Introduction: Science Fiction Double Feature

Abstract

The most well–known, and certainly the most frequently discussed cult film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), opens with an arresting image, a close–up of bright red lips mouthing the film's theme song, “Science Fiction Double Feature.” Both image and song have become practically iconic—emblems of the cult film, signs of its generally transgressive, sometimes campy nature, celebrations of the way such films, in contrast to most traditional Hollywood cinema, seem to directly address their audience, even, as Timothy Corrigan allusively puts it, placing them “oddly inscribed” within the film text (34). While Rocky Horror —the film—no longer seems to evoke the shocks (of recognition or of recoil) that it once did, both song and lips retain something of this evocative and subversive power. In fact, I would suggest that, because of what we might term their separation from the text itself—a separation that was always implicit, thanks to their placement as a prologue, prior to the actual start of the narrative—we might see in them some additional resonance, use them as our own prologue to thinking about the cult film and its place in our experience of film genres. This volume aims to draw on that resonance, specifically by tracking the relationship between the cult film and the genre of science fiction (sf), exploring a connection that has always seemed closer, somehow even more natural —although some might find that term an ill fit for the cult experience which always seems intent on questioning what is “natural”—than in the case of most other film genres. In fact, sf has typically enjoyed a special version of that relationship between audience and text that critics often cite as one of the defining features of the cult film experience. We might recall that, even in its formative period (for both literature and film) in the 1920s and 1930s—a period that saw the emergence of the great pulp magazines that helped shape the modern literary sf narrative—the sf genre was already marked by what John Cheng describes as a curiously “participatory rhetoric”(10).