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"I wanna go
Uh uh oh o-oh
To the late night
Double feature picture show."
Midnight is still more than an hour away. Slowly, they materialize from the darkness, bizarrely costumed and ready for the midnight ritual that will unite them and satiate their hunger for another week. They wear threadbare tuxedos and bloodstained shirts, black satin capes trimmed in white fur, black maids' uniforms, and yellow-glitter top hats. Occasionally, someone will roar up on a heavy, squat, black motorcyle. Heading the line, these hardcore faithful will fill the front rows of another weekend showing of the midnightcircuit's longest-running cult hit.
By show time, the line is swelled by "neophytes" and "virgins"-those who' ve seen the film only once or twice, or (can such things be?) not at all. No one seems to care that the wait is a long one. Carboncopy Columbias and Frank N. Furters dance the "Time Warp" and sing "Sweet Transvestite."
The theater's regular evening performance is finally over and the "mundanes" file out-ordinary middle-class moviegoers who are stunned into silence at the sight of the waiting cultists. When the doors open, there's a mad dash for the best seats. Those in costume generally sit front and center-where the action is. The lights dim amid cheering and whistling, then the crowd falls silent in anticipation. The 20th Century-Fox logo appears and fades out.
"Let there be lips!" scream a hundred voices. In response, a pair of giant rubyred lips fill the screen to mouth the words to "Science Fiction Double Feature." And that's just what the evening will provide: one performance on screen, and another -just as outrageous-by the audience. The Rocky Horror Picture Show strikes again.
What makes an otherwise sane person see a film like Rocky Horror (hereafter RH) more than a dozen times, or dress like a character in the movie? Why do people shout out instructions to the actors on screen and get up to dance the "Time Warp" in the aisles? Why do enthusiasts bring bags of props to use during the appropriate points in the movie -rice to throw at the wedding"' scenes, newspapers to place over their heads during the storm sequence, candles and matches to light during the "Over at the Frankenstein Place"...