Misc
A Preparatory Guide for a Rocky Horror Midnight Showing
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) when I was twelve years old. I hated it. I thought it was lewd and pointless. True, the musical is lewd, but I now see immense value in it. I fell in love with the movie about a year later, but I don’t remember what changed my mind. For my fourteenth birthday, I went into Chelsea, New York, to see my first shadow cast. I was far too young to fully understand, appreciate, and participate, but it remains one of my fondest memories. Through the years, I’ve held casual parties in my home where my friends and I do our own shadow casts, I’ve joined the shadow cast at my college (and was supposed to play Frank one year, until the production was canceled), I’ve gone to a dozen midnight showings, I’ve seen a stage production, and I’ve taken countless people’s virginity. Let’s just say this film is important to me.
The musical was monumental for the queer community when it debuted on stage in a tiny, 63-seat theater in London in 1973. At last, an overtly gay, bisexual story with unconventional gender expression that wasn’t swept under the rug! It then played in various theaters in London until closing in 1980. Although the movie was not too well-received when it was first released, it has, of course, amassed an enormous cult following since then. On April 2, 1976, less than a year after the film’s US release, it was first screened at midnight in New York, spawning the audience participation tradition.
Rocky Horror is still running strong, both in shadow casts at midnight screenings and in live stage productions. Even the COVID pandemic couldn’t tame this wild thing: a theater in Portland, Oregon, continued showing it to an empty house for 54 weeks of closure, and a huge team of celebrities joined forces to support the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s election efforts on Halloween 2020 with a live-streamed reading. Now that shadow casts are back, the hordes of Regular Frankie Fans can do the Time Warp together once more.
But what can you expect from a midnight showing with a shadow cast? To avoid giving away too much, I’ll go over the basic goings-on and prepare you for a night you will remember for a very long time.
Before you go to the movie theater, you should check with them about their prop policy. Many shadow casts will sell prop bags with approved items, but people can also bring their own. The most common props are toilet paper, toast, water guns, newspaper, and rice. Not every theater is okay with patrons throwing rice and such because it’s annoying to clean up, so you shouldn’t just go in with everything and expect to use all of it.
Dressing up as characters from the movie used to be a huge event, but I’ve noticed a significant decrease in that over the years, so don’t feel pressured to go in costume. A lot of casts will have events that encourage certain dress, like prom night or lingerie night.
Every show I’ve been to has had some sort of virgin initiation though, the specific ritual changes from cast to cast. You’ll have to see for yourself what your local cast does! You may be asking, What is a virgin? Besides a social construct that has no basis in fact, a Rocky Horror virgin is someone who has never been to a live show before. You may have seen the movie beforehand, but that experience is nothing like a midnight showing. It should be noted that the initiation is just for fun, and it is totally optional. Consent is key.
Once the movie starts, be prepared for a lot of yelling. There are tons of callbacks, or lines that the audience will shout at the screen and at each other. This is probably the biggest appeal of a live show. It’s a wild community effort to engage with the movie, the shadow players, and your fellow audience members. When watching at home, callbacks are fun, but it’s so much better in the theater. Don’t expect to hear much of the actual movie or the individual lines, though. It’s chaos. (As a side note, I was known as the queen of callbacks in my college cast because I knew so many for every scene.)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cult and cultural phenomenon for good reason. Even if you haven’t seen the movie before going to a midnight showing, which is actually what I recommend for the full experience, you’re in for a wild time. It’s raucous, inappropriate, potentially offensive, and the best night out I can imagine.
Get ready to take the substance, party at Pearline’s, and invite in Orlok, because FANGORIA has released their list of nominees for the 2025 Chainsaw Awards. Alongside the Dead Meat Horror Awards, the Chainsaw Awards are the most anticipated and prestigious Horror Film and TV accolades out there. The most exciting part is that, unlike most popular awards shows, the Chainsaw Awards will continue to allow fans to help choose the winners.
According to FANGORIA, the competition will continue its tradition of having films from the second half of 2024, and this first half of 2025. FANGORIA Editor-in-Chief Nobile Jr. said in their nomination release, that this should cause voting to be “vicious and voluminous.” He describes the award show as, “Like the Grammy’s, but gorier.” It should be a bloodbath of a competition, because this year’s nominees are absolutely killer.
The Substance and Sinners, two of the most talked about films of the past year, seem to sweep the nominations. Both blockbusters land in the categories for Best Screenplay, Director, and Best Wide Release. Nosferatu and Longlegs, both 2024 releases, are also in almost every category they qualify for, and the recently released Bring Her Back made a handful of nominations. The Monkey, Heart Eyes, and Presence did not make this year’s list of nominations.
Horror fans can cast their votes for FANGORIA’S Chainsaw Awards HERE.
SOURCE: Our friends over at FANGORIA
The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is a peculiar beast. Think about it. First of all, it never really got started. I consider the foundation of a horror franchise to be the movies that got released at a relatively steady clip (generally one or two years apart) before the series went on hiatus, then took a sharp turn into legacy sequels, direct-to-video sequels, reboots, and the like. For Friday the 13th, that foundation is eight movies. A Nightmare on Elm Street had five. Scream and Child’s Play were founded on solid trilogies. The Conjuring Universe is at eight and counting (and that’s if you skip Curse of La Llorona, which I am loath to do). And what did I Know What You Did Last Summer get? A measly two.
Not only did it fail to get started, it also kind of failed to get going. After the original two movies (the first of which is based on a 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan), which were directly in continuity with one another, it had a direct-to-video sequel eight years later and a short-lived television reboot 15 years after that. And yet, like any good horror villain, it refuses to die. With a 2025 legacy sequel coming our way, I thought it was high time to take a look at this misbegotten but indefatigable multimedia series and see just what we can make of it, by ranking its efforts from worst to best.
#4 I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021)
It makes sense that the world was not kind to this one-season Prime Video reboot. When the last entry in a franchise that anyone remotely cared about was more than 20 years earlier, and then you pull a big swing like this, more or less completely removing everything about the characters and premise that was compelling, it’s not going to go well. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that this is an ugly and incompetently-made series, with an outright disdain for the 180-degree line that makes the mere act of watching it feel like aesthetic water torture if you care about film craft even a little bit.
Really, the only thing that it had going for it was the fact that it was set and shot in Hawai’i. In addition to giving it a really grounded sense of place, it also evoked the specificity of the fact that the original movie was set in North Carolina.
#3 I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)
I honestly admire the extravagantly goofy choice to have original killer Ben Willis (Muse Watson in the original movies, Don Shanks in this one) return as a ghost who has become some sort of cross-country specter of previous-summer-themed vengeance. However, this direct-to-video sequel that is otherwise unrelated to anything else in the franchise is bland as all get out and boasts the weakest acting of the franchise. This is somewhat forgivable, given the fact that the original director was fired and the new director had to scramble to get everything together in just two weeks. And that original director was Joe Chappelle, who might have the actual worst filmography of any horror director (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Phantoms, parts of Hellraiser: Bloodline), so we probably dodged a bullet. This could have been even lower!
#2 I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is immensely, deliriously, outrageously stupid. Mileage will vary on this movie, but if you read my paean to the stupidity of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer from two years ago, you know my mileage is fully “Rascal Flatts in a Prius.” I’m getting that hybrid car highway mileage, baby, and I’m riding it all night long.
That said, it’s obviously not the best entry in the series. As charismatic as Brandy is, the new characters around Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) don’t hold a candle to the duo’s original friends in terms of complexity or entertainment value. And the choice (probably made by necessity) to keep the two surviving characters apart for basically the entire span of the story results in the movie completely deflating every time it has to cut back to whatever boring shit Ray is up to.
#1 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
I know, I know, it’s boring when the obvious choice is up top. But sometimes the original is simply the best, and you just have to deal with it. As I’ve already mentioned, the specificity of its setting in a North Carolina fishing town is unique and interesting for a slick, post-Scream slasher. And while the script doesn’t boast the Kevin Williamson-esque touches of his other work from the 1990s (it was written before Scream, and it shows), it’s a solid meat-and-potatoes slasher movie with a fun killer M.O. (hook-wielding murderers are so popular in urban legends for a reason) and a group of friends that includes Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar at the heights of their powers.
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