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<p><i>The </i><i>Rocky Horror Picture Show</i> is a cult film widely regarded as the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history. Over fifty years of continuous screening, it has sustained a global fan community that developed live, participatory performances around the film. Disney Fox’s acquisition and the 2025 digitally enhanced release mark its journey from marginal subculture to mainstream recognition. This article examines how this transition became possible and how live screenings persist. The analysis combines affordance theory with a postdigital perspective. The expansion of <i>Rocky Horror</i> fandom was enabled by successive technological developments: home video, the Internet, and social media. Each technology facilitated ritual learning, documentation, and connection of geographically dispersed communities. In parallel, the LGBT movement and expanding recognition of gender and sexual fluidity repositioned the film’s transgressive content as increasingly legitimate and socially resonant. However, digitization alone cannot account for the persistence of live screenings. A postdigital perspective frames these as material, embodied practices that consciously merge analog and digital elements, privileging physical co-presence and the singularity of live experience. The <i>Rocky Horror</i> fandom thus emerges as a postdigital phenomenon: technological and social affordances may account for the film’s trajectory from the margins to the mainstream, while postdigital analysis elucidates the enduring value of live, participatory screenings in contemporary media culture.</p>

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Jubilee for Rocky Horror: Mainstreaming and Cultural Persistence

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月1日

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  • Ornat Turin

摘要

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cult film widely regarded as the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history. Over fifty years of continuous screening, it has sustained a global fan community that developed live, participatory performances around the film. Disney Fox’s acquisition and the 2025 digitally enhanced release mark its journey from marginal subculture to mainstream recognition. This article examines how this transition became possible and how live screenings persist. The analysis combines affordance theory with a postdigital perspective. The expansion of Rocky Horror fandom was enabled by successive technological developments: home video, the Internet, and social media. Each technology facilitated ritual learning, documentation, and connection of geographically dispersed communities. In parallel, the LGBT movement and expanding recognition of gender and sexual fluidity repositioned the film’s transgressive content as increasingly legitimate and socially resonant. However, digitization alone cannot account for the persistence of live screenings. A postdigital perspective frames these as material, embodied practices that consciously merge analog and digital elements, privileging physical co-presence and the singularity of live experience. The Rocky Horror fandom thus emerges as a postdigital phenomenon: technological and social affordances may account for the film’s trajectory from the margins to the mainstream, while postdigital analysis elucidates the enduring value of live, participatory screenings in contemporary media culture.