Trans-Frankenstein
(originally posted on IMDb 25 August 2018)

There's no substitute for attending a theatrical screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," it's true, with the the rowdy audience participation that accompanies midnight showings of the campy rock-musical cult classic. I've done it, and it's a lot more fun than viewing it on home video. Yet, I suspect some write off this film for that reason as unworthy of serious appreciation. And some of the criticism is fair; for instance, its staginess doesn't fully transcend its theatrical origins, it's pastiche, and it's difficult to appraise it as a mechanically-reproduced film and not only as an event. I returned to this film in my search to see a bunch of Frankenstein movies after again reading Mary Shelley's novel--something I also recently did with Dracula--, and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" slyly adapts one or two major themes from the Frankenstein and other monster stories, which play into the film's transgressive appeal, LGBT or otherwise.

Stage and screen adaptations tend to lack the authoritative voice of a narrator. There's a narrator in this film, but as camp, he's humorously superfluous in the traditional role. This opens different paths of spectator identification, which have led to the monsters of such Gothic horror narratives as Dracula and Frankenstein becoming the sympathetic characters. Unlike Bram Stoker's story, this was already partly the case in Shelley's novel because Frankenstein's creature was one of the narrators, although it was still mostly, as the main protagonist, Dr. Frankenstein's narrative. In many of the classic horror movies, the books' storytellers, whether Victor Frankenstein and Mary Harker or the even more forgotten Robert Walton and Gabriel Utterson, take a back seat to or are entirely written out in favor of a focus on the monsters. More so than before, the monsters emerge as sympathetic outsiders--persecuted and misunderstood as the "other," as invaders, as ugly, as aliens. Even if this doesn't excuse or even explain their killings, it makes them entirely more interesting than the normal narrators and protagonists, the would-be Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Hapschatts of the world, who themselves only transform into interest through their interactions with the monsters.

"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" makes its mad scientist, Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by the fabulous Tim Curry), a monster from the start--a "freak of nature" and literally from another world--supported by a host of other Transsexual characters and spectators. His final creation, on the other hand, is the kind of Aryan ideal that would've pleased Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, although Frank-N-Furter still responds to an earlier work of his with the traditional violent disgust. The normals here are represented by the engaged couple of Brad and Janet, who enter Frank-N-Furter's party castle in the fashion of an old-dark-house horror film with their car breaking down.

Essentially, then, transsexuality, transvestism and bisexuality (as well as the Universal hunchback trope and the incestuous siblings) are analogous to Shelley and Frankenstein's shunned creature. The film's sexuality, however, including Frank-N-Furter invading the bedrooms of both Janet and Brad and turning them into fellow corset-and-garter wearing sexual beings, is more in line with Stoker's "Dracula," and, after all, Frank-N-Furter is a self-described "Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania," the last place also being the namesake of Dracula's home, for which he also left to invade another land and convert foreigners to his ways. In the suave Count tradition of Bela Lugosi's version, Dracula could also be a welcoming, if strange, host at first.

As for adapting the play to film, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is less creative. The rock soundtrack lends itself to some quick editing and a few odd camera angles, but even the set designs and settings reinforce that this once lived on stage. The climactic scene, although it features the old RKO Hollywood studio logo in the background, is even set on stage. Although, the theatricality, the fourth-wall breaking and the inclusion of Transsexual participants and spectators does invite the mirrored behavior of participants and spectators in the audience. Besides musical theatre, the film also re-animates the traditional art of painting, as in its depictions of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" and, appropriately, Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam." The result is rather stagy and full of episodic musical set pieces, as excellent as they are, but that belies the film's transgressive adaptation of familiar monster narratives--even though it's only as an event shared with dedicated followers when It's Alive.

(Included on my list of 50--and counting--Frankenstein films.)