Building a Creature: A Joyous Raid.
The Rocky Horror Show first came to life in 1973, rising from London’s experimental theatre scene—a period marked by street theatre, political dramas, and confrontational, rule-breaking performances. Creator Richard O’Brien had performed in the London casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, absorbing the countercultural energy of these rock musicals, when he met director Jim Sharman, who helped him develop the show. Rocky Horror premiered at The Royal Court Theatre, which was known for edgy new work and introducing “bad boy” playwrights like John Osborne and Joe Orton. It quickly became a sensation and transferred for a short time to an old movie theatre that was scheduled for demolition, and then to the Kings Road Theatre, where it ran for almost 3000 performances.
Because the show was created entirely by British artists, Rocky Horror brings an outsider’s eye to look at American popular culture (and its messages and morals), with irony and affection. Speaking with On: Yorkshire Magazine, O’Brien revealed his inspirations: “I have a very low-brow approach to life…I like populist kinds of themes – comics and rock’n’roll and B movies,” he explains. “The plot and dialogue for The Rocky Horror Show are raids on populist things: from advertising, from comics, from B movies, from sci-fi. It’s a complete and utter raid upon all those elements; a joyous raid.” The show also draws generously from glam rock and pop art to shape its characters, music, and visual language. More than the sum of its parts, The Rocky Horror Show reverberates with themes of rebellion, desire, and self-invention that have made it meaningful to audiences for over 50 years.
Late Night Double-Feature Picture Show.
Originally titled It Came from Denton High (a reference to the 1953 science-fiction film It Came from Outer Space, the show takes inspiration from science fiction and horror movies from the 1930s through the early 1960s. In Flood magazine, O’Brien acknowledged “The story begins for me…in my arrested development. I was an eternal teenager, forever a 1950s adolescent, which is something that I carried with me throughout the 1960s and beyond.” O’Brien’s opening song “Science Fiction Double Feature” expresses nostalgia for an earlier era of film. Double features (also called “double bills”) allowed audiences to see two movies back-to-back with one ticket. They became popular during the Great Depression and continued through the mid-1970s. The show parodies many tropes from “B-movies”—Hollywood films that were made quickly, on lower budgets. Short and sensational, B-movies in the ‘50s were often targeted to a growing teenage market who aspired for independence and a break from the moral prescriptions of their parents’ generation. Many of the movies referenced in the song, such as Tarantula (1955) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) reflected Cold War anxieties about nuclear power, unchecked science, and ideological invasion—typically represented as extraterrestrial aliens.
A reference to 1932’s Doctor X drops a clue to some of the tropes in store for the audience: a mysterious scientist, laboratory experiments, a doctor in a wheelchair, a maid and butler in tails, and a grandfather clock striking midnight. The opening song also references The Invisible Man (1933), directed by James Whale, a director who was openly gay in Hollywood. Whale also directed Frankenstein (1931), a clear inspiration for Rocky Horror, whose scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter creates, animates, and ultimately loses control of his creature. In these films, as well as The Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale established many horror tropes, including monster protagonists and ominous domestic spaces. In view of Whale’s queer identity, coded references to homosexuality can be read into his films, including a legible alignment between queerness and the monstrous “Other.”
Beyond raiding plots, characters, and sci-fi horror tropes, Rocky Horror investigates a bygone era when cinema defined what was considered normal and accepted social behavior. As protagonists, Brad and Janet stand for conservative, heteronormative values, while Frank-n-Furter, an alien from the planet Transsexual, challenges their notions of morality and sexuality. Scott Miller, founder of New Line Theatre, offers this understanding of the show’s thematic conflict: “O’Brien is talking about the very center of the culture of the ‘50s: the nexus of sex, drive-ins, and rock and roll… ‘Science Fiction Double Feature’ is O’Brien’s prologue, his statement of purpose. This will be a story about the (false) moral perfection of the 1950s as it slams up against the Sexual Revolution…”
Glam Rock and Pop Art.
While Rocky Horror was time-warping backwards for cinematic inspirations, it was also thrusting forward in its embrace of 1970s glam rock, a largely British phenomenon that was then dominating the UK charts. (Its American counterpart was called “glitter rock.”) Glam and glitter both brought a queer voice to popular music, as O’Brien recalls: “1972–73 was a moment of change. Glam rock and overt sexuality was around, gay people were coming out and there was a ‘buzz’ in the air.” Glam gave O’Brien both inspiration and liberation. “Glam suited me down to the ground. It allowed me to be more feminine in my manner of dress. You could wear a dress in the streets, suddenly, because laws against homosexuality had been repealed.”
Glam rejected rock’s traditional emphasis on sincerity and authenticity and uplifted artifice, irony, and theatrical excess. The rock star persona was recognized as a performance. Artists such as David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Freddie Mercury, and the band T-Rex distinguished themselves from the pensive singer-songwriters of the early ‘70s by placing image, costume, and theatricality on equal footing with music. Rocky Horror was originally performed on a thrust stage rather than behind a proscenium arch, embracing the energy of a rock concert, allowing Tim Curry to work the crowd directly, shatter the fourth wall, and embody the domineering and seductive theatricality of Frank-N-Furter.
Notably, Bowie’s appearances as Ziggy Stardust (1972-1973) and Curry’s performance as Frank-N-Furter emerged almost simultaneously, each combining music, makeup, and narrative to create characters that wielded a pansexual charisma and thrived in glam’s mix of theatre and spectacle. The parallels are not all coincidental: both Curry and Bowie were mentored and influenced by choreographer, dancer, and mime Lindsay Kemp (1938-2018), who helped both performers find the theatricality, movement, and stylization that supported their iconic creations.
Glam’s visual sensibility also overlaps with American pop art, particularly the social world of Andy Warhol’s Factory. The space functioned as both studio and social hub, cultivating a community of “Superstars” who redefined fame as self-invention rather than achievement. Pop artists like Warhol embraced advertising, celebrity, pulp fiction, and mass production, using irony and repetition to critique postwar media culture. From a British perspective, Pop was a uniquely American form. As O’Brien explains, “People used to say that we put Pop Art on stage with Rocky Horror, and they’re likely correct as our show was ripe with American themes and motifs, chock full of nods to adverts on the backs of magazines and pulp fiction and all that.” He adds, “I get so much credit for coming up with the line ‘Don’t dream it, be it,’ but that was an ad line for Frederick’s of Hollywood… I wasn’t so much a writer as I was an archivist.”
Now Playing at Studio 54.
The upcoming revival of The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54 adds another resonant layer to the work’s cultural history. From April 1977 to February 1980, Studio 54 was a legendary nightclub, transforming a former opera house and television studio into a space of spectacle and release. Founders Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell combined theatrical architecture with cutting-edge lighting and sound to create an environment that blurred performance and participation. In a 2020 exhibition about the club, The Brooklyn Museum explained, “Studio 54 was a space of liberation, where people from diverse sexual, sociopolitical, and financial strata could find refuge and commonality, whether by taking a star turn on the dance floor or by voyeuristically observing the scene.”
Director Sam Pinkleton has embraced this legacy in shaping the current revival. “We definitely want to push the experience of being in Studio 54, to feeling like you’re going to a trashy midnight movie as opposed to going to an important Broadway show. We are objectively doing this at the greatest site of late-night misbehavior, so the ghosts are really good for this show, and it’s something that we want to embrace. We have this opportunity to not transform the space in an immersive way, but actually to dress Studio 54 up in drag, as itself,” Pinkleton shared with Roundabout staff in an initial presentation of his approach to the show.
The cultural influences that shaped Rocky Horror give audiences many entry points, which may help us understand its enduring popularity. By evoking the imagination and anxieties of mid-century cinema, the transgressive theatricality of glam, and the irony of Pop art, O’Brien created a classic show that embodies America’s pop-cultural myths through both tribute and camp. As a total experience, The Rocky Horror Show invites audiences to cast off inherited norms and restrictions and dares us not just to dream of liberation, but to be it.