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(How Do You Halloween?) THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW: Don't Dream It...Experience It

By. Pleatherface 

As some of you readers may have noticed, I’ve mentioned I did not grow up here. And while back home my family and later the community in general adopted plenty of the markings of American Halloween celebrations such as pumpkin decorations, using costumes, trick or treating, and others, I did not experience quite a few “traditions” associated with the October celebration. Among them, on was watching the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a communal experience.

My first experience with the movie was watching it as a college-aged student in the 2000’s. It may have been a combination of curiosity fueled by my American cousins and some need to inform myself to best consume the pop-culture obsessed media landscape of the time. Indeed it was not easy for someone without the in-knowledge to be on top of every single reference in the Simpsons or Family Guy to name two shows that abused this vein for their own material. As with many popular culture products, consumption became a necessity to feel included at some point.

According to fan site, rockyhorror.com and other sources, on April 2, 1976 the film had its first midnight showing at the Waverly Theater, now called the IFC Center, in New York. The theater had begun midnight showings which seemed to have attracted a younger audience willing to playfully engage with the material presented by the film, as sources such as Vera Dika mention in Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. The official fan site adds that by September of that year, audience members were reportedly talking back to the characters and yelling at the screen. While I could not find a source explicitly dating the association of the film with Halloween, most agreed that by the October of 1976 the use of costumes by shadowing performers who would exchange humorous and counter-point dialogue could be the point where this connection was born.

The midnight screenings aren't the only reason we're still doing the Time Warp fifty years later. Spooky Starshine looks back at THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW itself, exploring how Frank-N-Furter challenged Brad and Janet's traditional world and why audiences continue to embrace his unapologetic weirdness half a century later.

The film stars many future stars like Susan Sarandon and Meatloaf (though the latter in music rather than film), and well-known actors such as Tim Curry and Barry Bostwick. It started as a musical written by Richard O’Brien (who plays Riff Raff). It was a Broadway success, but that success did not easily translate to its film-version. Most critics at the time did not take kindly to the film. While most reviews at the time agreed its music was a high point, most were turned off by what they took to be a nonsensical plot. Time was kind in some ways, especially with the audience, but it did not sway critics. In a retrospect, famed-critic Roger Ebert thought of it as more of a “long-running social phenomenon,” that had been, “ignored by pretty much everyone, including the future fanatics.” This to me points towards the importance of taking this film in the context of a group viewing rather than as an individual endeavor.

I also would like to take some space here to recognize the central figure in this delightfully baroque film. Dr. Frank-N-Furter as performed by Tim Curry. Tim Curry sadly passed away not too long ago, and it also got me thinking about how the figures that were a part of my and many others’ childhoods and youths (specifically thinking of millennials here) are one by one departing this mortal coil. As an elder millennial, this year alone has seen quite a few meaningful departures in that respect. But I’d like to focus on Tim here. Curry was an amazingly talented performer able to sing, dance, and act. He had iconic roles that touched upon almost all age groups. For children he could be the mean concierge from Home Alone 2 or Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. For teens and young adults he was the sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania, a scheming and frantic butler in Clue, or the horror in clown shape from It. For others he may be best known for his numerous cameos on television shows such as Psych, Rosanne, Monk, Will & Grace, Criminal Minds, Paddington Bear, etc. Fans may also have heard his 1970’s and 1980’s music albums. One of my personal favorite roles was that of Cardinal Richelieu in what is probably one of the worst adaptations of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 1993. He was the perfect choice for a scene-stealing villain in an otherwise forgettable film.

Back to the main topic, I’ll skip my usual description of the plot as anyone who has any experience with the film knows that to be an unpractical practice. This is an experience that cannot be reduced to plot points. This I learned from my first experience watching it as part of a community as a graduate student in Milwaukee. It was part of a team building exercise for a group of student staffers, one which had piqued my curiosity due to again those comments by my cousins and the description of the organizers about what the event could potentially look like. I must say their description was both spot on and well-short. While it may be said Wisconsin is quite the tame Northern Midwest state, cities like Milwaukee and Madison are home to various colleges which bring a youthful element to the otherwise quiet towns. The show we attended was at The Oriental Theater off-Brady Street. The show itself might not have qualified as memorable in the context of the history of these types of communal experiences, but it was impressive to me. And that is what I feel is the great legacy of the film, how its consumption can create a unique experience but one that is shared. Of the night, led by Sensual Daydreams and billed as one of the longest-running screenings of the film, I can say what impacted me the most was how easily we all fell into a rhythm as we became active participants in consuming the experience over simply consuming a piece of popular media.  My experience was also helped by the group I tagged along with and I must add the community itself who were excited to share the experience with a “virgin” (the term used to designate newbies to the experience). The crowd range from people as young as teenagers to what I may have erroneously thought were folks as old as my own grandparents at the time. While the troupe’s performance is akin to that of a theme park with numerous – and obvious – rules, the experience itself had for me a sense of novelty that made it seem much less-rehearsed than it may have been. It was easy to get swept up in the audience’s enthusiasm, and, in that way, it made so much sense that the plot of the film was ultimately meaningless. It all became about this attack on the senses, this bombardment of joy as it was shared through songs and vulgarity-laced shouting. As the night ended, I said goodbye to my coworkers, I walked towards my bus stop and went home by myself. While not the most memorable night of my life, it was undoubtably an exciting time and it got me thinking of what it was to really immerse yourself in the college experience through these types of communal activities. More likely I was still overstimulated and couldn’t adequately process it all.

What that night says to me today is quite interesting considering where my own research interests would eventually become after that experience. I have not entirely gone over modalities of consumption in these articles, as most of the movies I tend to watch alone (during the day as I am still easily scared lol). Yet, one of the elements of identity as I have explored it in my work takes into consideration how communal experience affects perception during individual consumption of cultural products. This is an excellent example of how a product may have not found its audience in one mode of consumption, but through ingenuity one can only tie to capitalism one was found. If the film had not been a box office disappointment or flopped in the eyes of movie theater owners, maybe we would have never had a theater owner who thought to dump it into midnight showings to serve a crowd of young and broke, rowdy youths or just those randoms who are willing to watch a film at midnight. It would not have found this new life as a communal product, much in the vein of performance art, that has made the film memorable and a cult-classic today.

There is so much more down that rabbit hole, but I feel it has been enough for this space and time.  I’ll be back next time with a look at The Cabin in the Woods, or more likely something Tubi has recommended.

And no discussion of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW feels complete without Tim Curry. Davalyn Baker remembers the performer who made generations of weird kids feel seen, from Pennywise and Darkness to Wadsworth and, of course, the role that taught us all: “Don't dream it. Be it.”