10 Movie Villains Obsessed With Immortality

It is not ironic that the theme of immortality has been with literature since at least the dawn of writing, and certainly much earlier in the tales of gods, the death and rebirth of crops and river beds, and the cycles of human life. The cinema is no exception, where villains regularly are mad for eternal life.

What makes the madness so compelling is that it speaks to the universal fear of death. While the audience may relate to the villain because of a fear of mortality, this rarely seems to motivate the character himself.

Rather, it is often a quest for staying young and beautiful because of attachment to life's pleasures, or perhaps the glory of conquering nature. Still other times, evil is merely for evil's sake. These tales usually end with a punishment and caution for the folly of playing God.

Just as those who wish for immortality may later pray for impossible death, anyone watching a film with these classic motifs who complains "This has already been done before!" may just live to regret it.

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.