It’s hard to say what they bode for the world, or even which is more startling, but here are two astounding facts: Elvira, the vampy, campy horror hostess with the enormous, um, following, envisions an America ruled by an army of her clones, one in every shopping mall and car wash. And when she held tryouts, 2,000 women (and men!) applied for the job.
“It was insane!” she recounts of the tryout — (or “open casket call,” as she put it) last summer. “We started at 11 a.m. and we ended at about 2 in the morning the next day, interviewing just a few of them.”
The results can be seen Saturday night at (of course!) midnight, when “The Search for the Next Elvira” starts a three-week run on the Fox Reality Channel that ends on (of course!) Halloween.
Even by Elvira’s generous standards, things got a little bizarre — for instance, the woman wearing a straw peasant hat and a veil who ran up and down the stage shrieking in Chinese until security men tackled her.
“She didn’t make the cut,” muses Elvira, “but she made for a good, entertaining show.”
But bizarre is pretty much the norm for Elvira, who’s spun an entire career out of a swooping Goth mini-dress, double-entendre wisecracks (her dream date: “the guy with the biggest bulge — I’m referring to his wallet, of course”) and an undying affection for scruffy little horror movies.
From a gig hosting movies like “Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks” and “Werewolf of Washington,” she leveraged a 26-year career as the uncontested Queen of Halloween and turned her name into a haunted-household word: a syndicated television star with three movies of her own, a string of lucrative commercial endorsements, lines of CDs and DVDs, and even a couple of pinball machines named after her. So, for that matter, is the computer system in the Stealth bomber.
And when aides in the Clinton White House began to get a creepy feeling about an ever-lurking intern named Monica Lewinsky, they nicknamed her Elvira. (Sniped back Elvira herself: “At least I get my little black dress cleaned once in a while.”)
It all started as a spare-change-on-the-weekend lark for a struggling young actress and former Vegas showgirl named Cassandra Peterson. When a local Los Angeles TV producer saw her do a couple of comic sketches in 1981 with the Groundlings, an improv-comedy troupe that included future “Saturday Night Live” stars Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman, he invited her to audition for a job hosting horror movies at his station.
Back in the three-channel universe of those days, practically every city in America had a local show of schlocky horror movies with a weird host who wore fangs or popped out of a coffin: Pittsburgh’s Zacherle, the Cool Ghoul; Cleveland’s Ghoulardi; D.C.’s Count Gore Duval. But when Los Angeles’ Sinister Seymour died — really died, not just climbed into a casket — station KHJ auditioned hundreds of potential replacements without success.
The KHJ producer asked Peterson to try out for the job in one of her Groundling characters, a clueless Valley Girl actress-wannabe. ‘I was like, ‘Oh, whoop-tee-doo,”‘ recalls Peterson — oh, the hell with it, Elvira. “Cause I was actually looking for a real gig. I went in and auditioned and I got the part. Then he said, ‘Come up with a spooky look.’ ... I’m going, ‘This is so lame. OK, whatever — I’m getting paid $300.”‘
The look — black wig, moonbeam makeup accentuated with panda eye shadow, and the tiny dress, undergirded by an industrial-strength bra, that showed off those Vegas legs and cleavage — was Elvira’s. The movies were KHJ’s, backlot quickies with cheapie zombies and vampires that came packaged with the more expensive films KHJ wanted to buy.
“There was no ‘picking’ involved,” Elvira hoots at a question about who chose them. “We got them out of Dumpsters in the back of the building ... Choose? Yuch. Definitely not a matter of choice.
“But there were a few hidden gems. Actually there’s one — and it goes against my grain because it’s kind of a slasher movie — but it’s just an amazingly creepy and beautiful movie. It’s called ‘Peeping Tom’by the same guy (director Michael Powell) that did ‘The Red Shoes.’ Such a creepy, weird, awful, ecccch movie. But I thought that was a real gem ...
“Pigs, about wild pigs that go on a rampage and kill people — how often do you run across that? There was one called ‘Dracula’s Daughter,’ which sounds stupid, but was really a great movie. It’s shockingly lesbian for 1936. I couldn’t believe it. I was just saying, woooh! It was really sexy. I liked it because the woman (title character Gloria Holden) was so powerful. She was the star of the movie and she had that same thing Elvira has going on — she didn’t take any crap from guys. She was in charge all the way. Very cool movie.”
But for every ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ there were about a dozen unspeakably bad flicks like ‘Monstroid’ or ‘The House that Screamed Blood.’ Elvira broke every rule in the TV book by mercilessly mocking them on the air, though her love for the genre was obvious. It dates back to her childhood in Colorado Springs when she saw a Vincent Price movie, “House on Haunted Hill,” that climaxed with a memorable gimmick — a skeleton flew out from behind the screen and over the audience, rigged on a pulley.
“God, that movie traumatized me as a child,” she sighs happily. “I’m still having therapy from it. ... I was the only little girl that was not collecting Barbies. I was collecting Aurora model kits like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy. That’s what I did when I was a kid. So I was already weird to begin with.”
Her formula worked. In two beats of a bat’s wings, her show was nationally syndicated as “Movie Macabre.” It lasted until 1993, when the mushrooming number of cable channels did in many of the independent stations. Elvira is frustrated that she’s never been able to strike a deal to host horror movies on cable, even though those films are a staple on networks like Chiller and Sci Fi.
“I have been approached to do it,” she says, “but generally they weren’t the kind of movies that I wanted to do. I don’t want to do the modern slasher flicks — I am really very anti- those type of maniac-kills-girl-with-a-knife kind of movies, that slasher stuff. I really like the oldies but ghoulies, the cheesy good-bad horror movies of the past ... To do the modern stuff wouldn’t be very Elvira-y.”
Not that there’s any lack of demand for Elvira. Her own movies, merchandising and personal appearances keep her busy — the latter so much that she came up with the franchising idea behind “The Search for the Next Elvira.”
‘I’ve been going on a lot of Elvira gigs where I’m signing autographs and I notice people about 30 years old and younger who come up and say, ‘Are you the real Elvira?”‘ she explains. “At first I was totally p.o.-ed, but later, I thought, hmmm, that’s giving me a brilliant idea.
“Anybody under 30 sort of grew with Elvira just in the culture, floating around. I don’t even know that they know there’s a real one. It’s like Batman or Superman or SpongeBob. You walk on Hollywood Boulevard and they’re all there (in costumes) and tourists are taking pictures with them and getting their autograph. Hey, that could be me.”
So here she is with a reality show in which aspiring young Elviras will face challenges just like the contestants on “Survivor,” except these will involve “furry little rodents and creepy crawling things and coffins, getting buried alive — and lingerie, of course,” she says.
“They will also have to be fearless and have a fantastically cheesy sense of humor and real true love of the horror genre. All of those things are absolutely indispensable to Elvira. So it’s not all about what a great figure they have. Although they’ve got to have that, too. And no modesty and no shame. Oh, for God’s sake, no. Immediately they’re out if they have any sense of shame whatsoever. How could I have done this for so many years if I had any shame?”
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BALTIMORE - You spot an average Joe walking down the street, except his name is Cal, as in Cal Ripken Jr. You can’t believe your good fortune, or your chump luck not having a baseball. You nudge your kid. “Guess who that is,” you say as you frantically search for a scrap of paper.
