‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’: Still captivating audiences 50 years on

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most singular films in cinema history. Released in September 1975, it marked the first time a major studio (in this case, 20th Century Fox) premiered a film in a single theater on the outskirts of a city. The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t a good one either. It wasn’t mediocre, nor experimental. So what on earth was The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Nothing less than the greatest cult film in cinema history.

Indeed, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most profitable theatrical releases ever: it cost $1 million and, in 50 years, has never stopped being screened. Moreover, it’s a film that’s experienced twice: once alone, and once with company. In this, it is also unique.

The audience experience has created a ritual that has evolved screening by screening, through audience interactions and spontaneous antics. Every weekend, in countless cities, it is shown alongside what is known as a shadow cast — amateur actors dressed as the characters, reenacting exactly what happens on screen. The audience, almost always regulars, recites from memory not only the dialogue but also the jokes developed over repeated performances, which sometimes differ from city to city.

The film’s pauses are used for clever call-and-response moments (“What’s a billboard doing in the middle of a cemetery?” a viewer might shout upon seeing the Denton city sign. “It’s called advertising, idiot,” another replies) or interactive games performed in front of the screen (like, during the opening credits, jumping while pointing at Richard O’Brien’s name, the costume designer).

A tribute to cheap horror movies

Neither director Jim Sharman nor actor-composer Richard O’Brien originally intended to make a film. Sharman was a theater director and O’Brien an actor who met at a casting and decided to combine some of O’Brien’s songs into something resembling a musical. Both had grown up listening to rock and roll and watching “midnight movies” — cheap horror and sci-fi films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s shown in double features at midnight on weekends for teenagers to blow off steam.

O’Brien had written a song called Science Fiction/Double Feature, which included all the icons of B-movies: the mad doctor, the creature, aliens, the suspicious mansion staff, gangsters, and even Nazis. The song cataloged all the creatures urban cinema of the 1970s had expelled from theaters (triffids, the invisible man, tarantulas, King Kong, Flash Gordon, Altaira Morbius, Klaatu, and countless other inhabitants of that RKO universe far removed from Citizen Kane). The lyrics included, purely for the sake of sound, the names Brad and Janet. And they end up becoming the protagonists: a pair of exemplary American youths facing the delirium of a mad scientist with a striking resemblance to Dr. Frankenstein.

The story’s structure was also an obvious homage to The Old Dark House (1931), a film that parodied the mysterious mansion subgenre, produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. (the Universal executive who bet on horror), starring Boris Karloff and directed by James Whale, whose personal life reflected much of the spirit of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

At the very beginning of the film, red lips sing Science Fiction/Double Feature against a black background. The song fades into a modestly American wedding in a church. A couple of songs later, an “expert” with an unusually short neck appears to explain the story of Brad and Janet. The couple goes to visit an old high school teacher and ends up in a mansion run by a strange scientist (Frank-N-Furter), who turns out to be a transvestite trying to create a sex slave, not before accidentally thawing a violent gangster (played by Meat Loaf) whose past is linked to Brad and Janet’s teacher.

At the moment of revelation, the audience discovers that Frank-N-Furter and his accomplices are actually aliens from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania — all explained during a pool orgy that ends with the eerie mansion taking off like a rocket. What was this movie? Who were they going to sell it to?

No one knew what to do with such a film. Yet producer Lou Adler remained confident. After a modest premiere in Los Angeles (September 26, 1975), the film arrived at the Waverly Theater in New York on April 1, 1976. With no publicity, The Rocky Horror Picture Show began to gain traction among the “freaks and geeks” on the margins. A diverse audience including the LGBTQ+ community, stoners, hippies, monster kids, gang members, and nearly anyone who didn’t have a clear place to belong. The Rocky Horror Picture Show became a gathering point for the “weirdos,” in the words of the protagonist, Brad Majors.

The audience laughed and shouted during screenings. But one day something unexpected happened: in the sequence where Susan Sarandon shields herself from the rain with a newspaper, a man named Louis Farese shouted, “Buy yourself an umbrella, bitch!” The audience erupted with laughter, and from that moment the film became a dialogue between actors and viewers.

Lou Adler knew something special was happening. Someone told Richard O’Brien: “Do you know what they’re doing with your movie? Think bad.” When they went to New York to see for themselves, the audience danced during The Time Warp, threw hot dogs at the screen during the dinner scene, and tossed buckets of water in time with the characters. Viewers sewed costumes at home and showed up each week dressed as the characters, even extras (the “Transylvanians”). In some screenings, a motorcycle would enter the theater at the exact moment Meat Loaf woke from his slumber. A cult film was born.

It could have remained a passing phenomenon, but the power of the songs and the movie’s very formal flaws (rhythm, four consecutive ballads near the end, the odd presence of the expert in some sequences, or absurd minor errors like Richard Nixon’s resignation speech playing on the radio with characters ignoring it) kept interest in The Rocky Horror Picture Show alive — it is available on Disney+.

One must also note the role of Sal Piro, president of the fan club from 1977 until his death in 2023. Piro, one of the film’s “patient zeros,” maintained the spirit of freedom and fun for nearly 50 years, not only in theaters but also at conventions (often attended by original cast members, though never Susan Sarandon) and through the vast memorabilia generated by such a small, magical, inexplicable film born from a love of B-movies. As the final ballad says: “Don’t dream it, be it.”

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