Elvira, Mistress of the Dark revisits her 'spooky, funny and sexy' first feature on its 35th anniversary

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark famously wants to be remembered by two simple words. But when all is said and done, Cassandra Peterson only asks that people remember her buxom alter ego by three simple words. "Spooky, funny and sexy," the horror icon told Yahoo Entertainment in 2016, rattling off the three essential ingredients to the character she's portrayed for 40 years and counting.

"All of those elements have to be there in order for her to be Elvira," Peterson said, adding that she has turned down numerous opportunities when one of those words was omitted. "When people want me to do these little walk-ons in horror movies where I play a sorceress kind of character, I’m like, 'Can’t do it.' Which is a bummer, because I hate turning down stuff. If it doesn’t have Elvira’s sense of humor, spookiness, and sexiness, it’s just not her."

Thirty-five years ago, Peterson gave the world the platonic idea of an Elvira production — Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, the feature film that she starred in and co-wrote with longtime collaborators John Paragon and Sam Egan. Released on Sept. 30, 1988, the movie puts the "spooky, funny and sexy" combination on full display... along with the two other big elements that Elvira is famous for.

"That's what draws them in," Peterson said in 2016, referring to the Mistress of the Dark's epic décolletage. "It's kind of the hook, and then they get the humor. When [people] ask me, 'Oh, can you cover up the cleavage?' I’m like, 'Nope, sorry.' It’s part of the character. Actually, it’s two parts of the character!"

Unfortunately, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark failed to draw them in at the box office during its initial release, largely due to the fact that its distributor, New World Pictures, experienced serious money troubles right before the movie premiered in theaters. Over the subsequent three decades, though, the horror comedy enjoyed a healthy afterlife on the boob tube through the VHS era, the cable TV era, the DVD era and into the streaming era. (It's currently streaming for free on multiple services, from Prime Video to YouTube.)

For years, Peterson hoped to get another Elvira movie off the ground: one sequel script is owned by the now-defunct Carolco Pictures, while another — Elvira vs. the Vampire Women — was offered to B-movie king Roger Corman, but arguments over the budget derailed its production. In 2001, Peterson self-financed her own follow-up, Elvira's Haunted Hills, but the experience exacted a high personal toll.

Her 2021 memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memories of the Mistress of the Dark, revealed that the movie brought Peterson's marriage to producer Mark Pierson to an unpleasant end. But it also opened up a new chapter in her life: Peterson fell in love with her former personal trainer, Teresa "T" Wierson, and revealed to that relationship to the world in her book after two decades of secrecy.

"People call it coming out, and I guess in a way it is," Peterson told Yahoo Entertainment in 2021. "I haven't ever been gay. I guess now there's like non-binary, gender fluid, whatever. I fell in love with somebody who I met, and she was a woman. We've been together for 19 years, and it's fantastic. I would be fine with saying, 'I came out and I'm gay,' but I don't think I'm gay. I don't know what the hell I am!"

Since coming out, Peterson has brought an entire generation of new fans into the cult of Elvira. And Elvira: Mistress of the Dark has become an almost biblical text, quoted by everyone from RuPaul to TikTok influencers. To celebrate 35 years of the spooky, funny and sexy movie starring the gal with the enormous... ratings, we're revisiting our 2016 interview with Peterson where she revealed why some of her biggest fans are in the Bible Belt and how vocal Elvira admirer Roger Ebert stabbed her in the back by panning the film.

Elvira first appeared on local L.A. television in 1981 when independent TV stations operated like the Wild West. Did it help being able to workshop the character in that kind of environment?

When I first appeared on local television as Elvira, I was allowed a lot more leeway than I expected. After I got the job, my friend [costume designer Robert Redding] made a sketch of what my dress should look like. I said, "There's no way I can wear this on TV," and they were like, "Just make the slit on the leg higher and it’ll be great." Local TV stations didn't really worry about standards and practices, so I made it pretty edgy. The station manager would come in just about every other week and say, "We've got a complaint again about your dress being so low-cut. You have to fix that." I'd go, "OK, I'll have them make the neckline higher." And then I wouldn't do anything at all, and he'd come back a couple weeks later and go, "We got a complaint." It just kept going on like that. I never changed it!

A lot of Elvira's early appearances on late-night talk shows are available on YouTube. It's interesting to watch them and see you figuring out the character outside of the "horror hostess" persona.

I was always figuring that out. I still am, I think. Depending on what show it was, I had to decide whether I was going to be edgy and if I was going to cover up the cleavage. Like when I appeared on The Magical World of Disney, my face was just peeping out of this big black blob of hair! [Laughs] I was always trying to find how far could I push Elvira while still being invited back on national TV again, trying to make her edgy, but not so edgy that kids—and I'm talking about older kids here, like 12 and up — couldn't enjoy her. And I'm still going, "Too far? Not far enough? I don't know."

Growing up in the '90s, I remember Elvira appearing on shows like Totally Hidden Video and Parker Lewis Can't Lose. It's funny to go back and watch your '80s appearances on CHiPs and The Fall Guy when, again, the character isn't fully formed.

In those early appearances, I really didn't know what the heck I was doing — who I was or who Elvira was. One of my first major national appearances was in the movie Stroker Ace with Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson. I played this girl trying to pick up Jim Nabors, a very challenging role! [Laughs] They originally had me wearing this blue, big-shouldered dress that was all the rage in the '80s. I looked like I was on Dynasty or something, but then I still had my Elvira wig and my Elvira makeup. I was like, "This so doesn't work." Later on, I got to a place where I could say, "I'm Elvira. This is the look I have, and you've got to write around me, not make me into somebody else."

Your appearances on The Fall Guy introduced you to Sam Egan, who would later be part of the writing team for the first Elvira movie, 1988's Mistress of the Dark.

Sam got the character immediately. Both times I did The Fall Guy, he knew exactly what Elvira should be doing and saying. My writing partner, John Paragon, and I needed somebody to be in the room who really knew what they were doing when it came to a movie script. We had been writing together for 21 years, so we were good at writing one-liners, but we really needed an adult in the room, and NBC, which produced the movie, insisted on us having a babysitter. So we got Sam, and he was just the perfect guy; he really kept us on track.

The movie bombed during its theatrical run, but it has become a seasonal favorite since.

All the critics just hated it. Even Roger Ebert, who was my friend, hated it! But it stuck around and stuck around and gained momentum over the years. More and more people like it, and I'm happy to say that when I see it every once in a while, it holds up. Maybe the best thing about the movie is that we couldn't afford CGI. A lot of CGI from that era looks so tired and ridiculous. Thankfully we only had cheesy effects, not special effects.

It's surprising that Roger Ebert wasn't an enormous fan of the movie given his well-documented friendship with mammary aficionado Russ Meyer.

Right? I ran into him many times over the years, and he'd always tell me, "Oh, I just love Elvira!" But when he and [fellow critic Gene] Siskel reviewed Mistress of the Dark on their show, they thought it was horrible and that I was a horrible actress. I was like, "Actress? I'm not an actress. I'm Elvira!" It would be like saying, "Gosh, Pee-wee Herman is such a horrible actor," or "Pat is such a horrible character." It’s funny: both Paul Reubens and Julia Sweeney were also Groundlings, and that's what we did. We didn't act so much as create characters.

The plot of the movie pits Elvira against puritanical small-town adults, led by Edie McClurg's Chastity Pariah. If anything, studios and ratings boards are even more skittish about sex and sexuality these days. Could you make the PG-13 version of the movie again today?

I probably could remake that movie today, and it would be just as relevant with all of that. Although let's hope it's getting a little better. I think if Elvira showed up in that town today, she'd have more people that were on her side than just a few teenagers. When I first syndicated my television show, it was picked up in all these various markets. And guess where our most successful market was: the Bible Belt. That says something, right?

Over the years, you've hinted that there are deleted scenes sitting in a vault somewhere. Any chance those might be released one day?

Not deleted scenes so much, because I managed to get pretty much everything I wanted into the movie. Actually, more than what I wanted, because NBC had this crazy idea that we had to have teenagers in the movie. They said that if we didn't have teenagers, teenagers wouldn't come to see the movie. So we ended up writing them in. I do have a lot of behind-the-scenes footage that my husband at the time [Mark Pierson] shot for fun. I don't know if I'll ever be able to show it, because I unfortunately don't own the rights to Mistress of the Dark. [Peterson has since released snippets of those behind the scenes videos on Instagram over the years.]

So no scenes that explain what happens to Frank Collison's henchman character, for example? He kind of vanishes from the movie.

Good question. What happened to Frank? I think that is one of the things that ended up on the editing floor. The director, Jim Signorelli, had done a lot of the commercials and Saturday Night Live episodes, and he had final cut, which didn't make us too happy. He locked himself in a room with the editor and just went to town on it. But in the end, it all came out all right.

I was happy that our producer Brandon Tartikoff — who was the president of NBC at the time — was a huge Elvira fan and gave me so much leeway to do and say what I wanted. We were also able to keep it PG-13 too, which was a real goal because my audience was younger. And I'm happy to say they’re younger again! For a while, I thought my audience was going to die off, and now suddenly, I've got this whole new audience, thanks to the advent of the internet.

They definitely let you get away with the tassel twirling grand finale.

Well, that scene was a major challenge. I had this talent of twirling tassels. I taught myself to do it when I was 14 years old. When other kids were practicing piano, I was practicing twirling tassels! I don't know why, but I thought, I must utilize that talent somewhere in my career.

We wrote that scene around it for the movie, but when the time came to shoot it, NBC said we had gone over budget. They wanted to end the movie with Elvira sitting on the stoop of her house. … I was begging and pleading that they not just stop the movie there, and they finally coughed up the money after a couple of weeks, so we went back and shot it in one day. Of course, on that day, I got the flu and was in my trailer sicker than a dog! I was able to do it — I still don’t know how.

When you made Elvira's Haunted Hills 12 years later, you had full creative control. Did that make it a more satisfying experience?

The lesson I learned on Hills was: Don't fund a movie yourself. Ever. [Laughs] I finally made my money back, but it took years. Creatively, I did get to do everything I wanted to do. The only thing that limited me was money. We made the film in Romania for $1 million, whereas the first film had a budget of maybe $13 million. At one point, Elvira was in a coach riding along a mountain edge, and I wanted six black stallions snorting and running through the night. What we got instead were these old brown nags that honestly looked like they were on their way to the glue factory!

In retrospect, I think I would do something very different if I were to make the film again. I loved Hammer horror movies and Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe films, like The Pit and the Pendulum, when I was a kid, so I was doing very much of an homage to those films while trying to keep Elvira in character. But I was walking a very difficult line there, and I think the movie doesn't play as well to people who don't know about those movies.

Watch Lyndsey Parker's 2021 interview with Cassandra Peterson on YouTube

— This story was originally published in 2016. It has been updated to reflect recent events.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is currently streaming on Prime Video, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Tubi and YouTube.