The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a cult classic since it’s release, inspiring fans to embrace it in midnight showings where they will dress up and interact with the movie. Even today, 45 years after it’s release, many theaters have weekly or monthly showings of the movie often in combination with a shadow cast. With the movie it’s a common practice to have actors dress up and mime along with the movie playing behind them while the audience interacts with callbacks, props, or by dressing up themselves. In many ways it’s still seen as a subversive movie, talking head on about things like gender and sexuality. Despite it’s name, it’s not considered a horror movie often anymore but rather falls more into the categories of comedy musicals and science fiction.
For the time, it’s images of gender non-conformity and sexual fluidity were refreshing and, for the more conservative minds, frightening. It’s important to remember when it was produced when looking at the movie, but with it’s still apparent popularity, does the movie hold up to our modern standards of dealing with gender and gender-non conformity.
Rebecca Bell-Metereau argues that the “films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s generally presented shallow or distorted portrayals of transgender characters as comic, psychotic, scary, or pitiful” (loc 296), and that these films solidified the transgender character tropes in films. She cites transgender characters being categorized into a joke (such as Daphne in Some Like it Hot (1959)) or into a villains (such as Psycho (1959)). The Rocky Horror Picture Show creates a movie where Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) is comedic, psychotic, scary, and pitiful throughout the movie rather than just one of those descriptors as Bell-Metereau suggests about movies of that time period. However, it still must be questioned whether Dr. Frank-N-Furter and The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a whole can be considered progressive or destructive.
The absurdity of the movie pushes it more into the genre of comedy than of horror, despite what the name suggests. Frank-N-Furter is a dramatic character that’s exaggerated to extremes. It’s easy to laugh at his absurd excitement in creating his creature.
Frank-N-Furter is a character created to laugh at. By dressing in woman’s clothes and lamenting on what he dreams of and what he’s created in his solo song I’m Going Home, he is created in similar fashion to the “sissy” trope of gay men in films (The Celluloid Closet). Like the “sissies”, Frank-N-Furter is pushed to such an extreme version of ridiculous, the audience can laugh at him. His fluidity in gender and in sexuality isn’t taken seriously because nothing about him is taken seriously. Even his own people, Magenta (Patricia Quinn) and Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien), grow bored of his antics, yawning during his ending song. But despite many of the characters and the audience finding humor in his exaggerations, not all of the characters find it this way.
In fact, the two characters that are supposed to represent the ‘normal’ viewer are fearful of Frank-N-Furter and through their eyes the movie is more of a horror movie than a comedy. Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) are thrown into the crazy, exaggerated castle of Frank-N-Furter and spend most of the movie fearing him and what he represents (sexual and gender fluidity). Janet even faints of fear at first sight of Frank-N-Furter.
They face the transgressive acts and appearance of Frank-N-Furter, and their instinct throughout the film is to fear it and to repress their own transgressive tendencies. Since Brad and Janet are supposed to represent the ‘normal’ audience member, through them the audience feels fear towards Frank-N-Furter in addition to laughing at his extreme antics.
This combination of fear and humor, however, disjoints the character of Frank-N-Furter, making him seem mentally unstable. This is also seen in his quickness to kill and his shifts in character. He’s depicted as a character with anger problems who will kill if things aren’t going his way.
When Eddie threatens the way Frank-N-Furter is running things, he brutally kills the ex-experiment with an axe. In addition to his willingness to kill, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is introduced as a Mad Scientist, fit with the green scrubs and his own creation (Rocky, played by Peter Hinwood). From the beginning of the movie, the audience is shown to see Frank-N-Furter as someone who isn’t mentally sane.
But despite this, Jim Sharman also makes the audience pity Frank-N-Furter. When faced down by Magenta and Riff Raff, his companions from home, he sings I’m Coming Home. While mentioned above as an example of his antics that the audience can laugh at, the song does also evoke pity from the audience. His makeup runs down his cheeks, and his voice is filled with sorrow as he realizes that his time has come to an end. The camera even looks down on him as he’s threatened, making him small and weak.
So throughout the movie, the audience is faced with the fact that Frank-N-Furter doesn’t fit purely into the categories of trans tropes that Bell-Metereau introduces, but rather moves through them as fluidly as he moves through gender. This makes him a complex character, not meant to be read as one thing. However, overall Frank-N-Furter is not meant to be read as the character the audience is supposed to connect to. They’re meant to see him as a different species, and the movie even goes as far as making him, Magenta, and Riff Raff aliens from a planet Transexual in the galaxy Transylvania. The audience is meant to feel distant from Frank-N-Furter, which does not favor trans representation in film. Rather it isolates people who don’t fit society’s notions of sex and gender and poses them as aliens to us.
Despite this, Rocky Horror Picture Show is popular among the LGBTQ+ community. I have done lights for a shadow cast of the movie. Those who were performing often expressed that the community of fans around the movie created a welcoming environment to be who you are. They feel comfortable in expressing non-traditional gender and sexuality with a lack of judgement. Despite the fact that Frank-N-Furter is an alien, none of the characters (human or not) come away from the movie ‘pure’ in the eyes of the society movies think they’re selling to. Even Brad and Janet, who are meant to represent the ‘normal’ in society, sleep with Frank-N-Furter, disrupting views of heterosexuality. While the movie excuses those of gender non-conformity as aliens, the fans of the movie find more acceptance of individuality than they find in other parts of society.
Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. “Trans Tropes.” Quick Takes Movies & Popular Culture: Transgender Cinema. kindle ed., Rutgers University Press, 2019.
The Celluloid Closet. Directed by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, narrated by Lily Tomlin, Sony Pictures Classics, 1995.
Images. “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” kissthemgoodbye. https://kissthemgoodbye.net/movie/thumbnails.php?album=177
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Directed by Jim Sharman, performances by Tim Curry, Twentieth Century Fox, 1975.
Gender & Sexuality in Film 
I believe that ultimately Rocky Horror is just another destructive portrayal of tans people. The fact that Frank is the villain of the movie and is killed at the end supports the heteronormative agenda of only feeling comfortable having queer representation in movies if the queer-folk are the antagonist of the film and “get what they deserve” by dying at the end.
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