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A man came to the stage at the SXSW premiere shaking.
The Q&A had just ended. Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror had screened for the first time anywhere, March 2025, Austin, Texas. The room had not wanted to leave. The man made it to the microphone and said: I just want to tell you I met my wife at Rocky Horror 32 years ago, and my wife wanted to tell you that if it wasn’t for Rocky Horror, she wouldn’t be alive today.
Linus O’Brien — the film’s director, standing at the front of the room — held it together.
He told me that story gets told over and over again. That he cannot think of another work of art — a film, a soundtrack, a stage play, a book — that has kept people alive in that direct, measurable, testimonial way. Tens of thousands of people. Possibly hundreds of thousands. Three generations of them, across fifty years, showing up every Saturday night in theaters from Milwaukee to Missouri to Melbourne.
“If I say hundreds of thousands,” Linus said, “people will think I’m crazy. But it’s a distinct possibility.”
His father, Richard O’Brien, wrote The Rocky Horror Show in 1973. Unemployed. Thirty-one years old. Starting at both ends and filling in the middle. He expected it to run three weeks in a sixty-seat room above the Royal Court Theatre in London, and then everyone would go looking for their next job.
The show opened in June 1973.
It is currently on Broadway.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror — directed and produced by Linus O’Brien — arrives on US streaming June 1, 2026. I spoke with Linus ahead of the release. Next week, this desk sits down with Richard O’Brien himself.
What follows is what you need to know before you watch the film — and what the film will tell you that this piece cannot.
The Film That Refused to Die
Start with the number, because the number stops conversation.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the longest-running theatrical release in the history of cinema. The 1975 film — budget approximately $1.4 million, shot in six weeks at a Victorian Gothic mansion in Berkshire, released to deafening silence and withdrawn from theaters within two months — has been playing continuously ever since. Not in revival. Not on the festival circuit. Every week, in cinemas across the United States and around the world, the lights go down, a spotlight comes up, and a shadow cast takes the stage in front of the screen.
Second place in the longest-running theatrical release category is one and a half years.
Lou Adler — the producer who made the Monterey Pop Festival happen, who had worked with Carole King and the Mamas & the Papas, who caught The Rocky Horror Show at the King’s Road Theatre in London and understood immediately that he was looking at something — told me through the documentary’s footage that by the end of 1978, there were fifty prints of the film in circulation. He had expected it to fade. “After the first year, I was talking to one of the owners and I thought, well, this picture just can’t go on this long. And boy, I’ll admit I was absolutely wrong.” The Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles ran midnight screenings at midnight, 2am, and 4am simultaneously. They were turning away 150 to 200 people per performance.
This is not nostalgia. In April 2026, the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show — directed by Tony Award winner Sam Pinkleton, produced by Roundabout Theatre Company — opened at Studio 54. It runs through July.
Jeffrey Weinstock, who has spent his academic career studying the Rocky Horror phenomenon, says it plainly in the documentary: “You don’t make cults. Audiences make cults.”
What Richard O’Brien made in 1973 was a first draft. The audience has been rewriting it every Saturday night for fifty years.
Richard O’Brien Before Rocky
The name on the birth certificate was Richard Timothy Smith.
Cheltenham, England, 25 March 1942. His father was a soldier, gone to war early, leaving Richard and his mother to arrange their lives around an absence. Around 1952, when Richard was about ten, the family relocated to New Zealand — landed in Tauranga, on the Bay of Plenty, settled eventually in Hamilton on the North Island.
Hamilton had a cinema. The Embassy Theatre. On his breaks, and after his shifts at the barber’s chair nearby, he sat in the dark and watched double features. Forbidden Planet. The Day the Earth Stood Still. It Came from Outer Space. Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings. He absorbed it the way a young person absorbs the things that will define them before they know those things are doing any defining.
In 1964 he left New Zealand and came to London. He was 22. He changed his name — practical, not dramatic. There was already a Richard Smith working as an actor in the British equity system and the rolls didn’t have room for two of them. He took his mother’s maiden name. O’Brien. Richard O’Brien. He had no idea what he was attaching it to.
London in 1964 was becoming something. The Kinks. The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. The Stones six months into their first album. O’Brien arrived in all of it and began the work of not quite breaking through. He cleaned houses. Pumped gas. Worked as a dustman. In the evenings he took drama classes, learning the Method, because Brando was a Method actor and Newman was a Method actor and James Dean was a Method actor. He got fringe parts. Touring productions. He kept a mental catalogue of the things that had gotten under his skin in that Hamilton cinema — the cheap sets, the over-earnest acting, the way American B-movies of the 1950s treated sexuality and transgression like something they could point at from a safe distance.
He also carried something he did not yet have language for. He was about six and a half years old the first time he said it out loud — that he wanted to be the fairy princess when he grew up. He remembered the look on the face across from him. He remembered the feeling. Whoops. I’ve said something I shouldn’t. And the shutters came down.
He would carry that for a very long time. What he did with it, eventually — and what the show he was about to write did with it without him fully knowing — is one of the questions that Strange Journey addresses directly. Richard O’Brien, at 82, on camera with his son. I will not give you what he says. That is the documentary’s to tell.
What I will tell you is that it took fifty years and his son holding a camera for him to say it in that particular way.
King Herod Gets Fired
Richard O’Brien met Jim Sharman through a mutual friend — Chrissie Shrimpton, who had been Mick Jagger’s first girlfriend, who described Richard as “a very serious young man, really quite clever” with “a really deep quality and really sensitive.” Shrimpton brought him to an audition for Gulliver’s Travels. She didn’t get it. He did. The choreographer was also the choreographer of Hair. He got into Hair, went around the country with it, and met Kimi Wong — who would become his wife and the mother of Linus.
Then Jesus Christ Superstar was being mounted. O’Brien was contracted to take over the role of King Herod.
He had about two rehearsals. He went on. Robert Stigwood, the producer, was sitting in the royal box watching.
At the end of O’Brien’s rendition of King Herod, Stigwood went thumbs down.
Sharman came backstage. Pulled Richard into a room. “I’m so sorry about what’s happened — I didn’t know that was going to happen — but I’d like to work with you again. I think you have some talent.” O’Brien thanked him and assumed it was lip service.
He went home. Linus had just been born. O’Brien was weighing whether to stay in the theater or return to New Zealand for a proper job. Waiting for the phone to ring was not an option.
The phone rang. Sharman. He was doing a Sam Shepard play — The Unseen Hand — at the Royal Court. Did Richard want to be in it? He did. Richard Hartley was the musical director. One evening, O’Brien mentioned to Sharman that he was writing a little musical. It was amusing him. Might amuse Sharman. Would he be interested in hearing what he had?
Hartley’s reaction, later: “I hoped it wasn’t religious — and of course it’s the only one that ended up with its own cult.”
O’Brien played “Science Fiction Double Feature” for them. Three times that night. Played a few other songs. Read a little of the script. Sharman went away. Silence for three or four days.
Then: “I’ve been offered another play downstairs at the Royal Court. I’ve told them I only will if I can have three weeks of fun upstairs first. I need another twenty pages in two days and another five songs in two days.”
O’Brien wrote songs in rehearsal. There was no time for fears and nerves. The working title — They Came from Denton High — gave way, at Sharman’s suggestion, to something that moved faster off the tongue.
The Rocky Horror Show.
The Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court held sixty seats.
Building the Thing
Nobody had any expectation of anything.
Jim Sharman described the set later: “Being a 60-seat room, the set designer Brian Thompson put scaffolding everywhere. Our stage was the width of my hands here and we only had one wooden chair. That was the set.” The problem of where to put the band was solved by building a cinema screen and putting them behind it. That is why the set became a cinema screen — not as a conceptual statement, but because they had scaffolding and nowhere else to put the musicians.
Sue Blane did the costumes. She had been told the project came with a director who had been really difficult about finding someone — that anyone with talent had already turned it down. She came on board. The fishnets. The corset. The platforms. Working with almost nothing, she produced something that would be replicated by thousands of shadow cast performers every Saturday night for fifty years.
Tim Curry was Frank-N-Furter. He was 27. Early in rehearsals he snapped an order at someone who didn’t jump to it, stopped, had what he described as “a rather small tantrum,” and said: “Look, I can’t be powerful if you don’t accept the power and at least cringe a little.” They were awfully good about it after that.
The opening night, just as they were about to start, there was a mighty blast of thunder over London. It was raining, belting down. There was a skylight in the roof. O’Brien looked up and the light flashed. If that ain’t a good omen, I don’t know what is.
Barry Humphries said the show was “impossible to over-praise.” The Daily Mail raved. Within a week they knew it had legs. Nell Campbell, who played Columbia: “It absolutely exploded. People were really crushing to get in and see it. This was something alive, something so funny but also something quite tragic — because one minute you were in love with Frankenfurter and the next minute you felt terribly sorry for him.”
Three weeks became seven years.
One of the best production stories — confirmed in the documentary by Richard Hartley — is the origin of “The Time Warp.” Sharman asked O’Brien to write a song for the three servants with a little dance for them to do together. O’Brien went home that night. He and Kimmy first invented a dance between themselves. Then he wrote a song to match the movements. The next morning, before rehearsal started, he swung by Hartley’s tiny basement flat. They finessed the chorus together. Then they arrived on time for rehearsal with “The Time Warp.”
A song performed continuously for fifty-three years. Written the night before it was needed. To a dance invented in a living room.
“There was no pressure on us,” Richard said, “because it didn’t matter if it didn’t go any further. It really was a moment in time and a moment of fun.”
The Character That Changed Everything
Mick Jagger’s company wanted the film rights. O’Brien went into the theater and told Sharman. Sharman said: “Don’t do that. Because then we won’t be able to do it.” O’Brien said: “Oh, all right.”
David Bowie had been considered for Frank-N-Furter. Lou Reed. Jagger. The studio wanted names. O’Brien and producer Michael White personally guaranteed the budget — a little under a million dollars — so that if the film didn’t complete or didn’t come out well, they were the losers. That was the leverage. If 20th Century Fox wanted the film, they took the cast that built the show.
Lou Adler: “Not only that — Jim was allowed to direct it. Not only that — Brian Thompson was allowed to be the artistic director. Not only that — Tim was allowed to play the lead role. We were all allowed to play.”
They shot at Oakley Court in Bray, Berkshire — a Victorian Gothic mansion that Hammer Horror had been using for their B-pictures for years. The Hammer connection was intentional. Sharman wanted to make it as a homage to Hammer, to the same tradition of cheap British genre filmmaking that O’Brien had absorbed in that Hamilton cinema.
When the special effects team showed O’Brien what they could do, he told them the effects were too good. They needed to be worse. The team was shocked. “Some people think that’s bad filmmaking,” Sharman said. “But actually it’s deliberate. But there are other times, because we were on a B-picture budget and a B-picture schedule, that it’s genuinely a B picture. But I can’t tell you which were which.”
Barry Bostwick came in as Brad. Susan Sarandon as Janet — her agents hadn’t wanted her to audition. Casting director Joel Thurm told Bostwick to bring her along “to help him read.” She wasn’t auditioning. Then she started reading. Jim Sharman said: “Who is she?” Thurm: “Those saucer eyes could wipe everybody off the screen, and sometimes did.”
Sarandon described the shoot: she didn’t have anywhere to stay in London. She moved apartments every two or three days, taking her birth control pills and her toothbrush into each new flat. “I was wet and miserable most of the time. But I remember the whole experience being fun. There was something about not having money — it was so humble — and it added to the edginess of it.”
Nell Campbell: “The movie was a six-week shoot. To do a musical in six weeks — unheard of. We just worked our asses off. There are even photos of Richard on the floor asleep.”
Peter Hinwood as Rocky — the creation, the muscle-bound object of Frank-N-Furter’s desire — had never acted before and was nearly naked for the entire shoot. “I was quite insecure about my talents and abilities,” he said. “Now it turns out I did okay. All sort of a bit of a mystery, really.”
Meat Loaf appeared one day. O’Brien had never met him. “There’s this guy, this redneck Texan. And he said to me, ‘Ha, hon.’ And I thought, ‘God, who’s that?’” Then Meat Loaf sang. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s astonishing — that voice.’” Meat Loaf subsequently informed O’Brien that he had been voted the best kisser in his high school in Texas. O’Brien said: “Really? Well, one would have to try that.” Meat Loaf proceeded. O’Brien: “Well, they were right.”
On the last day of the shoot — it was a wrap, everyone going home — Jim Sharman called Pat Quinn back. He had an idea, he said. He wanted to use her lips for the film’s opening shot, singing “Science Fiction Double Feature” with Richard’s androgynous voice. The shot required Pat’s head to be clamped to a board so it wouldn’t drift out of focus. She couldn’t move. Her husband kept ringing, asking for a divorce. She sent word back: she couldn’t do a divorce today. She was clamped.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened in the UK on 14 August 1975.
It bombed.
The Film That Failed
Lou Adler screened the completed film for the marketing and sales department at 20th Century Fox. Perhaps a hundred people. The film ended. Deafening silence. Then slowly, one by one, each person got up and left. Nobody said anything to Adler.
The studio previewed it in Santa Barbara — a college town mixed with a wealthy older crowd. Halfway through, half the audience was gone. Adler and a young Fox executive named Tim Deegan sat on the curb outside the theater afterward, trying to figure out what to do next. Then the college-aged kids started coming up. Saying encouraging things. Letting them know they had a film for an audience.
They just had to find it.
The Broadway run came first. The Belasco Theatre on 45th Street. Adler had taken a full-page ad in Billboard that said: Give our regards to Broadway and tell them that Rocky is on its way. New York killed it partly out of institutional snobbery — anything from Los Angeles was, in Adler’s words, “blingy and ephemeral and cheap and tacky and tawdry.” The show ran forty days.
When it closed, O’Brien stood on 44th Street outside his hotel, Tim Curry across the street at his. “Well,” Richard said, “I guess that’s it really. But it’s been a great ride for three years, hasn’t it?” Curry: “Yep. Absolutely. It’s been a great ride for three years.”
Neither of them had any idea.
Deegan had a friend in New York who was an exhibitor. Why not run the film at midnight? It can’t hurt anybody. Fox will go along with it.
The Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village — now the IFC Center, same building, Sixth Avenue and West 3rd Street — hosted the first midnight screening on 1 April 1976.
April Fool’s Day.
The Audience Takes Over
Something happened that nobody had planned for and nobody could have engineered.
One person shouted something at the screen. Then another. Then a pattern developed — specific responses to specific lines, specific moments that the regulars had identified as requiring interruption. Brad was called an asshole. Janet was called a slut. When it was raining on screen, someone produced a squirt gun. When the newly engaged couple appeared through the car windows, someone threw rice.
Jeffrey Weinstock, in the documentary, describes what came next: it was somewhere around Labor Day 1976 that the shoutouts began in earnest. A man named Lou Farese Jr. shouted at Janet as she shielded her head with a newspaper: “Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch!” Others contributed. If it was funny, it stuck. A second script was being written and superimposed over the first. What followed: costumes. Props — toilet paper, newspaper, flashlight, rice, squirt gun, toast, lighters (quickly banned at many venues). Then, in 1977 at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York, the first shadow cast — live performers in costume acting out the film in front of the screen while the film played behind them. Full staging. Choreography. Props. Performed by volunteers who paid for their own costumes.
Pre-social media. No internet. No TikTok. “How did these things go from place to place?” Weinstock asks. “Somebody would visit New York City, see a midnight showing, and then take it back with them somewhere else.” Also in 1977: the Rocky Horror fan club, with a newsletter. An organic spread, New York as epicenter, then across the country, then across the world.
Sal Piro ran the fan club from New York. A schoolteacher. He had been coming to the screenings since 1977, catalogued the traditions, spread them, kept the culture coherent across geography and decades. He was, in Weinstock’s framing, the connective tissue. Strange Journey is dedicated to him. Sal Piro died before he could see the finished film.
By the end of 1978: fifty prints in circulation. The Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles running three midnight shows simultaneously, turning away 150 to 200 people per performance.
Richard O’Brien, in the documentary, describes the first time he encountered it as a full audience event — a convention on Long Island, a big hall, a thousand people. A woman named Dori Hartley was a Frank-N-Furter impersonator. When the film reached “I’m Going Home,” someone put a spotlight on her. There was Tim Curry on screen, singing, doing the eye makeup. And there, in a bright spotlight at the front of the stage, was a real live person doing the same movements — her silhouette the exact same size as Frank-N-Furter’s — and the audience singing the refrains. “This is theatre at its very best,” O’Brien said. “This was a spontaneous moment where live theatre and live audience and cinema have come together in a way I’ve never seen before. It was quite remarkable.”
Jim Sharman, reflecting: “Having turned theatres into haunted cinemas, the notion of turning cinemas into theatres with people throwing things and talking back struck me as a pretty good idea.”
Trixie Mattel found Rocky Horror at 17, shopping at a ShopKo in Marinette, Wisconsin. In the bargain bin: a DVD with a man in high heels on the cover and big red lips. “It looks weird. I think I’m going to like it.” She took it home. “It was like hearing a radio channel playing something that I just had never heard before.” She drove to Milwaukee to see it in a movie theater. “It was like being an echo on another planet.” The second time she went, she was in the cast.
Her drag name, she explains in the documentary, came from Rocky. Her stepfather had used “Trixie” as a slur when she acted too feminine or too emotional. Rocky Horror gave her the same word as a gift, from what became her first chosen family. The name that had been used against her became her.
A man named Sean — a runaway, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, making his way however he could in New York in the late 1970s — found the Waverly. Tim Curry turning around in that elevator. “I became alive.” He found a tribe. It was the AIDS era. The epidemic was rampant. Sean is alive today and HIV negative. “I credit a lot of that to Rocky because I was safe — I was locked in a theater from 10:00 till 4:00 in the morning every Friday and Saturday night, whereas I could have been doing all sorts of things.” Then they would all leave at three or four in the morning, fill up a diner, go home at sunrise.
Austin, who runs Fluster Mustard, a shadow cast operation that targets conservative small towns in Missouri: “In a town that may see 20 people on a Saturday night, you’ve got 500 people driving in from hours away. You see people coming in in Trump shirts, and then all of a sudden you see the rainbow shirts, and then you’ll see them a couple months later and they’ll be in fishnets — and then you’ll see the manager of the theater in a maid outfit behind the concession stand. It’s infectious.”
Karen Tongson, who studies Rocky Horror academically: “Many young queer folks used Rocky Horror as a place of belonging in a suburban space that demanded they perform a more normal front. And Rocky Horror was the gateway for many of them — for many of us — to find people with whom we could grow, to find people we could trust, amidst our most abject fears. People talk about dancing like nobody’s watching. And I think that’s really the vibe you get at a Rocky Horror screening — and not just that nobody’s watching, but that everybody else is dancing along with you.”
Chrissie Shrimpton, who has known Richard O’Brien since the early 1960s and watched him carry things he could not say for most of a lifetime: “Gender has become a political football, which is really just a kind of global ignorance. Rocky took it to the audience and said, ‘Here it is. This is what it is. What are you going to do about it? You can’t do anything about it, because it is what it is.’ And I’m so proud of your dad for doing that, because I think the world would be a different place without Rocky.”
Richard himself, in the documentary: “The fact that people dress up is because society bothers them and they want to be something they’re not.”
Linus, sitting across from him: “I don’t think they want to be something they’re not. I think they want to be something that perhaps they are — just the opposite.”
Richard considered this. “I have this belief that sexually — male and female — we’re all on a continuum. At one end of it is hardwired female, at the other end hardwired male, and most of us fall on this continuum. And I think many many people have that side to their nature which they don’t reveal to the world. Rocky allowed other people to feel, well — I’m a sweet transvestite as well.”
Richard O’Brien After Rocky
The problem with creating one of the most durable works of popular culture at 31 years old, without particularly intending to, is that the rest of your career exists in its shadow.
O’Brien kept working. Shock Treatment in 1981 — the quasi-sequel, set entirely in a television studio, Brad and Janet trapped inside the machinery of American media, O’Brien appearing as Dr. Cosmo McKinley. Sharper as satire in some ways. Did not become Rocky Horror. Nothing was.
He continued writing stage musicals with Richard Hartley throughout the 1980s. T. Zee. Disaster. The Stripper. Top People. Fifty years of collaboration, still finishing each other’s musical sentences.
His screen career: Flash Gordon in 1980. Spice World in 1997. Ever After in 1998. Dark City in 1998 — Alex Proyas’s neo-noir science fiction film, O’Brien as Mr. Hand, one of the Strangers — earning him a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Supporting Actor. Five episodes of Robin of Sherwood as Gulnar, a corrupt druid, which is a sentence Richard O’Brien was almost genetically constructed to make work.
Then The Crystal Maze, Channel 4, 1990. A game show. Four time zones — Aztec, Medieval, Industrial, Futuristic. O’Brien as the eccentric Maze Master: a ukulele in corridors, a long coat, improvisation, genuine wit. The show became regularly the highest-rated programme on Channel 4. Seven million viewers for the 1993 Christmas special. His version is the one people mean when they say The Crystal Maze.
He provided the voice of Lawrence Fletcher across the full run of Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb from 2008 to 2015, through two films, and is currently back in the recording booth as the show has returned to production.
On 25 November 2004, a life-size bronze statue of Richard O’Brien in his Riff Raff space suit was unveiled in Hamilton, New Zealand — on the site of the Embassy Cinema. The one where he watched the double features.
He holds dual British and New Zealand citizenship. He received the Scroll of Honour from the Variety Artists Club of New Zealand in 2025. Married three times: to actress Kimi Wong, then to designer Jane Moss, then to Sabrina Graf, a German national, whom he married in April 2013 at their home in Katikati, Bay of Plenty.
On gender identity: in 2009 he said there is a continuum between male and female, some hard-wired one way or another, and he is in between. In 2013 on the BBC he discussed a decade of oestrogen use and described himself as approximately 70% male and 30% female. He has said: “Being transgender is a nightmare for many people. I’m very lucky that I’m in showbiz where I can be this eccentric person and therefore it’s allowed.” He uses he/him pronouns.
He has also spoken, in Strange Journey, about what it cost him — the private war, the years of being at war with himself, a period of darkness so complete he could not find his way to the surface. What happened next is the documentary’s to tell. What I can say is that his son was part of how he found his way back, and that Strange Journey is, among other things, the record of two men sitting in a room and finally saying things plainly.
Next week, we ask Richard O’Brien directly.
Linus O’Brien and the Strange Journey
Linus O’Brien was born in May 1972 to Richard O’Brien and Kimi Wong.
The Rocky Horror Show opened in June 1973. He was approximately thirteen months old.
He saw it live for the first time in 1976, at around four years old, at the King’s Road Theatre. They let him control the lights around the proscenium that night. He came home from school to watch black-and-white Tarzan movies and the original Star Trek and Starsky & Hutch and The Twilight Zone with his father. He was dimly aware, as a child, of rising financial fortunes. He did not think of himself as a person with an unusual family. His dad had a job. This was the job.
He started DJing at 14. This is not as unusual a sentence as it sounds — London in the late 1980s was in the middle of the second Summer of Love, and if you were young and paying attention and had grown up in a household where creative work was simply what people did, you got a pair of decks and figured it out.
He was good at it.
By 22, he had a record label. Oven Ready Records, co-founded with Moussa Clarke. House music. Their first release licensed by XL Recordings in conjunction with Multiply Records and Positiva, Virgin’s dance imprint. Around the same time, he co-founded a specialty record shop in Camden with Justin Rushmore. Carl Cox came to the shop. Pete Tong. Junior Vasquez. Masters at Work. Danny Tenaglia. The shop was, for a certain kind of person in a certain kind of London moment, a necessary destination.
He DJed around the world. He played techno. He moved to Barcelona for a year — no particular plan, which is perhaps why it worked. In Barcelona he met a man named Avner Shiloah. They became friends. They lost touch. They would not work together for twenty years.
He moved to Vancouver. Head of Development at Network Entertainment. He worked on Facing Ali — a documentary about Muhammad Ali told through the fighters who faced him: Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Jerry Quarry. The film received an Oscar shortlist in the documentary feature category. He worked on I Am Bruce Lee. Developed television series. Worked for Oscar-winning producer Bill Vince as Director of District 319, a cinema, bar and restaurant in downtown Vancouver that has since become Imperial Vancouver.
He moved back to Los Angeles. Made an album — The Black Below, with Amy White, released on London’s Default Position label, remixed by Howie B and Terry Francis. Launched PANIC, an underground techno series downtown — Bushwacka!, Jamie Anderson, Mr. C, John Selway, Woody McBride. Packed rooms, earned reputation, word of mouth.
Then 2020. The pandemic ended that chapter.
He was fifty years old. He was looking for something else to do. He started reading fan testimonials about The Rocky Horror Picture Show online — comments going back years, specific, detailed, the kind that don’t get written unless something is genuinely true. I was sixteen and I didn’t know what I was and then I found Rocky Horror. The stories kept coming, and they were not the ordinary language of fan attachment. They were accounts of survival.
He called Avner Shiloah. The man from Barcelona, twenty years later, now in Los Angeles.
Shiloah came on as co-producer and editor. They brought in Adam Gibbs and Garret Price from Margot Station — the production company behind the HBO Music Box documentary series, which produced Woodstock 99: Knock Down the Walls and Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary. The cast they assembled: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Peter Hinwood, Jim Sharman, Richard Hartley, Lou Adler, Sue Blane, Jack Black, Trixie Mattel, and archival footage of Sal Piro. The film is dedicated to him.
And at the center of it: Richard O’Brien, at 82, guitar in hand, playing “Science Fiction Double Feature” at speed, laughing, explaining why he played it fast.
“I haven’t got much time left, you see.”
At 82, that sentence carries weight. He delivered it with a smile.
Linus told me he doesn’t get too spiritual about these things. But he probably was the best person to make this documentary. His connection to his father. The fifty years. The Barcelona accident that produced the editor. “If I hadn’t moved to Barcelona 20 years ago for a year, I never would have met Avner Shiloah, and then reconnected with him in L.A., and this movie doesn’t get made.”
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror premiered at SXSW in March 2025. Sheffield DocFest. The GAZE Film Festival in Dublin — Audience Award. DocEdge in Auckland — Art of Storytelling Award. The Riverbed Film Festival — Best Documentary. Theatrical release in the United States on 26 September 2025. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 34 critical reviews.
Zachary Lee at RogerEbert.com: spaces of transgression and safety have never been more important — or in scarcer supply — than now.
Wilson Chapman at IndieWire: comfort for anyone who lives and breathes Rocky Horror.
The Austin Chronicle, at SXSW: an implicit exploration of how the Rocky Horror phenomenon has always overshadowed the lives and careers of the stars and creators, owning them more than they have owned it.
That last one gets at the documentary’s central question — and the one Richard O’Brien answers on camera, in his son’s presence, for what feels like the first time.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror arrives on US streaming June 1, 2026. Watch it.
Next Week: Richard O’Brien
Richard O’Brien is 83 years old. He wrote The Rocky Horror Show in 1973 in six weeks of unemployment, starting at both ends and filling in the middle, Linus asleep in the other room. He expected nothing. What happened instead is the subject of his son’s documentary — and next week, he sits across from this desk.
What does it mean to build something the world claims as its own? What does it cost? What does it give back?
We’ll ask him directly.
PERSONAL NOTE
I played Riff Raff 154 times.
Houston. Late 1980s into the 1990s. The Richey St. AMC Theater. But in Houston, the casts originated at the Alabama Theatre on Shepherd Drive, then the River Oaks, wherever the midnight circuit was running that particular season. Later I saw casts over in Clear Lake. When I moved to Florida, I would see them at the Gateway and some memorable times. Here in Kyiv, I missed the airing in October 2024.
I was not thinking about cultural legacy. I was not thinking about the longest-running theatrical release in the history of cinema. I was thinking about who was going to be in the parking lot, whether the new girl in the Columbia costume was going to be there again, and whether the drama between two of our Franks was going to spill into the show or wait until the diner afterward.
That was Rocky Horror. That was always Rocky Horror. The film on the screen was almost beside the point — it was the room, the people, the Saturday night permission to be whoever you were or whoever you were still figuring out how to be. We didn’t think of ourselves as participants in a fifty-year cultural phenomenon. We thought of ourselves as people who had found our people.
Which is, it turns out, exactly the point.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror — directed and produced by Linus O’Brien, son of the man who wrote the whole thing in six weeks of unemployment in a London flat in 1973 — arrives on US streaming June 1, 2026. I spoke with Linus ahead of the release. Next week, this desk sits down with Richard O’Brien himself.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is directed and produced by Linus O’Brien. Co-produced by Avner Shiloah, Adam Gibbs, and Garret Price (Margot Station). Featuring Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Jim Sharman, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Peter Hinwood, Richard Hartley, Lou Adler, Sue Blane, Jack Black, and Trixie Mattel. Dedicated to Sal Piro (1952–2024). US streaming premiere: June 1, 2026.
NatSecMedia / The Wire Tap — Kyiv
