By Rachel Meghan
When Tim Curry died on August 25, I felt grief as though I had lost an old friend.
I’m not one to usually get caught up with celebrity deaths, but Tim was different. I had always had a deep connection to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as someone who grew up with the film and joined a shadowcast in my twenties, and Tim felt like the mother of it all in many ways. His charisma and decadence in playing Frank-N-Furter fundamentally changed who I am as a person.
Shortly before his death, my husband, who is also an ex-shadowcaster, and I watched Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, a new documentary on the cult phenomenon. It premiered at SXSW in March 2025 and was released on September 26, 2025. It runs 90 minutes, and you can stream it on Prime Video and Apple TV. There have been many documentaries on the film in the past, but this one was different. Linus O’Brien, the director, interviewed nearly everyone involved who is still living, including Tim Curry, who sat down to talk about the role he will forever be tied to.
Let me give you some personal backstory: I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 12 years old. It was a movie I became completely obsessed with, one that moved me on its own, without the help of the audience participation and midnight screenings. When I was 22, I joined a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast, feeling like I owed it to myself to be a part of the culture, even though I wasn’t a big fan of people shouting over my favorite movie.
Regardless, it changed my life. Not only did I meet my husband while in the cast, but I also had an awakening of my own gender expression. Playing roles like Frank-N-Furter and Columbia gave me a hall pass to try being someone outside of the gender binary, someone who wasn’t quite entirely a woman, but a not-so-secret third thing. I consider myself 60% femme at this point, with that last 40% being whatever Tim Curry was in this film.
I honestly didn’t know many trans or nonbinary people prior to being a part of Rocky Horror. In a way, it provided me with a new vocabulary to describe myself. While my feelings on the piece and the shadowcast community are different today, I have it to thank for helping me discover who I am. I left the shadowcast community in 2020, during the height of COVID, and didn’t touch anything Rocky Horror–related for years. That is, until my husband and I sat down to watch Strange Journey.
Directed by Linus O’Brien, son of Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien, the documentary details the genesis of the piece, starting with the original production of The Rocky Horror Show at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in London in 1973. The show was a massive success, selling out the 63-seat theatre so many times that it eventually had to move to a bigger space.
One thing about my personal Rocky Horror love: I actually prefer the stage show. I find it to be better paced, and it has a wealth of directorial possibilities in and of itself that I am always eager to see with every production I go to. I’ve seen it all over America, as well as in the UK and Sweden, and it always blows me away.
So I appreciated how long this documentary stayed in the realm of the original stage production, from the London show to the Los Angeles production at the Roxy Theatre in 1974 to the failed original Broadway production in 1975, months before the movie came out and flopped as well.
I think it’s important to show this evolution in a Rocky Horror documentary. A lot of people only know the movie, and know it for its audience participation. But there is so much rich history in the musical before the midnight screenings, the dressing up, the throwing rice, the yelling obscenities at the screen. Underneath all of that, it was a powerful piece of queer joy for its time, and while it is of course a bit dated now (as most queer media of that time is), it’s still a hallmark of queer culture that endures, still bringing in audiences and still causing people to have sexual awakenings.
Thanks to the access the creator’s son had, Strange Journey features interviews with nearly everyone involved in Rocky Horror who was still living at the time of filming. That includes Tim Curry, whose death this summer was felt by an entire community of fans. Frank-N-Furter was ultimately his creation: he took O’Brien’s text and made the bold “sweet transvestite” an icon, sending him into the cultural zeitgeist as perhaps the most famous cross-dressing character of all time. He dripped with pure, unadulterated sexuality, and no matter your orientation, you could easily find yourself attracted to Frank-N-Furter.
Other interviewees include Nell Campbell, Patricia Quinn, Susan Sarandon, and Richard O’Brien himself, being interviewed by his son. Seeing so much of the cast together again was healing, in a way, for someone who grew up watching this movie again and again like I did.
The documentary covers not just the early success of the Rocky Horror stage show but also the catastrophic flop that The Rocky Horror Picture Show initially was. When the film flopped, O’Brien and Curry assumed that was it for Rocky Horror, and that it was time to move on. That is, before Fox executives began to sell the film as a midnight movie, like Night of the Living Dead and Pink Flamingos.
This is where the film found its footing. People started to show up again and again, dressing up as the characters and eventually acting out the film in front of the screen, something we call a “shadowcast” today.
It even jumps to modern-day shadowcasts, one of which I was a part of many years ago, which honestly gave me a bit of whiplash. The shadowcasts of today are a lot more streamlined and operate like rogue theatre groups, rather than just a ragtag group of fans having a good time. Still, the moments they show of modern shadowcasts are accurate to what I experienced when I started in 2016. It was a nice reminder of who I was in my youth, and now that I’m a 32-year-old mother, I’m able to look back on that time of my life as one where I was completely uninhibited and totally free.
What really stuck with me about this documentary was Richard O’Brien’s final words on the success of Rocky Horror that continues today. Because yes, the film is still running in theatres, and shadowcasts continue to perform it every weekend across the country. The end of the film shows O’Brien reflecting on this monolith, saying that Rocky Horror doesn’t belong to him anymore. It belongs to the fans.
O’Brien’s reaction to being asked what he thinks of Rocky Horror today shows a certain reticence. He wrote a piece of theatre that was a success on its own, a well-written, chaotic masterpiece. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023 that the shouting at the stage show “became a bit rude, actually,” though he allowed that in the movie “it makes no difference because it’s the same every night.” In a 2019 interview with StageTalk Magazine, he said, “I always worry that maybe the fans might steal the evening.” Still, he told The Big Takeover in 2025 that the show has become “a safe place for people to know that they belong to the rainbow community,” and “a place of refuge.”
Whatever O’Brien and I might think, and however precious the piece is to us on its own, without the fan culture to answer to, we are outnumbered. If that’s what it takes to keep such a beautiful piece of queer theatre alive, then so be it. After all, the moral of the story is “don’t dream it, be it,” and who am I to argue? The fans own Rocky Horror, and have for a very long time. And you know what? They can have it.
Rachel Meghan is a writer and mother in Providence, Rhode Island, who reviews for Rue Morgue and Books by Page, is an associate editor at The Hot Mess Press, and writes a Substack of funny little observational essays.