The Rocky Horror soundtrack is a great rock album, with or without its attachment to the film, and Phantom of the Paradise doesn’t have a soundtrack like that.
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The movie blasts through “Science Fiction Double Feature,” “Dammit Janet,” “Over at the Frankenstein Place,” “The Time Warp,” and “Sweet Transvestite” in its opening reel, then trudges through less revered numbers like “I Can Make You a Man” and “Planet Hot Dog” for the rest of the runtime. But Rocky Horror’s soundtrack is let down by putting all its best songs in the first half-hour.
From “Dammit Janet” to “ The Time Warp,” a lot of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror tracks have become beloved pop hits in their own right. On the surface, it’s a parody of Phantom of the Opera, but its tale of a musician selling his soul for a record deal reimagines the Faustian legend through the lens of the crooked modern music industry.īut, while Phantom of the Paradise has a stronger script, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has a more memorable soundtrack. It doesn’t just have a more compelling, character-driven narrative than Rocky Horror it also has a more specific satirical target. Phantom spins a more original yarn, revolving around a downtrodden artist, motivated by his love for an aspiring singer, fighting back against a slick record executive to have his music heard at a prestigious new concert hall. The meandering plot of Rocky Horror is a hodgepodge of B-movie clichés, with a young couple arriving at a haunted castle in the middle of the night, a mad scientist playing God to create life, and a UFO detective showing up to save the day. RELATED: This Underrated 1970s Slasher Is Brian De Palma's Ultimate Hitchcock Tributeĭe Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise script has a much more engaging story than The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The strategy worked a treat and Rocky Horror, unlike Phantom of the Paradise, became the cornerstone of cult cinema it was destined to be. Since Phantom had generated good word-of-mouth in spite of its harsh critical reception, Fox targeted Rocky Horror’s marketing and exhibition at the kind of niche cult audience that would dig its tongue-in-cheek horror satire and ignore the negative reviews.
Fox learned the right lessons from Phantom’s commercial failure, which allowed Rocky Horror to become a hit. They’re both great movies that mix their offbeat genre cocktail with the perfect dose of campness, but Rocky Horror had the benefit of arriving after Phantom had already bombed at the box office. Rocky Horror is still playing on the big screen somewhere in the world at any given time, nearly 50 years after its premiere, giving it the longest-running theatrical release in the history of film, while Phantom of the Paradise remains an underappreciated gem. But where Rocky Horror quickly became a sensation on the midnight movie circuit, Phantom of the Paradise was a box office bomb everywhere except Winnipeg and got swept under the rug of American cinema. Both received negative reviews on their initial release, which led to disappointing commercial returns. Less than a year later, the same studio released The Rocky Horror Picture Show, another campy musical comedy lampooning the tropes and conventions of the horror genre. On Halloween 1974, 20th Century Fox released Phantom of the Paradise, a campy musical comedy lampooning the tropes and conventions of the horror genre.
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