The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Directed by Jim Sharman
After getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, newly engaged couple Brad and Janet encounter the eerie mansion of the flamboyant, seductive Dr Frank-N-Furter and a variety of eccentric characters. Through elaborate dance and rock music, the mad scientist unveils his latest creation: a perfect, muscular man.
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6 films that influenced The Rocky Horror Picture Show
What critics say influenced The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Like the hugely successful B-Movie that inspired it — Harry Novak's 1965 sexploitation classic "Kiss Me Quick!" — "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is an exploitation musical that draws on a grab-bag of social identifiers to expand on conventional hypocrisies with more than just a nudge and a wink.
…it even has a glancing reference to ROCKY HORROR, a kind of Frankenstein tale, in the early appearance of the Creature himself but without the camp.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was born out of a 1973 London stage musical composed and written by Richard O’Brien, a struggling actor who had performed in rock musicals such as Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.
It is not hard to see why the film became such an immediate counterculture hit at the dawn of the 1970s, a decade that produced some of the most memorable of midnight movies, including John Waters’s 16mm gross-out Pink Flamingos (1972), Jim Sharidan’s campy rock musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and David Lynch’s avant-garde freakshow Eraserhead (1977).
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The fact that it became a huge cult sensation on the midnight movie circuit along with such cinematic oddities as El Topo (1970), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Eraserhead (1978) is much less difficult to fathom.
A decade and a half before The Rocky Horror Picture Show, teenagers turned the showings into rituals -- returning with their friends again and again.