Within just a few years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show grew from an oddball musical to a celebrated cinematic experience of midnight features and outrageous audience participation. This study tells the extraordinary story of the film from initial reception to eventual cult status. Uncovering the film's non-conformist sexual politics and glam-rock attitude, this volume explores its emphasis on the theatrical body (tattooed, cross-gendered, flamboyant), and its defiant queering of cinema history.
The first scholarly collection devoted to The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
dissecting the film from diverse perspectives including gender and queer
studies, disability studies, cultural studies, genre studies, and film
studies.
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, this work presents a new materialist analysis of the genre, emphasizing its long-standing focus on "ominous matter" and "thing power" since the eighteenth century. Through chapters exploring gothic bodies, spaces, books, and objects, it argues that the Gothic delves into the dynamics that arise when objects exhibit mysterious animacy or potency, and when humans are reduced to mere components among more powerful entities. By examining how the Gothic consistently decenters the human experience, the author reveals the entanglement of human beings within networks of both human and nonhuman forces largely beyond their control. This analysis repositions the Gothic as a haunting counterpart to contemporary critical and cultural theory, surfacing in discussions about human-object interactions and environmental relationships. The Gothic serves as a dark reflection of the present "nonhuman turn," articulating a twenty-first-century sense of anxiety regarding humanity's fate, characterized by themes of spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. By replacing hope with horror, the Gothic emerges as a philosophical meditation on achieving a more harmonious existence with the surrounding world.
