What Tim Curry and The Rocky Horror Picture Show have Given Us

Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. — Photo: 20th Century via TNS.

With the passing of Tim Curry on August 25, 2026, it is hard to talk about his career without talking about his landmark performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and the vast impact that The Rocky Horror Picture Show has had. Curry first played the character in the original London production of The Rocky Horror Show in 1973 before bringing him to the big screen in 1975. More than 50 years later, it is still the role most people associate with him. (Reuters)

A role that transcends generations, Frank-N-Furter is loud, sexual, theatrical and comfortable taking up space. He wears heels, makeup and a corset and never needs to explain himself for it. For the time, the mid-1970, something so far from mainstream entertainment was remarkable. Rocky Horror put self-assured queerness, gender expression and sexuality at the front of the story instead of keeping them shamefully in the background or hiding them away entirely.

For a lot of queer people, especially those growing up in places where openly queer spaces were hard to find, like small towns, Rocky Horror became a way to get close to that world without necessarily having to announce that you were looking for it. You could sit in a theater full of people in fishnets and makeup and see people expressing themselves in ways that might not have felt possible anywhere else.

That sense of belonging and community is what made the midnight screenings particularly important to the culture that Rocky Horror created, because the movie itself was only part of it. Audiences started dressing up, yelling back at the screen, creating jokes, bringing props and eventually performing alongside the film in shadow casts, creating a community experience rather than leaving it as just a movie. These screenings have long been described as particularly meaningful for queer audiences, with some people finding a sense of safety and belonging there that they were not finding elsewhere and seeing themselves reflected back at them. (History). Rocky Horror highlighted that there is a difference between a movie being popular with queer people and a movie becoming part of queer culture, and that line lies in community. That is why Rocky Horror is at the center of so many stories of self-discovery.

Drag star, business mogul and YouTuber Trixie Mattel has talked openly about finding Rocky Horror as a teenager and how the movie gave them an outlet for self-expression during a time when they needed proximity to queerness before they were ready to announce it. (Washington Post). It helped bring drag into the mainstream in non-club settings, making it more accessible to the average person and therefore normalizing it, allowing people to sit with and deconstruct their own biases.

The kind of influence that Rocky Horror has is difficult to even conceptualize, but you see it everywhere. You see it in drag, in theater, in midnight screenings with lines around the block throughout the year, and in modern alternative makeup and clothing trends. Rocky Horror offered this kind of queer-friendly space without always looking like a specifically queer space from the outside. You’re just going to a midnight movie, where everyone goes, and by introducing queerness in the way Rocky Horror does, it becomes what you need it to be, often a place for self-discovery, whether that means finding one’s self-confidence or slowly dismantling internal biases.

That is especially important when looking at Rocky Horror in the context of the 1970s. Today, someone who is questioning their sexuality or gender can find entire communities online within minutes, and there are countless resources for support. But this was not the case upon its release in 1975, or really until relatively recently. Queer people had communities, but they were often much harder to find, particularly for young people or those living outside major cities. Rocky Horror gave people another door into that world.

Curry understood that Frank had become something bigger than just another character. In a 2025 interview, he reflected on the role and the message behind “Don’t dream it, be it,” explaining that he came away from playing Frank with more confidence in his own ability to make his own choices. It is a line that continues to inspire people today. (The New Yorker).

It is a blatant misunderstanding of its impact to reduce Rocky Horror to a “campy movie” when, some 50 years later, young queer people still identify with its message and it is still giving people a place to experiment, express themselves and find community. Tim Curry gave that world its most recognizable face, but the legacy will continue to withstand the test of time as one of the first places where queer people were truly represented in mainstream media and as a safe place for anyone to be unapologetically themselves.

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