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

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

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.

Audience Participation - vo.rs

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