The AsphyxMovies like The Asphyx
- Key Features:
- Supernatural, Scientist, 20th century, Photography, Death, Scientific investigation, Gothic horror, Immortality, Experimentation, Grief, Paranormal
- Tone:
- serious, suspense-driven, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Horror fans, Sci-fi enthusiasts, Fans of gothic tales
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Dread → Obsession
The Asphyx

Hugo is a brilliant turn-of-the-century scientist, loved and respected by his family and friends, admired by his colleagues. But he is a man quickly becoming obsessed with a curious and frightening question... what is the mysterious apparition found in the photographs of his dying subjects?
The Asphyx
Charles Dexter Ward, a wealthy scientist, uses an ancient diary and human remains to begin a terrifying and bloody pursuit for immortality.

A scientist comes to believe that evil is a disease of the blood and that the flesh of a skeleton he has brought back from New Guinea contains it in a pure form. Convinced that his wife, a Folies Bergere dancer who went insane, manifested this evil, he is terrified that it will be passed on to their daughter. He tries to use the skeleton's blood to immunise her against this eventuality, but his attempt has anything but the desired result.

Eccentric scientist Victor Von Frankenstein creates a grotesque creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment.

Medical researcher Frank, his fiancee Zoe and their team have achieved the impossible: they have found a way to revive the dead. After a successful, but unsanctioned, experiment on a lifeless animal, they are ready to make their work public. However, when their dean learns what they've done, he shuts them down. Zoe is killed during an attempt to recreate the experiment, leading Frank to test the process on her. Zoe is revived -- but something evil is within her.

A scientist working with genetics creates a horrifying flying creature that feeds on human blood. Following a gruesome trail of dead bodies, Scotland Yard investigators must scramble to halt its ravenous rampage.

An astronomer becomes obsessed with searching the cosmos for signs of life beyond Earth which leads to a shocking discovery.

A crew of scientists arrives on a far, cold planet to examine archaic artifacts of unknown origin. They discover that their German enemies already have a ship there. When they seek their help after a failed landing, they only find the Germans’ bodies, obviously slaughtered by one of the archaic creatures, awoken to new life. Now the alien is after them.

An unconventional scientist, struggling to care for his terminally-ill wife, embarks on a journey to develop a cure for her. However, his methods of treatment and tampering with human DNA, could lead to the extinction of humanity.

Plagued by frightening occurrences in their home, Kelly and Ben learn that a university's parapsychology experiment produced an entity that is now haunting them. The malevolent spirit feeds on fear and torments the couple no matter where they run. Desperate, Kelly and Ben turn to a paranormal researcher, but even with his aid, it may already be too late to save themselves from the terrifying presence.

Professor Philip Goodman devotes his life to exposing phony psychics and fraudulent supernatural shenanigans. His skepticism soon gets put to the test when he receives news of three chilling and inexplicable cases -- disturbing visions in an abandoned asylum, a car accident deep in the woods and the spirit of an unborn child. Even scarier -- each of the macabre stories seems to have a sinister connection to the professor's own life.

A young NASA JPL scientist is abducted by extraterrestrials but when no one believes his story he becomes obsessed with finding proof which leads him on a journey of discovery.

The son of the inventor of a matter-transporter, which turned him into a monster when he tried to transport himself along with a tiny housefly, continues to pursue his father's experiment, while his own two sons attempt to extricate him, themselves and the family name from further disaster and scandal.

In the late 18th century, two newlyweds move into the stately mansion of the Fengriffen family. The young bride is victim of terrifying visions and apparitions, threatening her very sanity. A London psychiatrist comes to her help and uncovers the terrible secret that haunts the estate.

Fifteen years after his father's experiments with matter transmission fail, Philippe Delambre and his uncle François attempt to create a matter transmission device on their own. However, their experiments have disastrous results, turning Philippe into a horrible half-man, half-fly creature.

When his wife is killed in a seemingly random incident, Harry, prompted by mysterious visions, journeys to discover the true circumstances surrounding her murder.

A former astronaut helps a government agent and a police detective track the source of mysterious alien pod spores, filled with lethal flesh-dissolving acid, to a South American coffee plantation controlled by alien pod clones.

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.

Industrialist François Delambre is called late at night by his sister-in-law, Helene, who tells him that she has just killed her husband. Reluctant at first, she eventually explains to the police that he invented a matter transportation apparatus and, while experimenting on himself, a fly entered the chamber.

Cocky researcher Sebastian Caine is working on a project to make living creatures invisible. Determined to achieve the ultimate breakthrough, Caine pushes his team to move to the next phase — using himself as the subject. The test is a success, but when the process can't be reversed and Caine seems doomed to future without flesh, he starts to turn increasingly dangerous.

The Skull [from a short story by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho] is a fearsome, finely acted and moody tale of Gothic horror. The 150 year old skull of the Marquis de Sade has been taken from its grave, bringing terror to those who own it. Demonologist Christopher Maitland [Peter Cushing] is eager to add the piece to his occult collection. Despite the warnings of a friend [Christopher Lee], he's got to have it. And does he ever get it.

Twin zoologists lose their wives in a car accident and become obsessed with decomposing animals.

After miners disappear in the Namib Desert, some scientists find their remains and the demonic creature that killed them.

A special-ops team is dispatched to fight supernatural beings that have taken over a European city.

While watching for a planet that may collide with earth, scientists stationed in Scotland are approached by a visitor from outer space.

A cliché hunchbacked evil scientist's assistant aspires to become a scientist himself, much to the displeasure of the rest of the evil science community.

When a student takes on a theology project, he taps into another side that had been hidden away from him.

A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.

When a priest is jailed for the murder of a nun on whom he was performing an exorcism, an investigative journalist strives to determine whether he in fact murdered a mentally ill person, or if he lost the battle with a demonic presence.

A college paleontology professor acquires a newly discovered specimen of a coelacanth, but while examining it, he is accidentally exposed to its blood, and finds himself periodically turning into a murderous Neanderthal man.

Scientists in Antarctica desperately try to find a cure to a military virus that was released in a plane crash and has wiped out the rest of the world.

Sylvia, an industrial scientist, is troubled by strange hallucinations related to the tragic suicide of her mother.

The Space Shuttle returns to earth, but some of the equipment brought back on it begins to behave strangely. Scientists are unsure what is happening, and decide to take all necessary precautions.

An archaeological team attempt to unlock the secrets of a lost pyramid only to find themselves hunted by an insidious creature.

A mysterious artifact unearthed below a London Underground station proves to have powerful psychic effects on the people around.

A comatose hospital patient harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis to claim his private nurse as his own.

When a team of explorers ventures into the uncharted maze of bones that lies beneath the streets of Paris, they embark on a journey into madness and terror.

Two brothers, scientists Scott and Tony Nelson, develop an amplifier which enables a person to enter a 4th dimensional state, allowing him to pass through any object. Scott experiments on himself and discovers that each time he passes through something he ages rapidly. He begins killing people, sucking out their life energies and regaining his youth as a result.

Dr. John Markway invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Markway is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

American professor John Holden arrives in London for a conference on parapsychology only to discover that the colleague he was supposed to meet was killed in a freak accident the day before. It turns out that the deceased had been investigating a cult lead by Dr. Julian Karswell. Though a skeptic, Holden is suspicious of the devil-worshiping Karswell. Following a trail of mysterious manuscripts, Holden enters a world that makes him question his faith in science.

A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.

A schoolteacher moves into her deceased aunt’s house in a small Californian town, and is harassed by unfriendly locals and a mysterious hearse.

Research scientists experimenting with time warps are accidentally propelled forward into an unbearable future.

A young pathologist seeks answers to the mysterious death of a friend and soon comes into contact with the same cursed videotape that caused the death of the friend's wife and son, which is haunted by the curse of Sadako, a relentless spirit.

Three stories adapted from the work of Edgar Allen Poe: 1) A man and his daughter are reunited, but the blame for the death of his wife hangs over them, unresolved. 2) A derelict challenges the local wine-tasting champion to a competition, but finds the man's attention to his wife worthy of more dramatic action. 3) A man dying and in great pain agrees to be hypnotized at the moment of death, with unexpected consequences.

The arrival in a small mountain town of a dissheveled stranger launches a series of murders committed by some sort of animal. As the town doctor and his daughter attempt to help the stranger, the sheriff investigates the murders; and they uncover a sinister experiment involving two rogue scientists, a car accident victim, his wife and children, and a serum that causes a man to turn into a ravaging werewolf.

With a torrid past that haunts him, a movie theatre owner is hired to search for the only existing print of a film so notorious that its single screening caused the viewers to become homicidally insane.

In 2011, five Medical students investigated an abandoned mining town in search of paranormal evidence... They found them.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist, brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

An archaeology student photographs a mysterious naked woman by a waterfall, unaware that she is a female demon called Haggia, who soon takes possession of him via a cursed amulet.

A daring physicist travels into the past to stop a mysterious woman from stealing his invention. But once there, he uncovers a surprising truth about the machine, the woman, and his own fractured reality.

A young man visits his fiancé's estate to discover that her wheelchair-bound scientist father has discovered a meteorite that emits mutating radiation rays that have turned the plants in his greenhouse to giants. When his own wife falls victim to this mysterious power, the old man takes it upon himself to destroy the glowing object with disastrous results.

A pathologist experiments with a deaf-mute woman who is unable to scream to prove that humans die of fright due to an organism he names The Tingler that lives within each person on the spinal cord and is suppressed only when people scream when scared.

A collection of artifacts from an archeological dig in Egypt are brought to the famous Louvre museum in Paris, and while experts are using a laser scanning device to determine the age of a sarcophagus, a ghostly spirit escapes and makes its way into the museum's electrical system.

Dr. David Marrow invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Marrow is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

Keyes, a successful photographer who lives at the border of Skid Row, notices a homeless man with a strange old mirror. Immediately struck by it for reasons he cannot explain, he convinces the man to sell it to him, soon behaving in increasingly erratic and unhinged ways.

When Dr. Frankenstein is killed by a monster he created, his daughter and his lab assistant continue his experiments.

Successful writer and scholar Jonathan Merrick falls under the spell of the irresistible, bewitchingly beautiful Ligeia. She's fighting a fatal illness and she will stop at nothing to defeat death, her one true enemy.

When a cynical journalist accepts a wager that he won't survive the night in a haunted castle, it unlocks an odyssey of sexual torment, undead vengeance, and a dark seductress who surrenders the gravest of pleasures.

A group of elite soldiers sent to infiltrate and extract the lead science team from Pine Gap, Australia's top secret underground military compound, after it comes under attack from unknown forces. The mission is compromised when they encounter a young woman with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. As they try to escape, the group quickly discovers all is not as it seems and the facility has become a testing ground for something far more sinister.

Dr Simon Helder, sentenced to an insane asylum for crimes against humanity, recognises its director as the brilliant Baron Frankenstein, the man whose work he had been trying to emulate before his imprisonment. Frankenstein utilises Helder's medical knowledge for a project he has been working on for some time. He is assembling a man from vital organs extracted from various inmates in the asylum. And the Baron will resort to murder to acquire the perfect specimens for his most ambitious project ever.

Baron Victor Frankenstein has discovered life's secret and unleashed a blood-curdling chain of events resulting from his creation: a cursed creature with a horrid face — and a tendency to kill.

Five medical students want to find out if there is life after death. They plan to stop one of their hearts for a few seconds, thus simulating death, and then bring the person back to life.

Rescued from the guillotine by his devoted dwarf Fritz, the Baron relocates to Carlsbruck, where he continues his gruesome experiments.

Victor Frankenstein is a promising young doctor who, devastated by the death of his mother during childbirth, becomes obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. His experiments lead to the creation of a monster, which Frankenstein has put together with the remains of corpses. It's not long before Frankenstein regrets his actions.

Five medical students, hoping to understand the mystery of what lies beyond life, embark on a dangerous experiment. When their hearts are stopped for a short period of time, they have a near-death experience…

A photographer, Isaac is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter Angélica. When he looks at her through the lens of his camera, she appears to come back to life just for him. He instantly falls in love with her. From that moment, he will be haunted by Angélica day and night.

The first pilot to leave Earth's atmosphere lands, then vanishes; but something with a craving for blood prowls the countryside...

Following the death of celebrated scientist Susan Carter, her son Brian is surprised to inherit her controversial experimental addiction treatment center. When he and some friends visit the property, they uncover a terrifying and deadly secret.

Dr. Eric Vornoff, with the help of his mute assistant Lobo, captures twelve men for a grisly experiment; His goal to turn them into supermen using atomic energy. Reporter Janet Lawton, fiancée of the local lieutenant, vows to investigate Vornoff's supposedly haunted house.

The first manned spacecraft, fired from an English launchpad, is first lost from radar, then roars back to Earth and crashes in a farmer's field, and is found to contain only one of the three men who took off in it; and he is unable to talk but appears to be undergoing a torturous physical and mental metamorphosis.

Paris, 1830. In the heart of the town, Vidocq, a famous detective, disappears as he fights the Alchemist, an assassin that he has been pursuing for a few months. His young biographer, Etienne Boisset, decides to avenge Vidocq's death and takes the investigation on...

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

Academic researchers are chased by a nuclear-hot specimen of ancient Mayan blob.

Doctor Frankenstein creates a mate for his monster, a woman called Eva, who promptly rejects the male creature. In turn, the doctor becomes obsessed with Eva, and tries to make her a perfect Victorian woman.

Recently deceased, a white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to console his bereft wife, only to find that in his spectral state he has become unstuck in time, forced to watch passively as the life he knew and the woman he loves slowly slip away.

A group of young Miskatonic University scientists invent a time machine, only to learn that they are being manipulated by mysterious, unseen forces from another dimension.

In 19th century Baltimore, Isabel Porter, a girl stricken with grief from her parents' untimely death, voluntarily checks herself into the Rosewood Institute. Subjected to bizarre and increasingly violent pseudo-scientific experiments in personality modification, brainwashing and mind control, she must escape the clutches of the Rosewood and exact her revenge, or else be forever lost.

A race of space vampires arrives in London and infects the populace, commencing an apocalyptic descent into chaos.

A hospice nurse working at a spooky New Orleans plantation home finds herself entangled in a mystery involving the house's dark past.

Conducting clandestine experiments within the morgue at Miskatonic University, scientist Herbert West reveals to a fellow graduate student his groundbreaking work concerning the re-animation of fresh corpses.

A huge burrowing machine tunnels out of control at ferocious speed, cutting clean through to the center of the earth, to the twilight world of pellucidar. Once there, Dr. Perry and David Innes are threatened by half human creatures, lizard-like birds, and man-eating plants.

Anthropology professor Michal develops two overwhelming obsessions. The first one is a mummified, 3,000 year-old, perfectly preserved body of a shaman he and his colleagues have recently dragged out of a swamp. The second is an enigmatic student he meets by chance at a railway station.

Townspeople of a small English village begin to die in a series of horrible accidents, and a Scotland Yard inspector arrives to investigate a mysterious local medium who records conversations with the dead.

Several people disappear from and at the sea. Their bodies are found gnawed to the skeleton, even the marrow is missing. The scientists have no idea which animal could do such things. Dr. Turner begins to suspect that the company which builds a tunnel beneath the bay might have poisoned the environment and caused an octopus to mutate to giant dimensions...

Living on an estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron is visited by Percy and Mary Shelley. Together with Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and aided by hallucinogenic substances, they devise an evening of ghoulish tales. However, when confronted by horrors, ostensibly of their own creation, it becomes difficult to tell apparition from reality.

A deranged scientist locks 6 people in a steam room and threatens to turn up the heat if the local paper doesn't publish his story about global warming.

Five-thousand-year-old vampire Miriam promises her lovers the gift of eternal life. When John, her cellist companion for centuries, discovers that he has suddenly begun growing old, he attempts to seek out the help of Dr. Sarah Roberts, a researcher on the mechanisms of aging.

Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

Canadian scientist, Dr Geoff Burton takes up a position at a new institute in wintry Dresden in order to contribute to their most important project—a human regeneration gene—that also has the potential to make something miraculous out of a personal tragedy that has haunted him for years.

To regain her sense of smell and get back her lover, a detective joins forces with a perfume maker who uses deadly methods to create the perfect scent.

A psychological thriller based on the concept of anamorphosis, a painting technique that manipulates the laws of perspective to create two competing images on a single canvas.

The first manned expedition to Mars is invaded by an unknown life form, which stows away on the rescue ship.

Two investigators of paranormal hoaxes, the veteran Dr. Margaret Matheson and her young assistant, Tom Buckley, study the most varied metaphysical phenomena with the aim of proving their fraudulent origins. Simon Silver, a legendary blind psychic, reappears after an enigmatic absence of 30 years to become the greatest international challenge to both orthodox science and professional sceptics. Tom starts to develop an intense obsession with Silver, whose magnetism becomes stronger with each new manifestation of inexplicable events. As Tom gets closer to Silver, tension mounts, and his worldview is threatened to its core.

When the Universe decides what it wants, it's pointless to resist. With his family's life at stake, Joseph Steadman finds himself the unwilling test subject of a maniacal scientist in a battle that could save the world – or destroy it.

A deformed tormented girl drowns herself after her lover is framed for murder and guillotined. Baron Frankenstein, experimenting with the transfer of souls, places the boy's soul into her body, bringing Christina back to life. Driven by revenge, she carries out a violent retribution on those responsible for both deaths.

Professor David Ash exposes false spiritulists and mediums. He is invited to Edbrook to resolve the fears and torments within its secretive family. Soon after arriving Ash begins to doubt his own senses, and watching the strange behaviour of its residents does not make his task any easier. In time, he finds there's more to Edbrook than even he can debunk.

Army radiation experiments awaken a subterranean monster from a fissure that feeds on energy and proceeds to terrorise a remote Scottish village. An American research scientist at a nearby nuclear plant joins with a British investigator to discover why the victims were radioactively burned and why, shortly thereafter, a series of radiation-related incidents are occurring in an ever-growing straight line away from the fissure.

