Not that anyone I know calls her that, of course. She’s Elvira. Is, was, and ever shall be. Legend has it a teacher at my high school dated her at some point, many years ago, and he brought her to school once—and she probably wasn’t in full dress and makeup at the time, but everyone refers to it as “Mr. Perlstein dated Elvira,” not “Mr. Perlstein dated Cassandra Peterson.” But you know what? That’s okay; I’m not sure she’d mind—whether she ever dated Mr. Perlstein or not.
She did date Elvis, though, briefly in the ’70s when she was working as the youngest showgirl in Las Vegas history. She was seventeen at the time; apparently, Elvis gave her career advice. (I like to hope she was eighteen when they dated, I’d note.) Namely, move to Europe. Which she did for a while, and in fact she met Fellini and has a small, uncredited part in Roma. (Which therefore is one of the only things she’s done that I’ve actually seen!) She puttered around for years with a singing career, and she was a member of The Groundlings, and in fact she was even a DJ for LA alternative station KROQ in the early ’80s. Which I have to tell you surprised me not at all, given my long-time awareness of KROQ.
In 1981—before her KROQ stint but after auditioning for the role of Ginger Grant in The Harlme Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island—LA’s KHJ-TV channel 9 was making plans to restart its weekly Fright Night show. They dabbled with working with Maila Nurmi, but she wanted Lola Falana as Vampira and they didn’t, so they went their separate ways. They had a casting call, and Peterson responded. Her initial plan was to base her persona off Sharon Tate’s character in The Fearless Vampire Hunters, but the producers weren’t interested, and she went with the standard Sexy Vampiric Woman In a Low-Cut Black Dress.
Of course, Nurmi sued for trademark infringement. Or whatever you want to call it. Despite, I’d note, the fact that Nurmi admitted she was basically ripping off Morticia Addams. Obviously, Peterson won, and she started a long-running career as a pop culture icon, to the point where you don’t have to have seen her as Elvira in anything to be familiar with Elvira. As in, aside from an episode of Just Say Julie lo, these many years ago, I’m not sure I have.
From what I can tell, she’s more interested in the sillier horror movies, having refused to host several episodes of the Hammer House of Horror TV series because of their content. And that’s fine by me. On those rare occasions when I do watch horror movies, I don’t want to see cannibalism or what have you. I feel, though, that at least part of it for her is an awareness that it would damage her brand. Elvira stands, I think, for all that’s fun and campy about horror, not horrific exploitation. And that’s fine. It’s a reminder that horror can be a lighthearted release of tension. As Elvira would point out, more than one kind of tension.
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