Tim Curry sadly passed away on August 25th at the age of 80, and the internet responded the only way it knows how: by pulling on their fishnets, cranking up the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “Sweet Transvestite” and badly doing the Time Warp dance in living rooms across the world. And, yes, I was very much included. It was the right response.
Curry gave us Pennywise, along with the voice of every cartoon bad guy your childhood needed. He left us with a genuinely massive body of work. But for a huge number of people, he will always be Dr. Frank-N-Furter in majestic six-inch heels, a velvet cape (to be thrown off as soon as possible), and a grin that could curdle milk.
So, let’s discuss The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and why it deserves a seat at the horror table and not just the “camp cult musical” table it’s usually shunted to. Because something I think people forget when they’re doing the Time Warp for the two-hundredth time at a midnight showing is: this movie is soaked in horror DNA.
Underneath the fishnets and falsetto, Rocky Horror is doing what every great horror movie does in that it takes something sage and normal and shoves it through the meat grinder of transformation and dread. It’s been doing it since 1975 with a grin on its face the entire time. (And, yes, I know the original stage show debuted in 1973, but I’m going to solely be covering the film adaptation in this).
So, here are the Top Five Reasons why The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a bona fide horror classic. Dedicated, obviously, to the unforgettable, irreplaceable man in the corset who made it all work.
5. It’s a Gothic Haunted House Movie Wearing Lingerie.
If we strip all the songs away from The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a moment (but don’t actually do that as they’re the best part) and look at the bones of the plot, what do we see? A young, painfully square couple who are freshly engaged, very wholesome, and giving off “we will be dead by reel two” energy. They get a flat tire on a literal dark and stormy night.
Stranded, soaked, and desperate, they see a light in the distance and head to a looming, gothic castle for help.
This is the horror premise. It’s Jonathan Harker heading off to Castle Dracula, and countless other unlucky souls in haunted house movies who ignore every warning sign because their car broke down and it’s raining.
Brad and Janet are the absolute classic horror-movie protagonists: they’re naive, sexually repressed, and dressed like they just left church on a Sunday morning. And they’re about to have their whole worldview dismantled by something monstrous and ancient living behind an iron gate.
The castle itself plays it totally straight: a butler answers the door looking like he just crawled out of a crypt (well, Riff Raff basically is something that crawled out of a crypt), a maid who’s a little too interested in the visitors, a storm raging outside which traps the visitors. There’s a big central staircase, hidden rooms, a secret lab, and a dinner scene that wouldn’t be out of place in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
If you explained the plot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to anyone, they’d assume you were describing an old Hammer Horror movie, not a jukebox musical. Because, without the songs, that’s exactly what it is! Richard O’Brien said he grew up devouring horror movies, and it shows in every creaking hinge and lightening flash.
The movie knows it too, opening with disembodied lips singing about the “Science Fiction Double Feature,” a loving checklist of all the B-movies it’s about to reference. It’s telling us, right up front in the first sixty seconds that this is a monster movie, so buckle up.
4. Frank-N-Furter is a Classic Horror Monster (He Just Also Slays in Heels).
Here’s where Tim Curry comes back into it, because Dr. Frank-N-Furter is more than a fabulous host with a killer wardrobe. No matter how you look at it, he’s doing what every great horror monster does. He is Frankenstein’s monster AND Dr. Frankenstein fused into one very unsettling package, and it’s not exactly subtext. It’s the character’s name.
Think of the classic mad scientist archetype in horror: it’s a man who believes he can conquer death and biology through his will (and hubris); he builds something in a lab that shouldn’t exist, and is usually destroyed by his own creation. Frank-N-Furter does exactly this. He builds a man in a lab, bringing him to life with ceremony and electricity in a scene that’s a direct and loving parody of every Universal monster movie. And by the end of the movie, his creation has turned against him.
But what makes Frank-N-Furter seriously scary under all the sequins, and what made Tim Curry’s performance so enduring is: he’s a predator. Watch the movie again with clear eyes and you’ll see Frank doesn’t seduce Brad and Janet so much as he hunts them. Separately and methodically, in the dark and using deception to get into their beds. That really isn’t rom-com material, that’s the exact structure of a slasher stalking his victims, dressed up (yes, pun intended) as farce so the audience laughs instead of flinching.
Frank commands his castle the same way Dracula commands his; he has thralls (Riff Raff, Columbia, Magenta) like every good horror overlord has minions who both serve and resent him; and like every classic monster, he’s undone by the same forces of order he thought he’d conquered.
Tim Curry played all this with fearless commitment. There was no wink or nudge, no “isn’t this silly” energy. He played Dr. Frank-N-Furter as dangerous, truly magnetic, and honestly tragic, and that’s how you’re supposed to play a monster if you want them to last fifty years in our cultural bloodstream. Dracula worked because Bela Lugosi believed every moment of it. Decades later, Pennywise worked because Curry believed every moment of that, too. Frank works for the same reason, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that the same actor nailed both roles.
3. Transformation Horror is the Whole Plot.
If we strip horror down to the studs, one of the most reliable subgenres is the body horror of transformation: that fear that you could go to bed as one thing and wake up as something else completely, that your body isn’t yours to trust, or that your identity can be hijacked.
Werewolves, or The Thing. David Cronenberg’s whole back catalogue. It’s one of the horror genre’s oldest fears because it’s one of humanity’s oldest fears.
Rocky Horror runs this exact engine but set to “fabulous” instead of “gory.” Brad and Janet don’t leave the castle as the same people who arrived. They’re transformed completely by forces they can’t control, in a process they didn’t consent to and can’t reverse.
We’re told Columbia was a normal girl until Frank-N-Furter got ahold of her. Rocky himself is a transformation made flesh: he’s created from parts, brought to life, subjected to Dr. Frank’s will, and can’t control what happens to his own body. That’s Frankenstein anxiety in pure form, just wearing gold hot pants.
Then we have the floor show at the climax, where literally everyone is stripped down and re-costumed into identical corsets and fishnets against their will, a whole army of the transformed, marching in lockstep as Dr. Frank-N-Furter conducts them like Dr. Moreau looking over his island. It’s seriously eerie if you sit with it: a room of people who no longer look like themselves, moving in unison and losing a fundamental piece of who they were before they walked through that door. Horror has been telling that story since Jekyll and Hyde. Rocky Horror just adds some glitter.
2. The Floor Show is a Slasher Movie’s Final Act.
Let’s discuss the ending, because people seem to remember The Rocky Horror Picture Show as one long, campy party and forget the last twenty minutes of the movie are absolutely brutal by structural standards.
Frank turns Rocky into stone with a Medusa Transducer. Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott all get the same. Poor, doomed Eddie gets murdered with an icepick and served for dinner in a moment so cheerfully macabre it would make Leatherface nod in respect. Then in the last act, Riff Raff and Magenta, who have been burning with resentment and menace the whole movie, stage a full-on coup, shooting Frank, Rocky, and Columbia dead with lasers before the castle itself takes off into space. Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott crawl through the wreckage, traumatized and half-dressed, changed forever.
That’s quite a body count, and a violent overthrow. It’s the third act of a slasher or home-invasion horror movie: the monster is destroyed, the survivors crawl into the dawn in shock, and nothing will ever be the same again. The fact it’s scored with a funky glam-rock number instead of a string screech doesn’t change the reality of what’s happening.
Take the music away, shoot the ending in grainy 16mm, and you’ve got a really unsettling final act: three deaths, an execution, a home destroyed, and the survivors fleeing into the night. Rocky Horror gets it both ways and that’s part of its genius. You laugh and clap along to a firing squad because it knows on some level just what game it’s playing.
1. Rocky Horror’s Whole Cultural Afterlife Mirrors the Best Horror Traditions.
The Number One reason for why The Rocky Horror Picture Show deserves recognition as a horror movie classic isn’t about what happens on the screen, but what happens in front of it. I think it’s the most ‘horror’ thing about the entire enterprise.
Horror has always been a communal genre. There are midnight screenings, campfire stories, drive-ins full of teenagers screaming together…
Horror doesn’t want to scare you alone in a dark room. Historically, it wants you scared together in a crowd, participating.
Rocky Horror took that impulse and built a whole subculture from it, and you could argue it did it more successfully than any other horror movie in history. Members of the audience dress as Frank, Magenta, and Columbia. There are call-and-response lines shouted at the screen, props thrown at specific moments (toast, toilet paper, rice) in a ritual passed down and refined for nearly fifty years. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is more than just a “movie people like.” This has become a ritual, one performed at midnight and in costume, by a devoted community. It’s the same structural DNA that built Halloween traditions, haunted house attractions, and every horror convention where people queue up to be frightened for fun.
And not incidentally, Rocky Horror viewings have also been a huge decades-long haven for queer audiences and misfits of every stripe. A place where a “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania” was a permission slip instead of a punchline. Difference was celebrated at full volume instead of being hidden.
At its best, horror has always made room for the outsider; the monster is usually the most sympathetic figure, someone punished for existing outside the norm. Rocky Horror took that theme and made it the whole party, and audiences who’d never felt safe anywhere else found a home in that castle. And that, I think, is horror’s legacy distilled.
And Tim Curry is at the center of that afterlife. Every person who’s ever pulled on a corset for a midnight screening (oh yes, me very much included) owes him a debt, whether they know it or not. He drew up the blueprint and built it so well that people are still following it, lovingly and faithfully, half a century later. That’s maybe the highest compliment a horror icon can achieve.
So, rest in peace, you Sweet Transvestite.
Tim Curry gave horror two of its MOST enduring faces: a clown who made a whole generation afraid of storm drains, and a mad scientist in fishnets who made a whole generation afraid of (and thrilled by) the idea that transformation might just be the most seductive monster of them all.
Rocky Horror usually doesn’t get filed alongside Dracula or Frankenstein but it should. It’s got the castle, it’s got the storm. It’s got a mad scientist, a monster, a body count, a transformation, and a ritual. It also has the best chorus number ever written about doing a pelvic thrust.
Somewhere tonight, a midnight crowd is going to throw rice at a screen, yell “Buy an umbrella, you cheap b!%”&*d!” at Brad Majors, and do the Time Warp one more time. It’ll be exactly the sort of loud, loving, and ever-so-slightly unhinged tribute Mr. Curry earned. Let’s also give the man his due as a genuine horror icon while we’re doing it. He wore the fishnets and built the monster. He earned the crown.
Antici……..pation was never the right word. It’s just love.
*This article was written by Adam Page. You can read more about him in his author bio below*
Where to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
If you’re unable to catch a theatrical showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (everyone, especially every horror fan, should do so at least ONCE in their lifetime!) or if you’d simply prefer to throw rice at your TV or phone at home, you can find where it’s currently streaming using HorrorFam.com’s JustWatch affiliate buttons below:
Rocky Horror Picture Show | Rated R | Runtime 1h 40m | Released September 26, 1975
Images for this post were purchased on CineMaterial (posters) and MovieStillsDB (stills). The HorrorFam.com Horror Hottie award is a joint effort between SandpaperDaisy (HorrorFam.com’s Zander) and Lauren Spear (the ribbon and lettering). The Rocky Horror props checklist is a stock photo of toilet paper from Pixabay that Lauren wrote on.
