The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) — Overview

Christopher Noessel

3 hours ago

The famous disembodied lips that open The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’m working on posts about a British horror movie, a Kollywood sci-fi movie, and a post that ties together Chapter 11 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, sci-fi, and Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky. I’m also beginning a study on the narrative purposes of interfaces in sci-fi. But all progress has stopped with the news last week that Dolly Parton and Tim Curry have passed.

It’s parasocial, but the feels are real, and it was a lot to bear on top of current systemic anxieties. I’m GenX and both of these entertainers were icons. Parton perhaps even more so because of her extensive humanitarian work, but she only did one sci-fi thing, with negligible interfaces. Curry had a much more extensive filmography to draw from. So to honor him, I thought to review one of his films.

There are a number of sci-fi properties to pick from (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Earth 2, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, to name a few), but he is probably best known for his outrageous and iconic performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter from the stage play and subsequent 1975 movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That show has a place dear to my heart, so we’re going to review that.

It’s a complicated thing to analyze, but it does have a plot-centric set of interfaces in it, so let’s go. Warning: These are terrible interfaces for real-world modeling. But they weren’t meant to be good, per se, and I feel I have to do something.

Release date: 29 September 1975

Caveats about the summary

Some notes before we begin a plot summary.

It’s odd to describe this like it’s some regular cinema experience that you watch, focused on it, from beginning to end. It became a cult classic through decades of live midnight screenings with audience members in costume performing the movie in front of the screen as it’s happening, raucous audience shout-outs “Buy an umbrella!”, and cued events (like water pistols during the Act I rain storm). I’ll describe it straight through, but few ever receive it or remember it this way.
It’s a musical and so the flow of events can sometimes be broken by—and sometimes informed by—musical numbers, but these are not called out below unless they are important to the plot. That leaves some of the most memorable things about the film unmentioned, such as the “Time Warp”.
The movie is sardonically self-aware, with a narrator and characters breaking the fourth wall, a mix of diegetic and non-diegetic musical numbers, and beats played for comedy rather than for maintaining a believable or consistent internal world. Some of it happily resists diegetic explanation.
It’s partly a send-up of B-movie American and British science fiction films of the mid-20th century, so understanding its references and choices depends on being familiar with that sub-genre of movie.
Plot is very secondary to camp, flouting taboos, poking fun at trope, musical numbers, and horror.
There is a narrator in the film that provides occasional commentary but does not contribute to the plot, so goes unmentioned.
This description makes the story seem more coherent than it actually is.
I’ll employ my usual neutral tone that I use for summaries, but there is a huge discrepancy between that tone and the vibe on screen.

All that said, it still helps to have this summary on hand if you don’t know the film (or have never bothered to think about it as a narrative) to put its interfaces in something approaching context.

Plot summary

After leaving a wedding in “Home of Happiness” that is Denton, Texas, fiancés Brad and Janet get a flat tire outside a sprawling gothic castle. Together they knock on the door to get some help (for the youth: time was that phones had to be tethered to walls by cords or they could not work, so you had to go to them) only to stumble into a strange convention where an eccentric named Dr. Frank-N-Furter is showcasing the culmination of a scientific project: The vivification of a frankensteined muscle man named Rocky.

Just after Rocky is brought to life, a tough guy on a motorcycle named Eddie breaks out of a Deep Freeze storage room off the main chamber. He has a bloody scar across his forehead. He harasses the guests and hugs Columbia, one of Frank’s helpers, who is Eddie’s lover. Furious that his demonstration was interrupted, Frank-N-Furter grabs a pickaxe and chases Eddie back into the cold storage where he brutally murders him, as Columbia looks on and screams. Afterward Frank-N-Furter finishes his number, and walks Rocky to a makeshift marriage chamber. The scene ends. (Note this summary is a very lossy compression—at this point we’re halfway through the runtime of the movie.)

Brad and Janet are escorted to separate rooms to sleep the night. In disguise, Frank-N-Furter visits each of them in turn and attempts to seduce them, as castle staff watch through monitors. Meanwhile Riff Raff harasses Rocky, scaring him with the flames of a candelabra so much that Rocky escapes his chains and flees through the castle. Riff Raff alerts Frank-N-Furter, still in Brad’s room, mid-seduction.

Janet finds her way to the laboratory where she operates the monitor (why?) and sees Brad and Frank-N-Furter in bed. Jealous and feeling jilted, she finds Rocky herself and seduces him, as Columbia and Magenta watch from a monitor in another room. Frank-N-Furter, Brad, and Riff Raff enter the laboratory and Rocky and Janet hide in the laboratory vat in which Rocky was animated. On the monitor, they see a figure approach the front door and enter in search of something.

Brad remarks that the figure is Dr. Scott, his old science teacher and friend. Frank-N-Furter tells Brad that Dr. Scott works for a department in the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking into aliens (yes, kind of an early X–Files.)

Frank-N-Furter heads to the instrument panel and operates a Triple Contact Electro Magnet that pulls Dr. Scott’s wheelchair up the stairs, through multiple rooms and hallways, and to the instrument panel. In their confrontation several things are revealed.

Frank-N-Furter learns that Brad and Dr. Scott know each other
Dr. Scott came to the castle to find his missing nephew Eddie
Frank-N-Furter expresses paranoid concerns that Brad was doing reconnaissance for Dr. Scott
Janet and Rocky are discovered hiding and their tryst exposed

The scene ends with Magenta sounding a dinner gong and Frank-N-Furter saying that formal dress to the dinner party is optional. (At no point prior to this was a dinner party mentioned.)

During the meal, Dr. Scott reveals that he received a letter from Eddie written in blood reading, “I’M OUT OF MY HED. [sic] O HURRY OR I MAY BE DEAD! THEY MUSN’T CARRY OUT THEIR EVIL DEEDS. LOVE, EDDIE.” In response, Frank-N-Furter reveals with a pull of the tablecloth that they have been eating meat from Eddie’s corpse, which has been sadistically placed in an open coffin beneath the glass dining table. Screaming in fear, Janet runs to Rocky’s arms, which infuriates Frank-N-Furter. He slaps Janet and chases her around the castle with others in pursuit.

They wind up back in the laboratory where Frank-N-Furter activates a Sonic Transducer, which immobilizes Janet, Brad, and Dr. Scott. Then he has Magenta activate the Medusa, which turns each of them to stone and somehow simultaneously evaporates their clothing. Columbia picks this moment to confront Frank-N-Furter, explaining that she loved him until he dumped her. She insists that he choose between her and Rocky. Unbothered, Frank-N-Furter has Magenta Medusa her and Rocky to stone, as well. We then learn that Frank-N-Furter had taken half of Eddie’s brain to supply Rocky.

As part of a “floor show” (the purpose of which is never explained) Frank-N-Furter dresses the stone characters in drag and makeup and places them on a proscenium stage where Magenta uses a backstage de-Medusa to un-stone them. In this state they confess through song that they have enjoyed the freedom offered by decadence. Frank-N-Furter appears on stage with them and sings a song valorizing hedonism and committing one’s self to one’s deepest desires. The closing of the number reveals a swimming pool hidden beneath the stage in which they all writhe together.

The song is interrupted by Riff Raff and Magenta, wearing alien uniforms and sporting new hairdos. Riff Raff aims a three-pronged antimatter weapon at them, and announces that the tables have turned: Frank-N-Furter’s mission has failed. He takes control of the mission, proclaims Frank-N-Furter his prisoner, and begins the process of returning their castle to their home planet of Transsexual in the galaxy Transylvania.

Before they leave, Frank-N-Furter sings a wistful song about going home. (Which is achingly poignant, given his recent passing.) Riff Raff tells Frank-N-Furter that he won’t be returning home but will be killed instead. He shoots Columbia, and then Frank-N-Furter. Rocky grabs Frank-N-Furter’s body and tries to flee up the set, but reaching the top, he is overcome by more antimatter beams and falls with Frank-N-Furter’s body into the pool.

Riff Raff gives the humans just enough time to escape the castle before it takes off into the sky beneath a rainbow that appears in the sky just for the occasion.