How 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' Became a Midnight Movie Cult Classic

When The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in August 1975 at the Rialto Theatre in London, and then a month later in Los Angeles, it looked like a dud.

The campy movie musical—about a sweet young couple who stumble into a castle filled with costumed weirdos, presided over by Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a bisexual, gender-bending scientist from the planet “Transsexual”—underwhelmed at the box office and drew lukewarm reviews. The Observer dismissed its Frankenstein spoof as “10 a penny” (overly common). “The sparkle’s gone,” wrote Variety, opining that it didn’t hold up well to the Richard O’Brien stage hit on which it was based, a satirical tribute to B-movies.

Then came the midnight screenings. Starting at New York City’s Waverly Theater in April 1976, audiences transformed The Rocky Horror Picture Show into the ultimate midnight movie phenomenon. Fans showed up in costume, shouted lines back at the screen and danced in the aisles—turning each screening into a wild, interactive party. 

The movie didn’t just attract an audience of downtown eccentrics and open-minded thrill-seekers. It became a cult phenomenon and spread to other cities, with fans showing up night after night, keeping Rocky Horror in theaters for months, then years, then—in some locations—even decades. It's regarded as one of the longest-running theatrical releases in movie history.

“You weren’t just sitting in a darkened room. You were part of something,” says journalist June Thomas, author of the book A Place of Our Own, who frequented midnight screenings at the State Theater in Newark, Delaware, in the early 1980s. “You could be at the movies, but also be dancing and taking part in this thing.”

Alongside underground films like John Waters' Pink Flamingos and David Lynch's Eraserhead, Rocky Horror became one of the quintessential "midnight movies" of the 1970s. Together, they set a new precedent for how oddball films could become cult phenomena in the pre-VCR days by playing late at night in non-mainstream movie houses—and attracting word-of-mouth fanbases. Indeed, no film epitomizes the “midnight movie” phenomenon quite the way Rocky Horror does.

Rocky Horror wasn’t the first midnight movie, a loose category of offbeat genre pictures that thrive in late-night slots outside mainstream marketing. In the early 1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky's “acid Western” El Topo (1970) sold out night after night during a midnight run at New York’s Elgin Theater. That venue’s entrepreneurial owner, Ben Barenholtz, went on to showcase the perverse black comedy Pink Flamingos (1972), a cult hit among what he called “downtown gay people.”

With its glam-rock energy, countercultural themes of androgyny and sexual liberation and Tim Curry’s erotically charged portrayal of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Rocky Horror was primed for similar cult appeal. So, after the film’s lackluster Los Angeles release, a young advertising manager at 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation named Tim Deegan persuaded film distributors to hold late-night screenings. As he later recalled, “My marketing plan was two-pronged: no advertising and you can only see it at midnight.”

The plan worked: Fans embraced the film’s bizarre world with a spirit of camaraderie, mirroring in some ways the journey of virginal couple Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), as they stumble into Frank-N-Furter’s castle and undergo a sexual awakening within its liberating chaos.

At the Waverly (already known for its midnight screenings of zombie classic Night of the Living Dead), new customs took root. In September 1976, a regular named Louis Farese Jr., began shouting quirky retorts to the screen—like “Buy an umbrella, you cheap b---h!” when Janet uses a newspaper to shield herself from the rain. His banter sparked a tradition of “backtalk,” in which audience members developed their own counterpoint to the onscreen dialogue. “Whenever the repartee went over well, it would be repeated the following Friday or Saturday, [and] become absorbed within the general text,” according to film critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their book Midnight Movies. 

Gradually, the participation rituals grew wilder. Fans arrived in costumes inspired by the movie—some even copying Frank-N-Furter’s shoulder tattoo—a trend cemented by a 1976 Halloween costume party. Soon, “shadow casts” acted out scenes in front of the screen, singing along with musical numbers or mimicking the dialogue.

Then came the props. Someone brought a water pistol and squirted the audience during the rainstorm scene; others threw toast at the screen when Dr. Frank-N-Furter proposed a toast. These wacky customs hardened into canon as Rocky Horror screenings spread beyond Manhattan—first to other parts of New York and then to other cities around the country, like New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis and even smaller cities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Modesto, California. 

Still, the Waverly Theater remained the epicenter. In July 1977, the Daily News reported that “the Rocky Horror popularity reeks of cult,” with block-long lines on the weekends and “repeaters” talking and singing along. By decade’s end, 20th Century-Fox had hundreds of prints in circulation around the United States, making Rocky Horror arguably the most popular "midnight movie" of all time.

For some, the interactive screenings were more bewildering than fun. Journalist Randy Shulman, then a student at George Washington University, recalls being stunned when fellow viewers began shouting in unison, tossing rice and spraying water. 

“I was totally perplexed and annoyed by all of this,” Shulman recalls. “I remember turning to somebody behind me and saying, ‘Shut up, there's a movie going on!’” Frustrated, Shulman walked out.

A few years later, after transferring to New York University, he gave Rocky Horror another try at the Waverly—and, this time, the rowdy audience experience clicked. Looking back, he admits the movie is “not a well-made film,” but argues that audience participation is what elevated it to cult status. Had that interactivity never happened … we wouldn’t be talking about this film today,” Shulman says.

In retrospect, the Rocky Horror cult looks like an early model for today’s diehard fan rituals—from Marvel cosplay to audiences belting along with a Taylor Swift concert film. 

In the 1970s, though, the sense of camaraderie that sprung up around Rocky Horror had little precedent in cinema. It more resembled the obsessive fan community around the Grateful Dead: People returned not just for the movie but for the friends or sense of belonging they found there. Outside the Waverly, Hoberman and Rosenbaum write, regulars would “swap information, sing and dance on the sidewalk, compare their costumes, discuss potential lines or prop ideas.” 

“I think it really was meaningful to a lot of people. They got something from Rocky Horror that they weren't getting elsewhere,” says June Thomas. “Maybe they didn't have supportive family … [or] friends—except in this once-a-week [gathering] in the movie theater.”

That bond was especially strong for queer audiences. With its campy sensibility and playful gender-bending—embodied by Frank-N-Furter’s “alien transvestite” persona—Rocky Horror offered a safe space at a pivotal moment in queer history. “It was a very queer scene,” Thomas wrote in 2014, describing screenings where flamboyant makeup and nontraditional gender expression were welcome. 

“You knew, if you go there, you will find your people, and that felt very much like a gay bar," Thomas says today. "Not everyone was gay … [but] in a sense, everyone was a little bit queer in some way. It was a place of safety.”

Decades later, after leaving Delaware, Thomas revisited the film in 2019 while producing a podcast for Slate about the history of the Rocky Horror phenomenon. At a screening of the movie in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, she discovered that the call-and-response backtalk was still happening.

“It was kind of like muscle memory,” Thomas says. “Like hearing an old song that you hadn’t heard in a long time. Like, ‘Wow, how did I remember all the lyrics to that song?’”