The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

★★ Rewatched 29 Oct 2025

I get it. I really do. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cultural event, not just a movie. People dress up, shout at the screen, and have fun. That’s fine. But as a film? I’m with Roger Ebert: it’s more fun to be at Rocky Horror than to watch Rocky Horror.

Yes, the songs are good and Tim Curry is fun, maybe even brilliant. You can absolutely see why this launched his career; he’s the film’s entire gravitational center. But here’s the thing: take away the audience participation, take away Curry, and you’re left with something that has all the structural discipline of a porno. Characters exist only to set up non-explicit sex scenes, the songs take the place of the thrusting, and the so-called “plot” is just the writer putting his kinks on the screen like he's writing a shopping list.

Sure, it's a parody but even parodies need a pulse. This is my main issue with Young Frankenstein too. It’s a collection of sometimes clever, often boring bits, with no actual story holding them together. Same deal here, except instead of gags, we get pansexual musical numbers and a papier-mâché Frankenstein monster who might as well have “objectified metaphor” tattooed on his pecs. Rocky Horror isn’t a narrative; it’s a mixtape of somebody’s unfiltered libido.

As bizarre as this comparison may sound, Rocky Horror feels like a dry run for what Guillermo del Toro does: using adaptations of other people’s horror characters as a vehicle to express his own sexuality. Sure, del Toro’s kinks may be different from those of Richard O’Brien. He fetishizes Hellboy, the Gill Man, and Frankenstein’s monster as “misunderstood romantic others” who always wind up fucking a supermodel who “sees beauty in strangeness.” Yet Del Toro, for all his own fetishistic tendencies, at least pretends to build a story around them. His films have arcs, even when they feel like he’s just filming himself thumbing through Famous Monsters of Filmland with one hand. In The Shape of Water (as much as I hate it), the woman falls for the creature because the story builds to that. In Rocky Horror, everyone just falls into bed because the writer wants to, and we’re supposed to call it subversive.

That’s ultimately the problem. Richard O’Brien isn’t telling a story, he’s working through his kinks on camera. And hey, good for him! That’s art, in its own way. But even if you happen to share his turn-ons, it’s not especially interesting unless you’re watching it alone, with the door locked, the blinds drawn, and your laptop plugged in.