The Rocky Horror Picture Show: The Film That Became a Ritual

Almost no one who loves The Rocky Horror Picture Show first encountered it as a film. They encountered it as an event — a darkened theatre at midnight, rice in the air, a shadow cast miming along in fishnets on the stage below, three hundred strangers shouting the same rude interjections at the screen on cue. That is the thing to understand about Jim Sharman’s 1975 musical before anything else. It is the only film I can name whose cultural life is almost entirely detachable from the film itself. Watch it alone on a laptop and you will wonder what the fuss is about. Watch it at midnight with a room full of initiates and you will understand that the movie is merely the pretext for a fifty-year-old participatory rite.

This makes it a genuinely strange object to review, because the artefact and the phenomenon have to be judged separately. The phenomenon is one of the great stories in exhibition history. The artefact is a scrappy, uneven, wildly charismatic glam-rock horror pastiche that would have vanished without trace if a handful of New York weirdos had not adopted it.

From the Royal Court to the graveyard slot

The bones of it come from the stage. Richard O’Brien, an out-of-work actor with a head full of B-movies and rock and roll, wrote The Rocky Horror Show as a musical love letter to the science-fiction and horror pictures of his youth. It opened in 1973 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London, a tiny sixty-odd-seat room, and became a genuine hit, transferring to larger houses and winning over audiences with its filthy energy and its glorious songs. Tim Curry originated the role of Frank-N-Furter on that stage. The film followed in 1975, directed by Sharman, produced through 20th Century Fox, with much of the stage cast intact — O’Brien himself as the hunchbacked Riff Raff, Patricia Quinn as Magenta, Little Nell as Columbia.

The plot is a deliberate pastiche of every haunted-castle picture the writer had ever loved. A square young couple, Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon), get a flat tyre on a rainy night and take shelter in a remote mansion, where they stumble into the annual convention of Dr Frank-N-Furter, a self-described sweet transvestite from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, who is in the process of creating a muscled blond creature named Rocky for his own pleasure. Meat Loaf roars through on a motorcycle as the doomed Eddie. Charles Gray narrates, po-faced, as the Criminologist. It ends, as these things do, in murder and cosmic departure.

On release, the film flopped. Fox pulled it from most cinemas. By any ordinary measure it should have joined the enormous heap of forgotten 1970s misfires. What saved it was a decision by the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, in April 1976, to slot it into the midnight graveyard shift.

How a flop became a rite

The midnight audiences did something no marketing department could have engineered: they started talking back. First the shouted lines — witty, obscene retorts flung at the screen in the pauses the film unwittingly left open. Then the props: rice thrown during the wedding, water pistols and newspapers for the rainstorm, toast hurled when a toast is proposed, playing cards, party hats. Then, most remarkably, the shadow casts — troupes of fans who performed the entire film live in front of the screen, in costume, lip-syncing every line, a folk-theatre tradition that persists in cinemas around the world to this day. The film has now played continuously somewhere on earth for close to fifty years, the longest theatrical run in history.

The craft question this raises is a subtle one. Why this film? Thousands of movies are bad in interesting ways, yet only one generated a global participatory religion. The answer, I think, is that Rocky Horror is built — perhaps accidentally — with exactly the right gaps. The pacing is loose, leaving room for a shouted line. The tone is knowing and camp, inviting the audience to be in on the joke rather than subjected to it. Above all, its subject is transformation and permission: an invitation to abandon the buttoned-up Brad-and-Janet self and give yourself over to pleasure and costume and noise. It is a film about becoming someone else for a night, which is precisely what its audience does every time they attend. The form and the content rhyme perfectly.

Curry is the reason it survives

Strip away the ritual and one thing in the film would still command attention: Tim Curry. His Frank-N-Furter is one of the great screen entrances and one of the great screen performances of the decade — imperious, seductive, dangerous and camp in exactly calibrated proportion. Curry plays him as a genuine star, a creature of total self-belief, and the confidence is so complete that the character transcends the pastiche around him. Everything else in the film can be shaky. Curry never is. He anchors the whole enterprise with a performance that treats a low-budget glam-horror musical as though it were grand opera, and by sheer conviction, makes it so.

O’Brien’s songs are the other durable asset. They are pastiche done with real craft and real hooks — the opening science-fiction homage, the wedding stomp, the celebrated dance number that the whole world now knows the steps to. I will describe the songs rather than quote them, and say plainly that O’Brien understood the mechanics of an earworm as well as any professional songwriter of the era. The music is why people came back a second time, which is the only way a ritual ever begins.

The lineage it belongs to

For the collector, Rocky Horror is the most extreme case of a broader phenomenon, and it demands to be read alongside its fellow travellers. It shares the midnight graveyard slot with the other films that turned late-night exhibition into a subculture; the founding text of that world is El Topo and the birth of the midnight movie, and the essential viewing map is the midnight-movie canon, where Rocky Horror sits as the crowd-pleaser among a set of far more forbidding objects.

Its rudest sibling on that circuit is Pink Flamingos and the art of bad taste — John Waters’ Baltimore assault played the same midnight houses, and where Waters wanted to disgust, Rocky Horror wanted to seduce; the two mark the opposite poles of what the midnight audience craved. And for a purer cinematic cousin, the film’s glam-alien sensibility — the erotic visitor from another galaxy, the collision of science fiction and sexual transgression — finds its strangest echo a few years later in Liquid Sky and the alien-punk film only the 80s could make, which took the same raw materials somewhere far colder and stranger.

Trace the family tree back and you find O’Brien’s real ancestors: the Universal horror pictures, the poverty-row science fiction of the 1950s, the Hammer gothics, all the disreputable genre cinema a British boy could catch on late-night television in the 1960s. Rocky Horror is a fan’s tribute that grew larger than the things it worshipped, which is the sweetest fate a pastiche can hope for.

The verdict

Judged as a piece of filmmaking, Rocky Horror is a lopsided, thinly-plotted, sometimes clumsy picture carried almost single-handedly by one incandescent performance and a handful of superb songs. Judged as a cultural machine, it is a masterpiece of a kind that has no rival — a film that solved the problem of its own commercial failure by transforming its audience into its co-authors and never stopping. Both judgements are true, and only the second one really matters, because the film long ago stopped being an object and became a practice.

If you have only ever seen it at home, you have not really seen it. Find a screening with a shadow cast, take the newspaper and the rice, learn the callbacks, and go. The film will finally do the only thing it was ever meant to do, which is to dissolve the line between the people on the screen and the people watching, at midnight, in costume, together. That is the point. It always was.

Spoilers below

The film’s third act is where the pastiche curdles into something sadder and more interesting than the party that precedes it. Frank-N-Furter’s decadence catches up with him. His creation, his guests, and his servants turn on him. Riff Raff and Magenta reveal themselves as agents from Frank’s home world, sent to bring the mission to an end, and they mutiny against their master’s excess. In the climactic sequence Frank is shot dead, his creature Rocky dies attempting to save him, and the mansion — revealed to be a spacecraft — lifts off and departs the earth, leaving Brad, Janet and the Narrator crawling in the dirt of a devastated landscape.

The craft turn here is tonal. Sharman lets the camp curdle into genuine melancholy. Curry’s final number, performed as Frank faces his own destruction, is played with real pathos, the swaggering libertine suddenly small and doomed. The film that has spent an hour celebrating unlimited pleasure abruptly punishes its avatar of pleasure, and does so in the voice of the buttoned-up authority the whole thing seemed designed to mock. It is a genuinely ambivalent ending, and a more thoughtful one than the party atmosphere prepares you for.

The closing image leaves Brad and Janet transformed and abandoned, their innocence gone, crawling through the wreckage as the Narrator intones that we are all insects crawling on a planet lost in space. It is a bleak, cosmic sign-off for a film remembered as a knees-up. That contradiction — the euphoric surface over the desolate close — is part of why it rewards the hundredth viewing as much as the first. The ritual celebrates a film that ends in ruin, and somehow that only makes the celebration sweeter.