As the US film critic Roger Ebert astutely pointed out in his original, 2 ½ star rated 1976 review: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show would be more fun, I suspect, if it weren’t a picture show. That critics hated it is not, it seems, entirely true. Tis there, so mythology has it, that David Bowie’s first wife, Angie, gave the first audience participation ‘call-back’ when she yelled “No, don’t do it!” as creator Richard O’Brien’s Riff-Raff threatened to zap Tim Curry’s Dr Frank-N-Furter with a laser gun.Īn instant hit, the play transferred first to the West End and then to Los Angeles. The seeds were right there from the start.Ī camp twist on sci-fi B-movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show first sprang to life in 1973 as a musical play in the tiny capacity studio above London’s Royal Court Theatre.
It’s this off-the-scale level of audience partici…(“Say it!”)…pation, that first led to Rocky Horror being dubbed a cult. “I can’t wait til we can all do the Time Warp together again,” says Viezel. Plans are optimistically proceeding for the film’s 45th birthday party in St Louis later this year. His Facebook fansite has already hosted ‘The Rocky Horror Experience – the Live Lockdown Edition!’ and is packed with fan-created content such as a weekly ‘Zoomy Horror Quarantine Show’ where participants dress up and re-enact the entire movie over Zoom, a living room Time Warp dance-off, and ‘Don’t-cha Touch-a, Touch-a Touch Me’, a hymn to isolation frustration sung by a drag queen barbershop quartet. I want people to still have a place to be.” Especially for those in the LGBT community, it’s a place where they could be themselves and find people who were their family. “I know of a lot of people whose lives were saved by this movie. “For a lot of people, Rocky Horror is like their home, it’s their connection to everybody – all their friends,” Viezel tells me via Zoom from New York. For him, this is about more than a fun, cheeky night out in your underwear. With Covid-19 shutting cinemas, how can acolytes keep the faith? Enter Larry Viezel, president of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Official Fan Club – a responsibility he takes very seriously. Yet Rocky’s cult supremacy is now in jeopardy.
It has since grossed over $170 million worldwide and holds the record for the longest continually running movie release of all time. A box office flop so ker-splatty it was pulled from the few screens showing it back in 1975, only to be lovingly resurrected by a devout fanbase. For more than 40 years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has defined what we mean by a ‘cult’ movie, though few can ever hope to match its phenomenal level of ritualised worship. Every Saturday night since 1977, cross-gendered disciples in corsets and ripped fishnets have congregated to chant and sing along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as if attending some gloriously kinky midnight mass.
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