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Essay
50 years on, 'Rocky Horror' is still for us freaks and geeks
It is 1984. My friends and I are standing in line outside the University of New Hampshire Memorial Union Building theater, surrounded by college kids. We are mere high school seniors. I am dressed in a hand-me-down Army jacket. Eric dons a leather pilot’s cap and goggles. Bill wears a leather jacket and shades. John, a veteran of this event, is festooned in Lycra and rhinestones. He has told us newbies to bring bags of rice, newspaper, water pistols, decks of cards and rolls of toilet paper.
“When Brad and Janet are in the rain storm, squirt your squirt guns, and cover your head with your newspaper,” John explains. “Brad’s going to yell ‘Great Scott!’ when Dr. Scott shows up. Throw the toilet paper at the screen.”
“OK,” I say. Weird.
“When Frank sings the line, ‘Cards for sorrow, cards for pain,’ throw cards. Got it?”
Sometimes it feels like this scene from my initiation into the world of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" happened eons ago, on another planet, to a different Ethan. And yet, that movie screening helped make me the Ethan I am today, the Ethan who is comfortable with his true self, his inner weirdo.
This year, “Rocky Horror,” turns 50. Upon its U.S. release on September 26, 1975, according to “Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film”, the movie adaptation of the 1973 musical “The Rocky Horror Show” was widely panned: “labored … campy hijinks" (Variety), "lacking both charm and dramatic impact" (San Francisco Chronicle) and "tasteless, plotless and pointless" (Newsweek).
Yet by the time I saw the film almost a decade later, “Rocky Horror” was well on its way to achieving cult status. Attendees, many from the queer community, had begun performing as "shadow casts”: dressing in costume and lip-synching their characters' lines at the front of the theater. Audiences grew. What might have been a laughable footnote in film history became lauded.
For the uninitiated, “Rocky Horror” leans heavily on its kitschy, absurdist homage to the B-grade horror, science fiction and musical genres. Its haunted house plot, such as it is, kicks off when newly engaged sweethearts Brad (played by Barry Bostwick) and Janet (played by future, gold statuette-winning actress Susan Sarandon) get a flat tire during a rainstorm. They find refuge, they think, when they stumble into the warped castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a cross-dressing scientist from the planet Transsexual (which is, naturally, in the galaxy of Transylvania). Frank-N-Furter invites Brad and Janet to crash for the night in his lair, where he’s holding a costume party with his merry band of hooligan “Transylvanians”: among them, the rocker-biker Eddie (real-world, 1970s icon Meat Loaf), a creepy butler named Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien), and other eccentrics with names like Columbia, Magenta and Dr. Everett V. Scott.
Soon after the young couple arrives, Frank-N-Furter unveils his Frankenstein-like monster, the studly, muscle-bound and (mostly) mute "Rocky" (Peter Hinwood). As Brad and Janet descend into weirdness — cross-dressing! cannibalism! lasers! — Frank seduces them both, and Janet seduces Rocky. As I watched, I was seduced by who I might become.
Absurd plot aside, Curry’s magnetic presence, and the unforgettable lyrics and dance numbers — including "I Can Make You a Man,” "Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me” and "Time Warp” — are irresistible.
“Don't get strung out by the way that I look,” Frank sings in "Sweet Transvestite.” “Don't judge a book by its cover / I'm not much of a man by the light of day / But by night I'm one hell of a lover.”
I was no lover. But when I think back to seeing “Rocky Horror” for the first time as a shy, do-good, insecure teen, I see it as my baptism into “weird” culture, my coming out as a dork. Not that I’d had an entirely normal or sheltered backstory. I had been experiencing my own version of a fantasy life, obsessed with playing Dungeons & Dragons (which celebrated its own semicentennial last year). I had alternative roots. My divorced, single mom was a part-time artist when she wasn’t teaching school. Hippies, gay couples and filmmakers were part of my childhood. Many of my mother, father and stepmother’s social groups were 1960s castaways, lost souls in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate apocalypse. Pot smoke was not an unfamiliar odor in my house.
Until I saw “Rocky Horror,” that oddball culture made me feel like an outsider. I experienced it as a viewer, not a participant, but I wasn’t exactly mainstream either. I felt lost. But at that first screening, as I shouted “Slut!” when anyone said “Janet,” yelled “A**hole!” whenever Brad’s name was mentioned, and tossed slices of toast at the screen, I felt alive.
Tim Curry and Meat Loaf cavorted on the screen, while the joyously ridiculous audience, including me, participated in a communal experience in the theater. The movie’s cross-dressers, bisexuals and freaks celebrated outrageousness and flaunted authority. The show gave me the permission and courage to dress up and act out.
These weirdos are my people, I realized. I felt at home.
I wore that Army coat for the rest of that final year of high school, festooning it with punk band and anti-Reagan pins. I directed my own music videos — a cheesy MTV rip-off called “The Crusade” and an earnest anti-war film called “The Soldier”. With my Super 8 camera, I filmed my friends dressed in goofy costumes as we trespassed on the UNH campus after hours. I found love, and my first kiss. I even got a lead part as Sir Despard Murgatroyd, the cursed Frank-like outcast in the obscure Gothy, Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera “Ruddigore.”
I failed at channeling Curry’s transcendent Frank-N-Furter, but I was starting to embrace the performer in me. Hanging out with the dweebs — theater nerds, band geeks, the kids who chose gymnastics and karate and juggling — felt liberating. I began to feel brave enough to express the real Ethan.
I flew my freak flag a little higher.
I attended the collegiate alt-culture capital, Hampshire College, a refuge for intellectual and artistic misfits. I tried on multiple costumes, including actor, filmmaker, novelist and poet (and I caught a couple midnight “Rocky Horror” shows at Hadley’s famous "Dead Mall" while I was at it). From that point on, I hewed to a less traditional path — the life of an artist living abroad, a writer, a teacher, a performer, a D&D player and Dungeon Master for hire, a storyteller.
In the years since, I’ve watched “Rocky Horror” clips on YouTube. But I haven’t seen the entire film since the Reagan Administration. I’m afraid to. I worry that by watching a beloved movie through the eyes of a much older me, I’ll risk popping a nostalgic bubble.
Thankfully, “Rocky Horror” lives on. Astoundingly, midnight screenings continue, making the camp classic the longest-running theatrical release in film history. In 2005, the Library of Congress National Film Registry recognized “Rocky Horror” as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." A new documentary, “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror” hits screens on September 26.
As for me, every Halloween I dress up as a Frank-like zombie and turn my front porch into a stage for my annual performance. I still have my original copy of the soundtrack album. Whenever I want to tap into my weirdo, I take it out for a spin.
