The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a film adaptation of the musical theater production The Rocky Horror Show (1973), follows the newly engaged, '50s-American-middle-class-eqsue Brad and Janet into a mansion in the woods, looking for roadside assistance but receiving an invitation to the unveiling of the transvestite scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter's creation: Rocky Horror, an artificial instantiation of hegemonic masculinity. Further into the night, Rocky, Janet, and Brad each individually lose their virginity to Frank-N-Furter, and later engage in an orgiastic musical number before Frank-N-Furter's servants rebel, kill him for decadence, expel the rest of the cast, and transport the mansion to their alien homeland of Transsexual, Transylvania.

Overcoming a floppy release, the film has generated a tremendous cult following, with viewers reciting callouts on queue, cosplaying, and joining shadow casts that perform during showings. Research on Rocky is primarily divided between study of its ability to generate such cultural status and study of its filmic and thematic significance. Within the field of filmic analysis, the predominant debate between scholars is whether Rocky argues against, as the main narrative seems to, or for, as the tragic ending suggests, conservative norms around sex, gender, and sexuality.

Despite the film’s initial portrayal of Brad and Janet as its protagonists, the plot and theme of The Rocky Horror Picture Show are mainly concerned with and driven by Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s battle for control over the mansion, making him the actual protagonist of the film. Seen through Frank-N-Furter's perspective, his spontaneous appearance, unexplained power, and progressive decline, along with key diegetic inconsistencies, imply that the majority of the film takes place in a repeatable fantasy of Frank-N-Furter’s making, which he builds to escape from suppression but from which he is eventually returned, devastatingly, to a reality where he cannot be transgender.

The endearment of Frank-N-Furter to the cast and audience, his pursuit of a queer utopia of pleasure, his sudden, unsatisfying demise, and the expulsion of Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott from the mansion cause the audience to associate positively with queerness and then empathize with its unfair suppression by normative society. Although the film thus communicates the experience and benefits of queerness, in general, the audience does not substantially accept and adopt queerness in their outside lives because they, like Frank-N-Furter, are thrown into a fantastical loop guarded from reality by the film's heavy-handed representation of societal punishment: the film becomes a periodic dissipating outlet for queer energy.