 This video is brought to you by Ground News. Check out the link in the description to get started with 30% off today. If you're watching this video, there's a decent chance that you've already got your tickets to a local theater's Halloween screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the decade since its release, Rocky Horror has become the cult classic film. In North America, it sits up there with Pumpkin Spice, Spirit Halloween, and the looming dread of seasonal depression as a terminal marker of autumn. But with all love to it, the Rocky Horror Picture Show is an odd film. It's a musical comedy tribute to 30 sci-fi and B movies, it's got a madcap plot, clunky dialogue, and it's carried by an oddball cast dressed in wigs, fishnets, and campy outfits. On paper, it certainly doesn't seem like the first choice to be the longest running theatrical release ever, but nearly 50 years after its premiere, Rocky Horror is still showing, and really there's no sign of that stopping anytime soon. Despite all its oddities, or rather because of them, Rocky Horror has become a cultural powerhouse. It's so important that, when Disney acquired Fox in 2019 and began pulling old movies from theaters to put into the vault, it made a rare exception for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rocky Horror is a transcendent piece of media. More than simply crossing film genres, the Rocky Horror Picture Show crosses social boundaries, challenges sexual norms, and provides a soft opening for a highly vulnerable population to be themselves and feel truly accepted. Let's take a closer look. The early 70s were a time of sexual exploration. While the end of the 60s had favored a kind of low-cost free love, the 70s ushered in a new movement that was both an extension of and a reaction to those trends. Glam Rock. Glam was a queer-lad movement that was built on the back of gender non-conformity. Visually, it was a hodgepodge of style, from early Hollywood glamour to 50s pinups and cabaret theater, augmented by touches of ancient civilizations, sci-fi, and the occult. Essentially, Glam Rock was anything you wanted it to be, as long as it was bold. Meanwhile, the Stonewall riot of 1969 had birthed a liberation movement that saw queer folks stepping out from the shadows and demanding to be accepted in public life. An age-old power structure of cis normativity and heteronormativity was beginning to show its first cracks. And in the middle of it all, a London playwright named Richard O'Brien was developing a musical called The Rocky Horror Show. O'Brien, who identifies as third gender, was a student of Glam Rock, finding refuge in its radical presentations of gender and sexuality. In Simon Reynolds' shock and awe, O'Brien summed up the feelings of so many caught up in the glam wave. Glam Rock allowed me to be myself more. O'Brien took his glam influence and used it to pan a comic tribute to early science fiction and horror B movies. The Rocky Horror Show tells the story of a newly engaged couple, Janet and Brad, who get caught in a storm and arrive at the castle of a mad scientist, Dr. Frank Enferter, who was originated by Tim Curry in Drag. Frank Enferter creates a monster called Rocky, a physically perfect muscular man with blonde hair and a tan, before seducing both of the newlyweds separately. The show was a whirlwind of over-the-top antics, wild sex, and catchy tunes, but it was written on a shoestring budget. The composer Richard Hartley could only afford to hire four musicians who each had to double on a second instrument. The bass player needed to play saxophone, and Hartley himself played the keyboard in the show's initial run. Despite all of this, the show was a smashing success. A reviewer for The Guardian venerated the premiere, saying it had achieved the rare feat of being witty and erotic at the same time, and the various sexual permutations and combinations suggested by coupling silhouettes have a gaudy mathematical intricacy. The original show continued for nearly 3,000 performances, and managed to win the 1973 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical. To this day, the musical has barely taken a year off since, and with such an overwhelmingly positive response, it was only natural that the next major step was into film. In 1975, a film adaptation called The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered across the UK and America. It was a faithful adaptation, but with more budget and some silver screen pizzazz. The film was directed by Jim Sharman, who had directed the original stage play. Sharman worked with O'Brien himself to write the screenplay. Most of the cast reprised their original roles, including Tim Curry and O'Brien, who played the part of Riff Raff. These British theatre nerds joined up with the American talents of Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon, and Meatloaf, who injected a bit of Hollywood into the film. Hartley also came back as the composer, and was able to change his orchestra from 4 and a half members up to 30. This allowed him to add complexity and drama to the soundtrack. Everything was lining up flawlessly. Or so they thought. Despite being a step up from the acclaimed musical in nearly every aspect, film critics gave The Rocky Horror Picture Show a lukewarm reception. They complained about nearly every aspect of the production, from the plot to the music. The movie was subsequently withdrawn from its eight opening cities for small audiences, and its New York City Halloween night opening was cancelled entirely. But its distributor, Fox, wasn't ready to give up yet. In the 70s, there was a phenomenon of offbeat movies finding second life for cult fans at midnight screenings. These late night shows were time slots reserved for people who wanted something outside of the mainstream, something that regular censors wouldn't allow in a matinee showing. Midnight films could be experimental, violent, erotic, or surreal. Some of the most popular of these movies were made by Hammer film productions, who specialized in classic horror. Rocky Horror was a clear homage to these films. In fact, it was shot on location at Oakley Court, a Victorian manner that had been used in a number of Hammer films, including midnight movie classic The Curse of Frankenstein. Given these ties to the B movie world, Fox thought that midnight screenings might be a perfect home for Rocky Horror. Time proved them right. Slowly but surely Rocky Horror's popularity grew until it was a regular feature at New York's Waverly Theater. And then, about five months into its midnight run, something strange happened. One audience member, upon seeing Janet put a newspaper over her head to protect from the rain, shouted at the screen, buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch, which drew a few laughs from the other moviegoers. Over subsequent showings, the regulars would come back with new ad-libs or counterpoint dialogue to shout at the screen and amuse each other. Eventually, the regular viewers settled on favorites that have since become verbatim at nearly every showing. Today we know this practice as callbacks. Participating in these callbacks has become as much a part of the Rocky Horror experience as the movie itself. But audience participation with Rocky Horror is about more than just talking back. Performance groups became a staple at Rocky Horror screenings, with shadow casts creating imitations of the costumes and mimicking the action on stage. Before long, fans were starting to show up in costume as well. The distinct costumes in Rocky Horror are a perfect vessel for elaborate self-expression. They push against the strict fashion regiments of mainstream society and create a space for people to play with their gender expression. In the documentary Making the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film's costume designer Sue Blaine admitted that she had never looked at any sci-fi movies or comic books, saying, one just automatically knows what space suits look like. And for nearly 50 years, people have been running with Blaine's off-the-cuff, campy costume decisions. While many groups still show up as the characters themselves, this costumeing has expanded, with people showing up to Rocky Horror screenings in lingerie, drag, or anything that speaks to the liberated spirit of the film. Some theaters began to encourage this by allowing free admission to those in costume, but for many of the moviegoers, the costume itself was the excuse to finally be free. In a time where queer expression was frequently met with violence and hatred, Rocky Horror showings became safe havens. After all, few homophobes or religious fundamentalists were going to go out of their way to see such a deviant film in theaters. And while today we understand drag, cross-dressing, and transgender identities better, in the 70s there were very few outlets to express different ideas of gender and sexuality, never mind public ones. As queer communities flocked to Rocky Horror screenings, they became places for organization and action. At the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles, the fan playing the part of Frank Inferter was a transgender performer, D. Garrett Gafford, who was out of work in 1978 and trying to raise the funds for gender-affirming surgery. To this day, Rocky Horror screenings are still used to fundraise for queer causes. And as the cult showings of Rocky Horror started to spread across the world, it's liberating effect snowballed. Rocky Horror became a place where oppressed peoples could find strength in numbers and liberation in unity. By the new millennium, Rocky Horror screenings could be found in cities across the world, and many of those screenings were attended by activists and organizers who helped push for an era that saw the widespread acceptance of gay marriage and historically unprecedented recognition of trans identities. Even with the essential role that it's played in queer liberation, Rocky Horror is very much a product of its time, full of dated terminology and themes that don't quite stand up to modern standards. And while O'Brien himself remains a queer icon, he's also been on the record with questionable statements about trans identity. Pages and pages have been written debating the question as to whether Rocky Horror itself is transphobic, whether it plays into harmful stereotypes about gender identity and sexual deviance, and what the value of such a work is in modern queer discourse. There's no debating that Rocky Horror carries much of the queer phobic baggage of the 70s into its work, but at the same time, Rocky Horror showings have served as havens for anybody who's ever had questions about their gender or sexual identity. For many, it's been a work that spurred those questions in the first place. There are myriad stories of people having queer sexual awakenings while watching the film, stories of young people who feel confused and alone, watching the gender binary disintegrate in real time as Tim Curry dances in drag, and it's those people who have gone on to turn Rocky Horror screenings into safe spaces for anyone that might not fit into the strict regiments of mainstream society. Today we need those sorts of safe spaces more than ever. Queer backlash is happening everywhere. LGBT plus people are nearly four times more likely than non-LGBT people to experience violent victimization. Much of the progress made since the sexual exploration of the 70s is slowly being clawed back by conservative demagogues. This backlash wants to subjugate queer communities by keeping us scared and divided, but just like we have in the past, queer communities will continue to prevail. This Halloween, in indie theaters across the world, queer people and allies alike will pile into seats to watch Tim Curry dress in drag, to watch Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon get their conservative sexualities shattered, and to watch the joy and liberation of the glam rock era come to life once more. No matter what happens, Rocky Horror stands as proof of the ways that queer people will continue to come together, the ways that queer people will persist, will drive culture and will create singular, brilliant spaces of joy and self-expression. One of the biggest battlegrounds in the ongoing fight for LGBT rights is Florida. Personally, I've been keeping up with dispatches from that front, using ground news, which shows me the biases present in the news that I read. For example, if I look at stories about the fight around drag laws in Florida, ground news will show me that 47% of the sources covering this story fall pretty much within the center. 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