THE ASPHYX

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1972 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Peter Newbrook Cast robert stephens, robert Powell, Jane lapotaire, alex scott

Some inventively creepy ideas underscore this Victorian-era horror, the only film ever helmed by Peter Newbrook, cinematographer on the likes of Lawrence Of Arabia.

It’s 1875, and psychic researcher Sir Hugo Cunningham has made the kind of discovery that could rock the Royal Society to its collective whiskers. Photographs of the dead record the presence of a camera-bombing entity, appearing at the exact moment the subject shuffles off this mortal coil: proof, Sir Hugo believes, of the existence of the asphyx, a spirit that hovers over departing souls (the script claims it as an authentic Greek myth, but some alternative facts may be at work here).

There’s a genuine eeriness to the effects: the asphyx is revealed as a spindly, squealing, entirely unclassifiable thing, a puppety beast somehow more primally unsettling than any digital creation. Captured in a blue spotlight against a velvet curtain, it seems to belong to some magic show in Hell.

The film’s at its best when colliding Victorian science against myth, fine minds fighting to make sense of the supernatural in the name of progress. Elsewhere it has a drawing room feel, oldfashioned for 1972. Ultimately, it’s an uninvolving tale.

Extras 12 minutes of deleted scenes from the longer US cut. Nick Setchfield