Cassandra Peterson: Biography

Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Peterson grew up in Randolph, until the town was flooded to create Tuttle Creek Reservoir. Her family then moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. During her teens, Peterson worked as a go-go dancer in a local gay bar. She graduated from General William J. Palmer High School in 1969. Days after graduating, she drove to Las Vegas, Nevada, where she became a showgirl at The Dunes. The Guinness Book of World Records cited her as the youngest showgirl in Las Vegas history.[citation needed] She had a small role as a showgirl in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, briefly dated Elvis Presley, played a topless dancer in The Working Girls (1974), and purportedly posed for the cover of Tom Waits's 1976 album, Small Change. However, this story is apparently unverified, as Peterson has since described it as "a giant mystery", claiming that while she has no memory of the event, the picture looks enough like her that she feels "pretty sure" that it is. She is a vegetarian and has appeared in a humorous halloween-themed ad for PETA promoting a vegetarian diet.

In the late spring of 1981, five years after the death of Larry Vincent (who starred as host Sinister Seymour of a local Los Angeles weekend horror show called Fright Night), show producers began the task of bringing the show back. Deciding to use a female host, producers asked 1950s horror host Maila Nurmi to revive The Vampira Show. Nurmi worked on the project for a short time, but eventually quit when the producers would not hire Lola Falana to play Vampira. The station continued with the project and sent out a casting call. Peterson auditioned against 200 other horror hostess hopefuls, and won the role. Producers left it up to her to create the role's image. She and best friend Robert Redding came up with the sexy punk/vampire look after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Unable to continue with the Vampira character, the name Elvira was chosen. What followed was Elvira's Movie Macabre featuring a quick-witted valley-girl type character named Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. With heavily-applied pancake horror make-up and a towering black beehive wig concealing her flame-red hair, the transformation from Cassandra Peterson to the sexy "Elvira" was so drastic that no one ever recognized her out of costume.

Shortly before the first taping, producers received a cease and desist letter from Nurmi. Besides the similarities in the format and costumes, Elvira's closing line for each show, wishing her audience "Unpleasant dreams," was notably similar to Vampira's closer: "Bad dreams, darlings..." uttered as she walked off down a misty corridor. The court ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that "'likeness' means actual representation of another person's appearance, and not simply close resemblance." Peterson claimed that Elvira was nothing like Vampira aside from the basic design of the black dress and black hair. Nurmi herself claimed that Vampira's image was based on Morticia Addams, a Charles Addams cartoon character from The Addams Family comic strip in The New Yorker magazine.

The Elvira character rapidly gained notoriety with her tight-fitting, low-cut black gown which showed more cleavage than had ever appeared on local Los Angeles television before. The movies featured on Elvira's Movie Macabre were always B grade (or lower). Elvira reclined on a red Victorian couch, introducing and often interrupting the movie to lampoon the actors, the script, and the bad editing. Adopting the flippant tone of a California valley-girl, she brought a satirical, sarcastic edge to her commentary without ever being crass or mean-spirited. Like a macabre Mae West, she reveled in dropping risqué double entendres as well as making frequent jokes about her eye-popping display of cleavage. In an AOL Entertainment News interview, Peterson revealed, "I figured out that Elvira is me when I was a teenager. She's a spastic girl. I just say what I feel and people seem to enjoy it." Her campy humor, obvious sex appeal, and good-natured self-mockery endeared her to late-night movie viewers as her popularity soared. At the same time, Elvira was embraced as an icon of the waning 1980s punk movement as well as the emerging Goth subculture.

The demand for Elvira increased throughout the 1980s. A frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and many other talk shows, she also produced a long-running series of Halloween-themed TV ads for Coors Light Beer and Mug Root Beer (her trademark cleavage was covered up for the Coors campaign). She did guest roles on television dramas such as CHiPs, The Fall Guy, and Fantasy Island, and appeared on numerous awards shows as a presenter. Despite the fact that her success is forever linked to her image as Elvira, Peterson has never been reluctant to make out-of-costume appearances as herself for television interviews and specials.

In 1982, with the surprising success of Movie Macabre, Knott's Theme Parks hired Elvira to replace Seymour as the host of its annual Halloween Haunt during the month of October. Elvira would appear nightly at the park, live on stage with a Halloween-themed musical comedy revue similar to her Mamma's Boys act from the 1970s.

The Elvira character rapidly evolved from obscure cult figure to lucrative brand-name and "Mistress of all Media", spawning countless products throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including Halloween costumes, comic books,[8][9] action figures, trading cards, pinball machines, Halloween decor, model kits, calendars, perfume, and dolls. She has appeared on the cover of Femme Fatales magazine five times. Her popularity reached its zenith with the release of the feature film, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (co-written by Peterson) in 1988. She also did many non-Elvira character-roles in other films, most notably Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) with friend and fellow Groundling Paul Reubens (as his Pee-wee Herman character), and King Solomon's Mines (1985) starring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.

In September 2010 Elvira's Movie Macabre returned to television syndication in the United States, this time with public domain films.