in campy violence. Tracing Sir Hugo’s descent down the slippery slope of progressive thought, The Asphyx brings us a series of death scenes that rival those of Dr. Phibes in their creativity and almost Rube Goldberg complexity. In order to trap their asphyxes, the characters must bring them out into the open by putting themselves in lethal situations. Obviously, a well-aimed gun or a middling dose of poison with an emetic nearby would do the trick, but this is a visual medium and the dictates of the plot give Newbrook the perfect opportunity to go big. And he doesn’t disappoint. Sir Hugo builds an electric chair for himself and has a guillotine erected for Christina. Giles drops an enormous glass cube over his head with various tubes and tanks so that he can gas himself–though we later discover that his asphyxiation tank is actually an indirect route to simple self-immolation. At every turn, the easy is made difficult, and the plain, baroque. The most absurd example of this occurs when Giles, in his attempt to prove to Christine that her father is immortal, seals Sir Hugo in an airtight casket within the family crypt for 24 hours. Was this elaborate scheme really necessary? No, but it’s creepy and visually stunning.

This superfluous scene in the family mausoleum brings me to the question of The Asphyx’s dominant aesthetic mode. Because Amazon’s blurb calls it steampunk, I was expecting alternative histories and fantastical gadgetry powered by copper-colored boilers. But, really, it isn’t that at all. With the exception of the light booster and its blue aquarium gravel–the only truly sci-fi element in the film–everything else feels grounded in the actual advancements of the period, which, based on Sir Hugo’s membership in a fictionalized Society for Psychical Research, I take to be somewhere around the 1880s or ‘90s. By then, photography had been in use for decades, the celluloid motion picture camera was already in development, and the electric chair was well on its way. If Sir Hugo is merely a co-discoverer with others around the world of these new technologies, his inventions being  contemporary or very nearly so with similar ones devised elsewhere, then The Asphyx is missing the kind of outlandish and purely speculative devices that, to my mind, characterize science fiction. 

While it has something of that obsession with newfangled equipment that characterizes post-war atomic horror, at its heart, The Asphyx is a love letter to the patinated gothicism pioneered in the ’60s by Hammer Productions and exemplified in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle; its style is deliberately and aggressively macabre even when a naturalistic approach would make more sense. For instance, conversations between Sir Hugo and his sons take place in a subterranean tomb rather than in his study, the lab, or even the drawing room. And we spend a lot of time watching him photograph bloated corpses in a dank cellar, a ghastly activity that in no way furthers the plot. Perhaps the clearest hat-tip to an earlier sensibility is the odd way in which the individual asphyxes are stored. A nondescript cube or cylinder–something smooth and scientific looking–would be the obvious choice, but instead they’re deposited in small wooden toe-pincher caskets! These over-the-top flourishes tone down the steampunk vibe, which is perfect for a viewer like me, who’s more into classic horror than retrofuturism.  

The specialty asphyx-sized caskets are just one of the absurdities that qualify this film for cult status. There’s also the music, acting, and creature-design. A cheerful pastoral score plays as Sir Hugo convulses on his electric chair and soars as Christina stares at the blade that will excise her head. To say that there is a mismatch between these uplifting strains and gruesome scenes is an understatement. There’s also an incongruous Italian vibe to Sir Hugo’s interactions with Giles, which exhibit a level of unpredictable emotional intensity that feels out of place in a conversation between uber-British rationalists. If the patriarch were a woman in a Giallo film, he’d be slapped. And then there are the gods of death–the asphyxes themselves! With their craggy features, dorsal fins, and out-stretched arms, these little Grim Reapers, who are only ever seen from the waist up, look like godzilla sock puppets. They’re adorable and add significantly to the film’s already abundant charm.