Brad and Janet, the couple from Rocky Horror, live in a town that has been transformed into a giant TV studio. Brad is committed to a soap-opera mental hospital as a game-show prize. Janet is groomed into a manufactured pop star.

In 1980, the team behind the most successful midnight movie ever made set out to shoot its follow-up on location in small-town Texas. Then the Screen Actors Guild went on strike, and the production collapsed.

Rather than wait it out, the writer and director rewrote the whole film to take place inside a single television studio. The strike, Richard O'Brien later said, turned out to be a stroke of good luck.

SHOCK TREATMENT (1981), the almost-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is a satire of reality television, two decades before Big Brother or The Truman Show.

20th Century Fox had no idea what to do with it. They dropped it into theaters already running Rocky Horror at midnight, hoping to clone the cult. It died.

A town that cannot tell its life from its programming. A population that volunteers for surveillance and calls it fame. The Rocky Horror follow-up got orphaned by its own studio, but turned out to have seen the future.