At 50, Rocky Horror Still Has Malta Doing the Time Warp – Glitter, Queerness and All

At 50, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is ‘imperfectly’ good (and queer) as ever – and Malta is still doing the Time Warp

St Julian’s’ Eden Cinemas is usually quiet on a Tuesday night, yet last week its lobby pulsed with glitter, feather boas and the unmistakable bassline of “Sweet Transvestite”. The occasion? A special midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show commemorating half a century of fishnets, Frank-N-Furter and fearless queerness. Half the crowd weren’t even born when the film first scandalised cinemas in 1975, but they knew every callback by heart – proof that the movie’s anarchic spirit has found fertile ground in Malta too.

To outsiders, the archipelago can appear buttoned-up: a country that only legalised divorce in 2011 and still debates carnival costumes in parliament. Yet Rocky Horror has quietly thrived here since its VHS heyday in the 1990s, when an underground student society at the University of Malta smuggled tapes past customs and projected them onto a bedsheet in a Qormi garage. “We were 18, terrified of being caught, but also thrilled to see something that looked like us,” recalls local drag pioneer Chucky Bartolo, who co-hosted last week’s anniversary show. “That grainy tape taught a generation of Maltese kids that gender could be a performance – long before Instagram made it fashionable.”

Today, Rocky’s legacy is stitched into the fabric of Malta’s growing LGBTQ+ scene. The annual Malta Pride after-party at Gianpula Village regularly ends with a mass “Time Warp” choreographed by the Malta Gay Rights Movement. Meanwhile, Valletta’s Splendid Theatre hosts shadow-casts every Halloween where actors lip-sync in front of the screen, Maltese-accented callbacks flying across the aisle (“Mela, x’għandna hawn, Frank-N-Fuq-Ix-xatt?”). Revenue from these sold-out nights funds Rainbow Support Service, which offers counselling to queer youth from Gozo to Żabbar.

The film’s themes feel especially urgent on an island where 36 % of LGBTQ+ students still report feeling unsafe at school, according to the 2023 Malta National Student Survey. “Rocky Horror gives them a space where the weird is wonderful,” explains educator Alex Mangion, who uses the movie in Gozitan secondary-school workshops on gender expression. “After we screen the ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’ sequence, even the most conservative kids start debating identity on their own terms.”

Tourism operators have noticed the draw. This summer, VisitMalta quietly added “Rocky Horror-themed bar crawl” to its LGBTQ+ travel packages, shuttling visitors from the Sliema waterfront to a secret rooftop in Buġibba where performers recreate the “Hot Patootie” number against the backdrop of St Paul’s Bay. Early bookings came not only from Berlin and London but also from Catania and Tunis – evidence that Malta is becoming a queer cultural crossroads in the Mediterranean.

Not everyone is cheering. After last week’s screening, conservative NGO Pro Malta Christiana issued a statement condemning “foreign cultural decadence”. Their press release sparked a fiery debate on TVM’s Xtra, where host Saviour Balzan asked whether Malta could “cherry-pick liberation without losing its soul”. The answer came, inadvertently, from the Archbishop himself: hours later Charles Scicluna tweeted a photo of parish youths rehearsing “Time Warp” for a charity fundraiser, captioning it “Even shepherds can dance”. The tweet now has 12 k likes and counting.

Perhaps that is Rocky Horror’s true gift to Malta: it cracks open conversations that legislation alone cannot. Beneath the corsets and confetti lies a simple invitation – come as you are, not as society expects. In a country negotiating rapid social change, that message remains as radical today as it was fifty years ago. So when Eden Cinemas dims the lights again this Friday, expect the aisles to fill with lawyers, dockworkers, gender-fluid teens and their nannas, all flinging their arms wide for the pelvic thrust that really drives you insa-a-a-ne. Because on this little rock, the Time Warp isn’t just a dance; it’s a declaration that the future is whatever we dare to dream it, be it.