This time we're in Victorian England and Robert Stephens stars as a scientist who has discovered he can photograph what appears to be the soul escaping the body right at the time of death. Through a tragic accident, he realizes he can also capture this phenomenon in moving pictures. However, once he sees it moving he realizes the ghostly phenomenon is not moving away from the body, as an escaping soul would, but towards it. Thus, he concludes it must be an "Asphyx" – a creature who comes and leads you into death.
Allow me to pause for a moment and say that as an American I figured the title was pronounced like "asphyxiation," like "us-fix." Since the movie takes place in England, everyone pronounces it with an emphasis on the first syllable, so it comes off as "Ass-fix." So, that's hilarious.
Anyway, at a public execution they capture the phenomenon on film again, and Powell decides it would be possible to capture the entity in a beam and drag it into a trap (over a decade before GHOSTBUSTERS!), thus preventing death and maybe leading to eternal life. He wants to perform this experiment on himself, his assistant (Robert Powell) balks at that. But the scientist's assistant wants to marry the scientist's daughter (Jane Lapotaire) and the scientist promises both of them eternal life if this works.
I don't have to tell you things don't work out as planned. But I will tell you that the effects for the actual Asphyx creature are pretty great even if they're a little shoddy by today's standards. It appears to be a grotesque puppet super imposed with various blurring effects, etc., but what's really great is the sound design. It screeches and screams in unearthly tones that are truly unsettling.
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