Report Card: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976)

Read all the Rocky Horror Picture Show posts in chronological order. Rocky Horror is something special. It’s not because it’s a send-up of B-movies. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Hardware Wars, and Kung Fury are all send-ups of B-movies and they haven’t become cultural forces. Plus, while it might have begun life in O’Brien’s head as a send-up, parody is secondary to its centering of sexuality and queerness and flouting of every taboo it thought it could get away with. Those themes were absolutely not part of 1950s creature features or sci-fi, so it’s a parody of B-films in the way Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is about laundromats, which is to say, not really at all. It’s not the ensemble. Sarandon, Bostwick, and Adams are all overearnest parody. O’Brien and Quinn are doing niche performance art. The rest of the cast plays their roles “straight”, except for Curry, who didn’t adopt a stance as much as conjure Frank-N-Furter from the cosmos into being as some camp primal…