PELHAM, Tenn. — There aren’t many places to watch a movie 333 feet underground, but on October 23, The Caverns will screen The Rocky Horror Picture Show inside Big Mouth Cave, complete with a live shadow cast, audience participation and a costume contest.

The 8 p.m. screening features a new 4K restoration of the original unedited 1975 film. Fans are encouraged to dress as their favorite characters and come ready to talk back to the screen — a ritual that has followed the movie since the year after its release.

The timing carries extra weight this year. Tim Curry, who originated the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter and became the face of the film’s cult following, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 80. His longtime manager, Marcia Hurwitz, confirmed his death to Variety, saying he died peacefully; he had suffered a severe stroke in 2012.

Curry first played the corseted, fishnet-clad scientist on stage in London before reprising the role on Broadway and then in the film. The character — and Curry’s performance — became the template for the costumes that fill Rocky Horror screenings to this day.

A tradition born from a flop

Rocky Horror wasn’t a hit when it opened in Los Angeles in September 1975. The film only found its audience the following spring, when it began running as a midnight movie at New York’s Waverly Theatre. The Waverly’s manager at the time, Denise Borden, played the soundtrack before showings to build atmosphere, and regulars began booing the villains and cheering the heroes along with the action on screen.

From there, the rituals audiences now take for granted took shape quickly. A handful of Waverly regulars are credited with originating the call-back lines shouted at the screen, while another fan is remembered as the first to show up dressed as Frank-N-Furter. Props followed — rice for the wedding scene, newspapers for the rain, toast thrown during a dinner-table toast — along with the “shadow casts” who now perform the movie live in front of the screen at theaters and venues around the country.

That midnight-movie ritual is why an underground cave in Grundy County is a fitting stop for the film 50 years on. Rocky Horror has never really belonged in a conventional theater seat — it was built, almost by accident, for exactly the kind of communal, costumed, talk-back-to-the-screen setting The Caverns’ subterranean concert hall offers.

A Halloween staple, now also a farewell

For longtime fans, the October screening was already going to be a Halloween tradition worth marking during the film’s 50th anniversary year. Curry’s death makes it something more: a chance for local audiences to do the Time Warp one more time in the same costumes, call-backs and communal chaos that Curry’s original performance helped set in motion half a century ago.

Tickets and additional information are available through The Caverns’ website. The venue, located at the base of the Cumberland Plateau in Pelham just 30 minutes from Lynchbrg, also offers cave tours and campground stays for those looking to make a weekend of it. •

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