The Rocky Horror Picture Show began as a small stage musical produced in the UK in the early 1970s. Originally called The Rocky Horror Show, the stage musical became a major success and was brought to the United States, first playing on the west coast where it was received warmly but then opening on the east coast where its was savaged by critics and was a commercial failure. A film version, titled The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was released by 20th Century Fox in 1975.
The movie’s debut was a critical and financial failure. But The Rocky Horror Picture Show got a second life in 1976 when it became a fixture of the midnight movie circuit. Audiences interacted with the film, shouting jokes and insults timed to coincide with the action and eventually shadow casts of actors would perform the film on stage in front the screen. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been in continuous release for fifty years, playing somewhere in the United States and around the world on at least a weekly basis, and it has a dedicated fan base that organize screenings and conventions. Half a century later, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the definitive cult movie. Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema looked back at the film and its legacy.
Let’s start with the film itself. Newly engaged couple Brad and Janet (Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) find themselves stranded at the home of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a mad scientist about to reveal his newest creation.
The content of The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been shrouded by its intense cult adoration and the rituals that Rocky Horror devotes have enshrined around it. Peeling away that cultural scaffolding reveals an uneven film that is colorful, anarchic, and fun. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is highly stylized and plays like a fairytale. The world of the film is rooted in the Universal monster pictures of the 1930s and 40s and the drive-in science fiction movies and Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 60s. But it’s also an overtly sexualized place; conservative naivete collides with the sexual liberation of the 1970s. The film is simultaneously nostalgic and rebellious. The picture has some great songs including “Science Fiction Double Feature” and “The Time Warp” and “Sweet Transvestite” performed by a unique cast of characters, namely Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. It’s also an uneven film The storytelling stalls in the second half with little sense of direction or momentum and the end of the picture is almost incoherent. (Read the full review here.)
But the flaws of the movie are kind of beside the point. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a film by, about, and for outcasts and weirdos. There is an earnestness to its oddness and the film’s independence appeals to a specific audience in a powerful way.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been with us for decades and it occupies a unique place between the margin and the mainstream. The movie and the shadow cast phenomenon were featured in the 1980 musical drama Fame and 2012’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The television series Glee did its own iteration of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a TV remake of Rocky Horror starring Laverne Cox was broadcast in 2016. The remake was less a standalone film and more like a tribute band or an impersonator.
Jeffrey Weinstock is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University and President of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic Weinstock is also the author of a monograph on The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the Cultographies series published by Wallflower Press and he’s the editor of Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan. You can find more about Jeffrey Weinstock’s work at https://www.jeffreyandrewweinstock.com/.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is best known not for the content of the movie but for the raucous interactive screenings put on by the film’s devoted fanbase. On about a weekly basis somewhere in the United States and throughout world, Rocky Horror fans gather for screenings in which the audience yells out semi-scripted jokes and insults while performers dress up as the characters and act out the movie as it plays on the theater screen.
Brian Watson-Jones is the cast director of Transvestite Soup, the Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast in the Twin Cities Metro Area. Transvestite Soup performs at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can find out more about Transvestite Soup at https://transvestitesoup.org/.