Horrified Magazine has today published on their website a new article that I have written about Fred Burnley’s 1972 film Neither the Sea Nor the Sand: “‘We are an elemental people’: Grief, love beyond the grave and the liminality of the coast in Tigon’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand”.

The penultimate film by Tigon British Film Productions, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand was based on the novel by (ITN newsreader) Gordon Honeycombe. Those of us of a certain age will remember him, no doubt. The book is at its heart a reworking of the premise of W W Jacobs’ iconic short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’.

There’s little published material about either the film or the novel on which it is based, so this article by myself is breaking some new ground – particularly with regards Honeycombe’s references to the Fourteenth Century anti-clerical/reformist medieval poem Piers Plowman (by William Langland, a follower of John Wycliffe). Most of the material that has been written about the film (and the novel) assumes the veracity of the reference to the poet Ross Guyot, to whom the quote from which the novel’s title originates is credited – but as I say here, ‘Guyot’ was a concoction by Honeycombe to obscure his reference to the Langland poem – and in fact was most likely an allusion to the Thirteenth Century poet Guyot de Provins.