Why Rocky Horror and Clue are Halloween Movies

When most people think of Halloween movies, their minds will immediately turn to horror movies. It’s no surprise, since the blood, guts, and terror fit perfectly with the spooky atmosphere of the season. Despite my love for Halloween, though, I hate most horror movies, especially “classics” like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Still, a hatred for horror movies doesn’t mean I’m out of options for Halloween films. Instead, every Halloween season, I’ll settle down and watch cult classics like Rocky Horror Picture Show and Clue. But given the films’ lack of nightmare-inducing elements, how can they be called Halloween movies? It’s simple: camp.

Camp is notoriously hard to define. Wikipedia defines camp as “an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value”, which is true to a certain extent for both films. No matter what aspect of Clue or Rocky Horror Picture Show you look at, from the character design and dialogue to the action and basic premise, all of it feels like it lacks a sense of art - they are crude and exaggerated in a world that praises art for its subtlety and delicateness. Still, I feel like this isn’t the best definition for camp films like Rocky Horror Picture Show and Clue. After all, bad taste is subjective, and I wouldn’t say either film is necessarily ironic except in that they play their ridiculousness entirely straight. Instead, I think the campiness comes from how both films present a kind of “hyperrealism”, not in the traditional usage of the word but rather in that they present reality at its extremes.

Take the characters in each film as a first example. In the case of Clue, the cast includes a woman with a string of husbands who have died in mysterious circumstances, a batty politician’s wife, and an effeminate and wimpy homosexual, among others. In Rocky Horror Picture Show, the lead characters Brad and Janet are the dullest, whitest, most heterosexual couple you’ve ever seen. While they may seem different, they all share one thing in common : they’re stereotypes taken to the extreme. Stereotypes exist in real life as a way to broadly categorise people and make assumptions about them, but real human beings are too complex to be encapsulated by a single identity. In these films, however, the stereotypes we use in our real life are made more real than they naturally are by creating characters who only exist to fit that stereotype, whether it be a black widow like Mrs. White or a WASP couple like Brad and Janet. By reifying these tropes, the films create something larger than life, exaggerations of cultural stereotypes which are both true and ridiculous.

Speaking of Mrs. White, she is a perfect example of the next level of hyperreality brought to the films - the dialogue. Are there lines more iconic than “Husbands should be like Kleenex, soft, strong, and disposable” or this untranscribable line? In both films, the dialogue is either suspiciously perfect and witty or blunt in ways that is unrealistic but accurate to what we really want to say. Clue is definitely stronger than Rocky Horror Picture Show in this aspect, as with the above two lines, but Rocky Horror Picture Show has its fair share of bizarrely on-the-nose and frank lines too, such as when Brad proposes to Janet and explains to her that love can grow one of three ways, “good, bad, or mediocre.” How terribly romantic. In both cases, the dialogue is how we wish we could speak like in real life, constantly dry and true and humorous that isn’t socially permissible or which we aren’t quick enough to think of - the dialogue isn’t realistic, but it represents the perfect reality, the hyperreality we all dream of.

The films' action, too, toes the line between reality and hyperreality. Is it likely that you’ll be caught up in a real-life murder mystery in a house full of potential suspects, murder weapons, and secret passageways? Or that your car will break down and you’ll find yourself taking refuge in a house of bizarre sexual deviants? No, it’s not likely - but it's possible, just like everything else that happens in the films. You might be used to someone helping you out of your coat, but if we follow the convention to its conclusion, it’s logical enough to help someone out of all of their clothes and down to their underwear. If we try to lead someone upstairs in a rush, we might typically try to stop and help them up, but there’s very little stopping us from just continuing on as though nothing happened. Breaking down doors, too, rarely works out as it does in the movies - as the butler in Clue soon finds out by slamming ineffectively into a door and stumbling halfway across the room. The camp in Clue and Rocky Horror Picture Show is about taking reality to the extreme, with all of our nonsensical rituals and awkward moments, making us aware of how ridiculous reality is by exaggerating it to hyperreality.

The hyperreality of Clue and Rocky Horror Picture Show is clear, then, but what does camp have to do with Halloween? Fortunately, it’s much easier to explain that than it is to explain camp. Simply put, being frightening is only one part of Halloween, but both Halloween and camp are also about pure insanity as well. Halloween is the one day of the year that people are allowed to be as crazy and freaky as they want - their insanity will simply blend in with the rest of the crowd. Camp conveys the same feeling by portraying a world where everyone is so extremely real that they start to seem insane too. Both Halloween and camp are refuges for the people who don’t fit into society's definition of normal, who are too weird or who don’t understand the point of all the little rules we're expected to follow. Incidentally, this is also likely why queer people are often fans of both Halloween and camp art. In a world where they’re constantly viewed as “others” and “outsiders”, Halloween and camp show a world where breaking away from societal norms is the norm, where even the most bizarre among us might be accepted.

In sum, if you love Halloween, but can’t quite get yourself to enjoy the horror and violence of typical Halloween movies, give Clue and Rocky Horror Picture Show a try. Through their hyperrealities, they act as unapologetic mockeries of how strange our world really is, and as a result, they remind us that being normal is just as weird as being a misfit. Just like Halloween, they encourage you to be the most authentic version of yourself - as Frankenfurter said in Rocky Horror, “Don’t dream it, be it”. After all, at the end of the day, that’s what the spooky season is really about : revelling in the joy of being the freak you really are.