Ruby 1977
Ghosts, Guilt, and the Flicker of Lost Dreams: The Swamp’s Spell and Southern Shadows in Curtis Harrington’s Ruby 1977
There’s a certain poetry in returning to Ruby, a film soaked in the spectral glow of a drive-in screen right here at The Last Drive In, one of the few places where the magic of celluloid under the stars still survives. As I settle in to revisit Curtis Harrington’s haunted Southern Gothic, I can’t help but feel the resonance between the film’s setting and this very space: both are sanctuaries for stories that refuse to fade, for ghosts that linger, especially in the flicker of headlights and neon.
Ruby is more than just another title on my list; it’s a film that demands a deeper dive, a unique piece of work whose atmosphere and haunted characters seem written in their silhouette for the communal hush of a drive-in at dusk. In the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring its shadows and secrets in a full essay here at The Last Drive In.
Unpacking not just the film’s eerie mood, but also Piper Laurie’s unforgettable, larger-than-life performance, haunted, even, like the swamp itself, brings that world closer, more tangible in its strangeness, her grief and bravado twist with the gnawing breeze and the ghostly glow from the projector booth. Think of what it means to watch a story about a haunted place, a kind of “haunted” relic of American moviegoing, charged with nostalgia. Ruby is set down in one of the last true haunts of that vanishing experience, sitting beneath the stars, spilling popcorn in the front seat of your car out in the open night air.
Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977) is a delirious Southern Gothic horror, a film that swirls together the haunted glamour of the past with the crumbling malaise of the present. From its opening moments in the swamps of 1935 Florida, where Ruby Claire witnesses her gangster lover Nicky Rocco, gunned down and, in the same breath, gives birth to their daughter, the film sets a tone of trauma and unresolved longing that never quite dissipates.
Sixteen years later, Ruby is running a rundown drive-in theater deep in the Florida wilds, surrounded by the very men who betrayed Nicky and haunted by a daughter, Leslie, who has never spoken a word. The drive-in itself is a liminal space, caught between the flickering fantasy of the movies and the suffocating reality of the swamp, between the faded dreams of the 1930s and the restless spirit of the early 1950s.
Piper Laurie, fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn in Carrie 1976, delivers a performance that is nothing short of operatic. As Ruby, she is equal parts brassy survivor and wounded animal, “a loud, drunken, melodramatic tornado of a character, and if Laurie had toned her performance down even a micron, the character would not have worked.” and “Laurie is like a female Vincent Price…her performances are worth catching even in the most Gawd-awful dreck,” – from a review in Offscreen Journal – which captures the film’s unique combination of atmosphere and excess. Piper Laurie dominates every scene she enters, her grief and guilt simmering beneath the surface, her bravado just a mask for the pain she can’t quite outrun.
There’s a wildness to her performance, at times camp, at times heartbreakingly raw, that secures the film in an emotional reality, even as the story veers into supernatural excess. She proves herself to be formidable once again, making even the most outrageous moments feel rooted in a bruised emotional truth.
There’s a memory I treasure from the time I spent with Piper Laurie at the Chiller Theater convention. Naturally, we talked about her outrageous performance in Carrie, it’s the film everyone brings up. But what truly lit up her face was when I told her how much I loved Ruby. She admitted it was a film few people ever asked her about, and it meant a lot to her to hear how much it resonated with me. Piper shared how much she enjoyed working with Curtis Harrington, recalling the experience and her performance with real fondness. At that moment, as she held my hand, it felt like we were both celebrating a hidden gem, one that deserved to be remembered, just as she clearly remembered it with a lot of glee and warmth.
The story unfolds in a series of increasingly bizarre and violent episodes. The drive-in is plagued by inexplicable deaths. A projectionist is found hanged by film stock, and another employee is impaled on a movie screen. And yet another meets his end courtesy of a possessed soda machine. Now that’s a creative way to get bumped off! All the while, Leslie, Ruby’s mute daughter, begins to act out, her possession by her dead father’s spirit echoing the intensity of The Exorcist. “The dead are restless tonight,” one of the characters mutters in horror, and the film makes you believe it to your campy, creeped-out core. The atmosphere is thick with fog. The Spanish moss is animated, and there’s the ever-present threat of something menacing lurking just out of frame.
Ruby begs, “Nicky, is that you? What do you want from me?”
The drive-in’s neon sign flickers like a dying heartbeat, and the swamp seems to press in on all sides, a living, breathing menace, a body of water that holds decadent, horrible secrets and crimes.
William Mendenhall’s cinematography is a key part of the film’s eerie mood. He turns the drive-in into a haunted cathedral of Americana, all moonlit blues and sickly greens, headlights cutting through mist, and the flicker of old movies playing against the darkness. Harrington, with his knack for moody composition and the shadows of the mind with effortless subtlety, leans into the gloom, letting the queasy darkness swallow up his characters, and using the landscape to heighten the sense of decay and dread. “You think you can just walk away from the past? The past never lets go.”
Vince (Stuart Whitman) says to Ruby – “Sixteen years, and you’re still running from ghosts.”
The film’s period details, battered cars, faded costumes, dreamy, languid music, and the very concept of the drive-in as a gathering place are rooted firmly in a world where the past refuses to stay buried.
The cast around Laurie is a collection of noir archetypes and B-movie oddballs. Janit Baldwin, with her signature doe-eyed innocence, is both vulnerable and unsettling as Leslie. Her silence makes her sudden outbursts all the more chilling. Stuart Whitman plays Vince, who achingly longs for Ruby as her loyal but doomed lover, while Roger Davis brings a touch of skepticism and science as Dr. Keller, the parapsychologist drawn into the haunting. Sal Vecchio’s Nicky Rocco, though mostly a spectral presence, casts a long shadow over the story, his vengeance a supernatural force that stains the air with the blood of the past.
Ruby is the product of a creative team steeped in cult cinema. Harrington, known for his stylish B-movie sensibilities, directs with his usual grasp of intensely skewed personalities, while writers George Edwards and Barry Schneider patch together elements of noir, supernatural horror, and Southern melodrama.
George Edwards was a prolific writer and producer, especially known for his collaborations in genre cinema from the 1960s through the 1980s. Not only did he help pen Ruby, his writing and producing credits include: the screenplay for the twisted psychological horror film The Attic 1980 starring Carrie Snodgrass and Ray Milland. Earlier, he collaborated on the screenplay with Harrington for The Killing Kind in 1978, and once again, in 1967, he wrote the story for Harrington’s Games. He was also a producer involved with Harrington on Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966), Queen of Blood (1966), How Awful About Allan (1970), and What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971). And you can definitely see his imprint on one of my go-tos when I want to see Mother Nature file a formal vicious complaint, 70s horror- with fangs, scales, and slime – Frogs 1972.
Barry Schneider’s screenwriting career spans several decades, with a focus on feature films and television. His notable writing credits include the screenplay for Harper Valley P.T.A. 1978, Roller Boogie 1979, Mother’s Boy’s 1994 starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which explores the destructive force of obsession, and the teleplay for the TV Movie, Haunted by her Past 1987.
The film’s score by Don Ellis adds a nervy, jazzy edge, heightening the sense of unease. The score coils through the film like midnight smoke—restless, sultry, and blue, each syncopated riff and minor chord progression casting long shadows that linger in the hush between heartbeats. Saxophone phrases slink through the darkness, while muted trumpets and brushed cymbals add a smoky timbre, turning every scene into a moody nocturne where jazz and suspense entwine. Every note seems to linger, echoing in the air and thickening the atmosphere, turning each musical passage into a kind of aural fog.
There are moments in Ruby that border on the absurd, but the film’s commitment to its own weirdness is part of its charm. It’s a bit of nostalgia euphoria for me to see the drive-in showing Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. It’s a fun anachronism, since that film wasn’t released until 1958, while Ruby is set in 1951. That’s okay with me. The detail and the moment still work. The original ending was changed by producers, and the director’s cut is now a rare collector’s item on Blu-ray that is part of my quirky library of cool.
The film was a commercial success, grossing $16 million on a $600,000 budget, and Piper Laurie’s blood-red costume in the finale has become iconic, visually echoing her character’s descent into madness and doom.
In the end, Ruby, with all its campy, creepy elements, still manages to linger with me because of its atmosphere, swampy, haunted, and thick with the ghosts of both the past and the golden age of drive-in horror. It’s a film about guilt, loss, and the ghosts we carry, all played out under the flickering lights of that haunted drive-in. Messy, sometimes over-the-top, nonetheless, Harrington’s Ruby still stands as a cult gem for anyone who loves their horror with a side of Southern Gothic and a dash of melodrama. It’s a feverish meditation on the past, waiting for the right night to come roaring back to life and drag you down into the murky patient swamp.