THE EXORCISM OF HUGH aka NEITHER THE SEA NOR THE SAND) 1972
Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972): Where Love and Horror Dissolve into the Tide:
In the shadowy corners of 1970s British horror, where folk tales bled into psychological dread and the supernatural seeped into the mundane, Neither the Sea nor the Sand (released in the U.S. as The Exorcism of Hugh) emerges as a ghostly outlier—a film less concerned with startling its audience than with haunting them. Directed by Fred Burnley, a documentarian whose brief foray into fiction left behind this singular, sorrowful gem, the movie is a requiem for love in the face of death, a meditation on how grief can corrode the soul as surely as any demon.
Set against the desolate beauty of Jersey’s coast and Scotland’s cliffs, it unfolds like a hazy dream, blending Gothic melancholy with a stark, almost clinical realism that reflects Burnley’s roots in observational storytelling. Here, horror is not a spectacle but a slow creep, a tide of obsession eroding the boundaries between devotion and delusion.
At its core, the film is a love story—or perhaps an anti-love story. Anna (Susan Hampshire), fleeing a fractured marriage, finds solace in Hugh (Michael Petrovitch), a lighthouse keeper whose quiet intensity mirrors the wild landscapes around them. Their romance, captured in sun-dappled montages of coastal walks and windswept embraces, feels idyllic until Hugh collapses on a Scottish beach, his body as lifeless as the stones beneath him. What follows is not a resurrection but a grotesque parody of one:
Hugh returns, mute and hollow-eyed, his flesh decaying even as Anna clings to him with desperate fervor. Burnley films his reanimation without fanfare—no thunderclaps, no lurid special effects. Instead, the horror lies in the mundane details: the way Hugh’s hand grows cold, the flies gathering around his wounds, the vacant stare that replaces his once-animated gaze. This is a zombie narrative stripped of genre tropes, rendered as an intimate tragedy. A love affair of the heart that lingers beyond the grave. A danse macabre of longing and decay.
Susan Hampshire, best known at the time for period dramas, delivers a performance of raw, unvarnished vulnerability. Her Anna is neither a hysteric nor a victim but a woman weaponizing denial, her love turning into something possessive and self-destructive. Opposite her, Frank Finlay (as Hugh’s brother, George) embodies the film’s moral panic, his accusations of witchcraft and attempts to “exorcise” Hugh reflecting society’s fear of the unknowable—of emotions that defy reason. When George meets his end in a fiery car crash, the scene feels less like a shock than an inevitability, a verdict on the futility of wrestling with forces beyond comprehension.
Cinematographer David Muir, whose work on the cheeky, transgressive horror film Girly 1970 and Monty Python showcased his versatility, lenses the film with a documentarian’s eye for texture. The crashing waves, jagged cliffs, and vast skies are not mere backdrops but active participants in the cold drama, their indifference underscoring Anna’s isolation. In one striking sequence, the camera lingers on the couple’s shadow stretching across the sand, a visual metaphor for their fading connection. Nachum Heiman’s score—a dissonant mix of mournful strings and wordless choral arrangements—heightens the existential unease, evoking a folk ballad sung at a funeral.
Critics in 1972 were baffled. Time Out dismissed it as “tedious,” while The Monthly Film Bulletin took aim at its “lack of pacing.” Yet modern reappraisals, fueled by its 2024 restoration, recognize its quiet power. Like Carnival of Souls 1962 or The Babadook 2014, where Essie Davis delivers a tour de force performance embodying Amelia’s unraveling psyche with such raw intensity and emotional authenticity that her portrayal of a mother teetering between love, grief, and madness becomes the film’s haunting core. Davis’s ability to convey terror, exhaustion, and desperation- often in the same breath- anchors the film’s psychological horror, making her descent into darkness as gripping and believable as any in recent cinema. Her performance is widely regarded as one of the most powerful in modern horror, drawing comparisons to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby for its vulnerability and depth. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the most extraordinary performances and examples of contemporary high-art horror.
Neither the Sea nor the Sand mines horror from this kind of emotional extremity, framing grief itself – as a kind of possession. Burnley, who died tragically young in a 1983 car accident, never made another feature, leaving his contemplative horror film as his lone, flawed testament—a bridge between Hammer’s Gothic excess and the art-house introspection of later British horror.
Its final image—Anna and Hugh walking hand-in-hand into the sea, their bodies dissolving into the horizon—captures the film’s paradoxical heart. Is this a romantic union, a surrender to madness, or a cosmic punchline? Burnley refuses to say. Instead, he leaves us with the chilling truth that love, in its most obsessive form, can be as destructive as any curse—and that the most profound horrors are those we carry within, waiting for the tide to pull them free.
THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA 1976
The sea is always present in The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)—sometimes as a whisper in the soundtrack, sometimes as a mythic force, always as a tide pulling at the edges of Molly’s mind. Matt Cimber’s haunting psychological horror film, written by Robert Thom and starring Millie Perkins, is a product of the 1970s’ fascination with trauma, liberation, and the blurry boundaries between fantasy and reality. Climber is a prolific and eclectic director whose career spans exploitation cinema, blaxploitation, psychological horror, adventure, and even television. Single Room Furnished (1966) was his debut feature, starring Jayne Mansfield in her final film role. The Black Six (1973): A notable blaxploitation film featuring NFL stars. Lady Cocoa (1975): Another blaxploitation entry starring Lola Falana. The Candy Tangerine Man (1975): A cult blaxploitation classic, cited as a favorite by Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino. And later, G.L.O.W. Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1990): Cimber co-created and directed this iconic syndicated TV series, which inspired the later Netflix show.
But where many of its contemporaries sought shocks or spectacle, this film drifts in stranger, sadder waters, offering a portrait of a woman whose agony is as relentless and mysterious as the ocean itself. Molly, played with aching vulnerability by Perkins, is a bartender on the sun-faded Venice Beach boardwalk. She is, to those around her, a loving aunt, a loyal friend, and a free spirit—her warmth and humor make her the unlikely heart of the local bar scene. But beneath her breezy exterior, Molly is haunted by childhood abuse at the hands of her seafaring father, a trauma so profound that it fractures her sense of self and reality.
The film’s title is a nod to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and Molly, like Venus, seems to have emerged from the sea—beautiful, damaged, and adrift.
Cimber directs with a steady, almost dreamlike patience. The violence in The Witch Who Came from the Sea is never lurid or sensational; instead, it arrives in a haze, as if glimpsed through sea salt-streaked glass. Cinematographer Dean Cundey, who would go on to shoot Halloween 1978 and Jurassic Park 1993, uses wide angles and slow, drifting camera moves to create a sense of unease, trapping us in Molly’s fractured perspective.
At times, Cundey employs color-negative film and slow-motion to blur the line between memory, fantasy, and reality, especially during Molly’s acts of violence—her seduction and murder of two football players, her attack on an aging television star, and her final, feverish rampage. These scenes are rendered not as cathartic outbursts, but as nightmarish fugues, where sound distorts and images shimmer with unreality.
The film’s horror is rooted not in monsters or supernatural forces, but in the aftershocks of trauma. Molly’s murders are both acts of vengeance and cries for help, her psyche split between the child who suffered and the adult who cannot reconcile her pain. Critics like April Wolfe have compared her to Norman Bates—a villain whose crimes are horrifying, but whose vulnerability and damage elicit sympathy. Perkins’s performance is remarkable for its delicacy; she never plays Molly as a monster, but as a woman unraveling, her voice slipping into a childlike lilt, her eyes clouded with confusion and longing.
Millie Perkins is best known for her luminous debut as Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), a performance that launched her as one of Hollywood’s most promising young actresses. She went on to star opposite Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country (1961) and appeared in a string of distinctive roles throughout the 1960s and ’70s, including the cult classic Wild in the Streets (1968). Among her most celebrated works is her collaboration with director Monte Hellman in the existential surreal western The Shooting (1966), where she starred alongside Warren Oates and Jack Nicholson. In this atmospheric indie, Perkins played a mysterious woman who hires Oates’ character to guide her across the desert, contributing to one of the era’s most intriguing and subversive westerns, cementing her reputation as a versatile and enduring screen presence.
The supporting cast—Lonny Chapman as Long John, Vanessa Brown as Molly’s sister Cathy, and Rick Jason as the ill-fated Billy Batt—grounds the film in a world that is both warmly communal and quietly indifferent. Long John, in particular, is a rare presence in horror: an older lover who accepts Molly without judgment, his easygoing affection a small island of safety in her storm-tossed life. The bar itself, filled with nautical bric-a-brac and the constant murmur of the sea, becomes a liminal space between land and water, sanity and madness.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea was controversial on release, landing on the UK’s infamous “video nasties” list for its combination of sexuality and violence, though it was ultimately never successfully prosecuted and later released uncut.
Today, the film is recognized as a sensitive, if harrowing, depiction of mental illness and the long shadow of abuse. Its refusal to offer easy answers or conventional catharsis sets it apart from the more exploitative fare of its era, aligning it with other 1970s feminist and psychological horror cinema like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death 1971 and Repulsion 1965.
The film’s final act is as quietly devastating as anything in the genre. As Molly confesses her crimes and her pain, she slips into a kind of mythic oblivion, envisioning herself adrift at sea—alone, but finally at peace. The police arrive, but there is no triumphant justice, only the sense of a life overwhelmed by sorrow and secrets. The ending, as critics have noted, is more poetic than punitive, a last voyage rather than a reckoning.
Cimber’s direction, Thom’s deeply personal script, and Cundey’s atmospheric cinematography combine to create a film that is both a time capsule of 1970s anxieties and a timeless meditation on the cost of survival. The Witch Who Came From the Sea is not a film of easy scares or simple villains; it is, instead, a haunting elegy for those lost to the tides of memory, trauma, and longing—those whose pain, like the sea, is both ever-present and impossible to fully grasp.
