10 Movie Villains Obsessed With Immortality

10. Sir Hugo Cunningham - The Asphyx (1972) 

In this horror film set in Victorian England, achieving immortality involves destroying, not creating. A parapsychic investigator captures ghastly spirits on film, as they appear over the dying. What's more, he discovers that they are entities that come to claim one's soul and carry it to the afterlife. Cunningham concludes that if he can purposely bring himself to the brink of death and eliminate the spirit at the right moment, then he could live forever.

He pursues his obsession at the cost of the people and life he held dear. This culminates in the final and perhaps most interesting scene of the film: Cunningham ambles, a tatter-clothed hobo with a deformed mask of a face, in the streets of the contemporary world. Pausing first to contemplate the setting sun, he deliberately walks into traffic.

The film is the one and only directed by Peter Newbrook, more famous for his camerawork for Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai.