So I’m going to my very first Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing on the 12th, and I’m very excited. I’ve seen the movie in fragments here and there, and can’t wait to see the thing in full.
Is there anything I need to know? The flier doesn’t say “audience participation”–can I assume that’s a part of any midnight showing, regardless? Or should I be prepared to watch the movie like any other movie? Should I scrounge up a costume, or can I go in street clothes?
Audience participation is a necessary part of any screening of RHPS.
Street clothes are fine unless you plan on standing up and acting out the film in the front of the theater with the rest of the “cast”.
You might be able to take the “Rocky Horror Picture Show Participation Album” out at your local library. Have a sense of humor when they ask you to volunteer the information that you are indeed a virgin.
It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. If you’re going with people who aren’t RHPS virgins, ask them for advice on participation. Clothing: wear whatever you want. Be prepared to be initiated, each group is different. I had to moan enticingly in front of a packed house but some people have to do much worse, heh heh! Have fun no matter what happens! Lucky you…
Wow, thanks for all the replies! All three of us going are RHPS virgins, and have no idea what to expect. I’m starting to get a little nervous, but I’m also pretty excited. Thanks again for the help so far!
At the Harvard Square Cinema, virgins had to ritually march to the front of the theatre where they stood in a line, we all yelled ‘FUCK YOU, VIRGINS!!’ and the deflowered ones returned meekly to their seats. That was it.
On one occasion, I watched an extremely drunk woman vomit all over her date’s lap.
On another occasion, some loony shot off a bottle rocket in the theatre. It zizzed overhead, arced gracefully, and went straight down into some guy’s Afro.
Where it exploded. In the bright, flashbulb-like burst, I saw a sort of Afro-Divot pop neatly out of his head. It was… impressive.
So was he. When the guy got up, he must have been six and a half feet tall, muscles on his muscles, and he had a smoking hole in the side of his hair, and he was PISSED. He stormed through the theater, shouting, cursing, and interrogating random people. “Did YOU shoot off that firecracker, motherfucker? If you did, I’m gonna KILL yo’ ass!”
For some reason, no one wanted to own up to it, and within ten minutes or so, security came and collected him. Certainly livened up the movie. Then again, Rocky Horror is one of those flicks that doesn’t really need enlivening. In fact, several people who’d been in the theater didn’t even notice the explosion or the raving angry maniac afterwards… it was that lively.
Kind of made me glad I wasn’t sitting in an aisle seat, though…
Sigh. I remember my first time. Back around Halloween '77 or '78. We had NO CLUE what we were going to. It was just the second part of a double feature we wanted to see (the first part was “Phantom of the Paradise”). No warning, no costumes, no nuthin. Then the lights went down, the audience began screaming “lips!” and the madness began.
I watched the RHPS DVD with some friends just last Saturday.
“Rose tints my world and keeps me safe from the trouble and pain”
Buckle, just give yourself over to absolute pleasure. Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh. Erotic nightmares, beyond any measure, and sensual daydreams to treasure forever. Can’t you just see it, oh, oh, ho…
BuckleberryFerry,
Unless things have changed drastically since I last experienced it (>20 years ago :eek: [ul]
[li]Newspaper[/li][li]Squirt bottle of water[/li][li]toast[/li][li]flashlight[/li][li]rice[/li][/ul] Also remember the phrase “Where’s your fucking neck?” and be prepared to shout it out at the propitious moment. It’s a lot of fun.
The first time I saw it (~30 years ago) the looniness hadn’t started it yet; it was just a mid-'70s crowd of mostly stoners who giggled their way through it.
The next time I saw it was as a midnight movie only about a year later, and the madness had begun. It wasn’t highly developed yet, but for the time a movie theater full of lingerie clad women and an audience cued to, en masse, harmonize certain dialogue was different.
The last time I went was in 1999, specifically to meet our once and rare now Cessandra, and she was part of an organized troupe. They even had a manager.
That was the first time I’d ever gone to meet someone I knew only from the Internet, and I remember thinking that all I really knew was that she said she was 18, and a blonde who’d be dressed in lingerie. There couldn’t have been a better meeting ground than RHPS.
Do NOT get the audience participation album. Just DON’T. I can tell you, as an old veteran player, that nothing is more boring than listening to an entire audience impersonate the Sal Piro Lesbian Choir: drone"no, he’s not, she’s got syph…"*/drone*
Each theater is bound to have its own “in-joke” participation, and nothing will mark you as a dork quite so quickly as an endless recitation of the “official” participation (a participation that was NEVER official anyway, no matter what they tell you in New York.)
Go in casual clothes, be open to the idea that they’re going to tease you, and enjoy yourself.
My college dorm was a couple of blocks from the 8th Street Playhouse in NY, so we went a LOT. The best, though, had to be the night we devirginized my friend Brian, the mild-mannered, hyperintellectual pianist/computer programmer from U. of I. Oh boy, did he not know what hit him.
We got there straight from picking him up at the airport, and somehow I managed to slip a letter into Uncle Sal’s (the MC, for the uninitiated) hat. It was the last one picked that evening before the show, which meant all the tamer devirginizing rituals had already been used up. So Uncle Sal sent over Frankenfurter, who ripped my friend’s shirt halfway off and proceeded to practically give him a hickey in front of a sold-out theater full of people. I think that was when poor Birian realized this wasn’t going to be a nice, quiet weekend in NY with maybe a couple of museum visits with his old high school buddy…
(Did I mention it was the same weekend as the Greenwich Village Halloween parade? Bit of a culture shock after Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.)
So much depends on the local rituals where you go to see it, but yeah, be prepared for anything.
