I think maybe the best reason one can give for why they love a movie is simply, "It brings me joy." And anyone who knows me knows that
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is my favorite movie of all time. So there was much joy.
I first saw this when I was 12-going-on-13 years old at the local one-screen theater's midnight showing (which they did every weekend for years). We had a new teacher, fresh out of college, in my middle school and when he heard us talking how we wanted to see Rocky Horror, he called our parents and asked if it would be ok for him to take us. Incredulous as it may seem by today's or even recent parenting models, all of our parents said yes. He gave us instructions during the week on what we needed to bring to not be labelled "virgins" (the term for anyone who hasn't been to a screening of RHPS)... at 12-13 years old.
The night was electric for us. The theater was a sort of dark carnival bristling with a festive nightmare energy. The lights went down. And then...
The explosion inside me that night was nuclear. So many things, the experience was overwhelming. Music and colors and an otherworldly weirdness, blood and sex and Rock and Roll, motorcycles in the night and lightning and "folk dancing", a transvestite Mad Scientist (when an overt transvestite was unheard of) and a perfect Monster singing about an "orgasmic rush of lust". It was a fusion of all the things that had excited my young brain up to that point and whole buncha new ones too.
A sign had warned me...
...but I pressed heedlessly on and was rewarded with an awakening inside that has never diminished. It is in no small part because of Rocky Horror that I spent so much of my life, as I always put it, "searching for the secret hours of the night".
But enough about my connection to the movie.
For anyone who doesn't know, Rocky Horror is a glam-rock horror-musical adapted from a wildly popular British stage play about a naive middle-American couple who happens upon the Frankenstein castle on the night that its over-sexed Mad Scientist brings his Creation to life. It is steeped in the Horror and Sci-Fi of the 50s and 60s, especially Hammer Horror (the "Frankenstein Place" in RHPS is actually the same castle that Hammer's watershed The Curse Of Frankenstein was filmed and the lab even uses some of the same props) and the music of Marc Bolan and David Bowie.
For many people, the early part of the film, up through "The Time Warp" and ending in "Sweet Transvestite", is what they came for and they tend to lose interest after that. For people like me (and we are legion!), all of that is merely the opener and the movie really begins in earnest when we all go "up to the lab and see what's on the slab".
At this point, Rocky Horror is born and immediately begins singing one of the best songs of the film, "The Sword Of Damocles" and the wildness that makes this movie Horror and sexy and all of the magic really begins.
I have often felt that the tragic third act was actually the best part of the film.
But after my most recent viewing, I think that I actually like the second act best. Which comes as some surprise even to me as this short section is often considered the slow slog one must get through. I have always thought that was nuts but, hey, I love the movie.
Really, I just love everything about this film. I love the way, way offbeat characters, from Little Nell Campbell's Columbia...
... to Riff Raff and Magenta and of course, Dr. Frank N. Furter. I love Eddie. I said it. I actually think both Barry Bostwick and especially Susan Sarandon excel as the "normal" characters who have to be so committed to what they're doing and they are.
The music is absolutely wonderful, arguably the best original soundtrack in film history, the design is fantastic with its perfect mash-up of Hammer and Glam, and its energy is just unlike anything else I can think of.
For me, it is not October without this movie but I have to consider that really,
I am not me without this movie.
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