CREASE MAGAZINE — DOUBLE FEATURE REVIEW

THE ASPHYX (1972) + THE WASHING MACHINE (1993)

Two machines. One obsession. Zero off-switch.

Some double features are about tone.
Some are about era.
This one is about the fatal urge to mechanize the unexplainable.

Put The Asphyx and The Washing Machine back-to-back and you’re watching twenty years of technological anxiety mutate—from gaslight Gothic rationalism into neon-lit, appliance-grade paranoia.

Same disease. New housing.

THE ASPHYX (1972)

Victorian death, reverse-engineered

This is Hammer-adjacent horror stripped of camp and pumped full of dread. A scientist photographs dying faces and discovers a recurring shadow—the Asphyx, a spirit that appears at the moment of death. Naturally, he builds a machine to trap it. Naturally, this ruins everything.

What makes The Asphyx hit so hard is its cold procedural tone. This isn’t mad science for spectacle—it’s research. Observation. Repetition. Hypothesis. The machine isn’t flashy; it’s industrial, ugly, purposeful. A prototype that feels assembled in a basement between moral compromises.

The film understands something crucial:

Once death becomes a system, life becomes a variable.

Every scene tightens the noose. Immortality doesn’t arrive as freedom—it arrives as administrative burden. Who lives forever? Under what conditions? Who decides? The film never lets you forget that the true horror isn’t the specter—it’s the spreadsheet forming in the inventor’s mind.

This is pre-digital dread: clipboards, brass fittings, photographic plates. A world where the afterlife is captured not by faith, but by documentation.

THE WASHING MACHINE (1993)

Giallo goes domestic

If The Asphyx is the lab, The Washing Machine is the showroom floor.

By 1993, Italian genre cinema had fully absorbed modernity’s glow: stainless steel, white tile, designer apartments, professional women, late-night TV. And in the center of it all—an appliance. A murder machine disguised as progress. The ultimate domesticated threat.

This film is delirious in the best way. It takes the giallo obsession with voyeurism, sexuality, and guilt and routes it through consumer technology. Bodies go missing. Evidence spins. Cycles repeat. Cleanliness becomes complicity.

The washing machine isn’t metaphorical—it’s literal. A box that promises purification and delivers erasure. A system that runs whether or not anyone is watching.

And unlike the Victorian inventor, no one here is building anything new. The horror is already installed.
Just plug it in.

THE LINE CONNECTING THEM

From invention to infrastructure

Together, these films form a perfect systems-horror arc:

1972: Man builds a machine to conquer death.

1993: The machine is already in your home.

The Asphyx asks: Should we do this?
The Washing Machine says: Too late.

What links them isn’t plot—it’s logic. Both films understand that once you externalize control to a device, morality gets abstracted. Responsibility becomes diffuse. Blame gets laundered.

The Victorian scientist thinks he can outsmart mortality.
The modern characters assume the system is neutral.

Both are wrong.

CREASE VERDICT

This is a perfect late-night double feature for system skeptics. One foot in candlelight, one foot in fluorescent hum. Watch them together and you’ll feel the shift—from fear of discovery to fear of maintenance.

From “What have I created?”
to “Who’s responsible for this?”

Answer:
Everyone.
And no one.

Programming note: Best viewed with black coffee, no notifications, and a healthy distrust of anything that promises to make life efficient.

— Crease Magazine