In 1981, improv artist, singer, and showgirl Cassandra Peterson received word from a friend that local television station KHJ-TV were casting for the role of a host on their weekend horror show Fright Night.
“Oh boy, a job that will pay me a couple hundred bucks a week, and I can work and be a serious actor in my spare time,” Peterson remembers saying, a smile on her face.
How little she was prepared for what was to come the moment her character, Elvira, first appeared on the television screen.
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Born in 1951, Cassandra Peterson was only a few years old when she pulled a tub of boiling easter eggs off the stove, resulting in burns to over a third of her body and leaving her visibly scarred. She spent three months recovering in hospital.
When the family moved to Colorado Springs (where “all the freaks come from”), and Peterson started schooling, she was often teased because of the way she looked. The experience made her feel like a monster.
So it was that the creatures in the Vincent Price horror movies like House on Haunted Hill – which her cousin took Peterson to see when she was only seven – started resonating for her.
“I, for some crazy reason, really loved being scared, and I’d have bad recurring nightmares for most of second and third grade. But I really got into it,” she told Biography.
While her sisters collected Barbies, Peterson begged her parents for model kits of Frankenstein or The Mummy. At school, she would dress in costumes made by her mother, who ran a costume store. She was a loner, a freak, but proud of her identity.
In her teens, Peterson worked as a go-go dancer at a local gay bar, after having developed a desire to become a dancer after watching Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas. After three long years waiting for the opportunity, Peterson travelled to Las Vegas over the spring break of her final year of school to audition for a show called Vive Les Girls at The Dunes hotel and casino.
She was successful, and the same day that she graduated from high school, Peterson moved to Nevada to take the next step in her career.
At only 17, she required a legal waiver signed by her parents to perform as a showgirl. “It was pretty unbelievable that they did it. But that was under severe threats from me.”
It was here that she met Elvis Presley. The two dated briefly, and Presley encouraged Peterson to become a singer.
She took his advice, and moved to Italy in the early 70s, where she quickly found herself touring as the lead singer for funk band I Latins 80s.
Though she had made an appearance in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever, it was a chance meeting with renowned director Federico Fellini that drew Peterson to the world of film.
On her return to the United States, she played several small roles in productions, and undertook a nightclub tour of a revue called Mama’s Boys. Eager to develop her skills, Peterson later joined an improv troupe called The Groundlings. There, she was joined by rising stars like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse’s Paul Reubens, and Phil Hartman, who found success on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons.
“The Groundlings were definitely responsible for me being Elvira because I learned to be fearless, basically. If you can get up in front of an audience full of people and not know what you’re going to do beforehand and then have to come up with it to try to entertain people, then you can honestly do anything in life.”
Indeed, while The Groundlings were performing in Los Angeles, a friend told Peterson that a local television network were looking to hire a new host for a reboot of horror show Fright Night. Her friend knew the director, so Peterson asked her to invite the show’s creators to a Groundlings performance.
Peterson’s portrayal of a particular character – a witty, Valley-girl type – intrigued the producers. Soon after, they hired Peterson, and asked her to develop a horror host around that particular character. She was given free reign to create the ideal image for the role.
Working with her best friend and makeup artist, Robert Redding, Peterson came up with an idea based on the look of Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers, but it was quickly rejected. Redding went back to the drawing board, and together they designed a sexy punkish vampire, dressed all in black. “He got the make-up idea from a book on Kabuki theatre, the hairstyle from his favorite singer, Ronnie Spector of The Ronnettes, and the dress was just as tight and sexy as we could get it!”
They gave her the name Elvira, and the show was renamed Elvira’s Movie Macabre.
Her tight-fitting, cleavage-enhancing black gown caught the attention of local viewers, but it was her sarcastic nature and campy humour that saw Elvira start to appeal on a national level.
What Peterson had originally thought would be a casual gig had engulfed her career in only a few short years, and she set to making the most of it.
Elvira became a brand. Even if people hadn’t seen the show, they undoubtedly recognised the character, as Peterson lead the charge in producing everything from comic books to pinball machines, Halloween costumes to perfume, throughout the 80s and 90s.
Peterson also produced a home video series called ThrillerVideo, which featured Elvira introducing a range of episodes from the British TV shows Thriller and Hammer House of Horror. Refusing to be associated with slasher horrors or films involving animal cruelty, any episodes featuring these elements incorporated a replacement host.
Elvira made a range of guest appearances on shows such as CHiPs, and was even involved in Wrestlemania 2 as a guest commentator. Meanwhile, Peterson herself cameoed in films such as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, though without her makeup and beehive wig she was unrecognisable to most.
The character was set to reach the pinnacle of popularity with the 1988 Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. However, one week before release, the film’s distributor New World went bankrupt. I worked on that film for a solid three years—writing it, selling it, doing all the stuff you have to do to get a film made. And then, instead of going to 2,500 or 3,000 theatres, it goes to 150 theatres. The end.”
The failure shook Peterson (though the film would later become a cult classic), and she took a year off to recuperate.
After several attempts at having a sequel to the film funded, Peterson and then-husband Mark Pierson decided to produce it independently in 2000. Elvira’s Haunted Hills was shot in Romania on a budget of $1 million (most of it Peterson’s personal money), 1/12th of the funding Mistress of the Dark had received over a decade earlier. It screened at AIDS charity fund raisers across America, before being shown at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Talking to The AV Club, Peterson describes the experience as “brutal, brutal, brutal. For what it was, it came out pretty damn good—but it doesn’t compete with Mistress Of The Dark, unfortunately.”
Though Elvira was not in the media as much as she once was during the 2000s, Peterson remained active in the pop-culture scene.
She spends up to four months a year appearing at Halloween-related events across America, and is constantly working on projects to franchise the Elvira brand.
The first of these came in 2007, when Peterson hosted a reality-TV show called The Search for the New Elvira, though she plans to continue in the role as long as possible. In 2010, Movie Macabre was revived by NBC for a short run with Peterson at the helm, followed by 13 Nights of Elvira on Hulu in 2014, a show which ran from October 19 to Halloween in the same style as the original program.
In 2012, Peterson joined Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee to invest in Comikaze Expo, which is now one of the largest pop-culture conventions in the United States. The pair had been guests of honour at the inaugural event the year prior. Peterson is described by Comikaze CEO Regina Carpinelli as the “Mistress of the Board“.
“I knew I would grow up and wear a costume one day, and that’s exactly what happened,” says Peterson. But to reduce her career, and the clever way in which she leveraged her iconic character, to a sexy style, is to overlook what Elvira means to so many people.
To see Peterson on show at gay pride parades or pop-culture conventions says it all. From an early age, she was different, alien, isolated. As a TV host, she brought people like her together, and proved that being different was something worth celebrating.