The Asphyx

The Asphyx (1972) is a British sci-fi horror film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Peter Newbrook. Robert Powell and Robert Stephens star in a Victorian-era story built around a genuinely unsettling idea: what if the thing that accompanies every human death is not a soul departing, but a creature arriving — and you could trap it?

Scientist Hugo Cunningham first spots the anomaly in photographs of dying people — a faint blue apparition hovering near their heads. After research into ancient Greek mythology, he concludes these are asphyxes: personal spirits of death, bound to a single individual. If he can capture his own asphyx in a beam of light, he cannot die. The experiment works. And that is where the film becomes genuinely grim.

Newbrook shoots it with a dry, almost clinical seriousness that keeps the horror from tipping into camp. The film asks plainly — and without mercy — whether immortality obtained this way is worth what it costs. Stream The Asphyx (1972) online on iFILM.