A Victorian gentleman studies photographs of the dying and keeps finding the same smudge of light hovering near their faces at the instant of death. The blur is an entity that comes to claim every person at the moment they die. If he can trap it, he can stop death itself.

THE ASPHYX (1972) stars Robert Stephens as Sir Hugo Cunningham, a wealthy scientist whose photographic experiments lead him to identify this being as the Asphyx, a creature out of Greek mythology that appears only at the final moment of life. Convinced he can capture and imprison it, he sets out to make himself and his family immortal.

Robert Powell plays Giles, his adopted son and collaborator, who agrees to help on the condition that Hugo grant him immortality in return. Jane Lapotaire plays Christina, Hugo's daughter, who ends up on a guillotine as an experimental subject in her father's work. What follows owes as much to Greek tragedy as Hammer horror.

Peter Newbrook directed this as his only feature. He had come up as a camera operator through David Lean's crew, serving as second unit photographer on Lawrence of Arabia, where the cinematographer was Freddie Young. Young won the Oscar for that film and two more after it, and he shot this film.

The Asphyx mixes Gothic trappings, early photography, and science fiction logic with supernatural dread, giving it an eerie, almost procedural weight.