Elvira, Mistress of the Dark Letterboxd Review

            I didn’t think I would be doing any more in-depth reviews on Letterboxd let alone feel the necessity to analyze this as strongly as I did during this October 2017 viewing. It hasn’t been a year yet since my last viewing, but previous viewings didn’t quite bring out in me what I’m feeling right now. There are parts of me that don’t feel qualified to be the one to write it because, typically, I am identified as a man in my daily life. I don’t think I’d go so far as to call myself non-binary, but the concept of gender has given me problems most of my life. I’m not a great fan of testosterone in general. That’s another story in itself and not why I’m here. So why am I here? I’m here to tell you, with full confidence, that Elvira is one of the most important feminist icons of our time, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is one of the most important feminist works of our time and a cinematic masterpiece, and I’m going to tell you why.

            First, I want to talk about horror hosts for a moment and how important they are to me. I was introduced, for the most part, to horror at the age of four with the release of It Came From Hollywood. My first horror hosts were Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Candy, and Cheech & Chong, and they opened up a world to me that I cherish. I didn’t grow up in an area with a local horror host and never got a chance to see Elvira outside a few of her assorted television appearances on MTV, The Tonight Show and ChiPs. I was an insomniac child, and television raised me while my parents were asleep. As Gilbert Gottfried often says on his Amazing Colossal Podcast in reference to the Universal Monsters franchise and classic film in general, “the greatest film school in the country was in your living room.” Gilbert’s childhood was twenty years before my own, that of my parents’ generation, but I was fortunate to have grown up in the early 80s before paid programming and DMCA license restrictions killed television’s ability to show these movies in the sheer volume they once did. The type of programming that fed Gilbert filled me with just as much nutrition and satisfaction. As a lonely and awkward child in a small, repressed, religious southern town in Texas, I had the ability to share the things I loved with a great many people, but there always was some little nagging feeling in the back of my mind that made me feel unsafe to share my love for horror movies. I have problems starting conversations with people in general, but the problem was greater with this subject in particular. I knew that there must have been like minds around me. I know now that there were, but I was afraid to reach out to find them. Deathly afraid. I enjoyed my classic movies and my horror movies mostly alone. I shared that love and received much of it from my mother, also a huge horror fan and perhaps even greater than myself, but that wasn’t the same as the feeling of freedom to walk out into the world and proclaim that I was a horror fan. Again, I know that I wasn’t alone, but I was afraid to seek out kindred spirits. I was a child who had seen Lucio Fulci’s The Gates of Hell from the front row at the tender age of five. I’d seen Poltergeist and Halloween and Halloween II a year or more before that, but I was a quiet child who still watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street daily and walked down the street to attend Sunday school. My gauge of how people would be receptive of me never was in tune, but I never tuned them out. I was in the horror section of the local video store on a daily basis, and I never saw anyone else there. The woman who worked there couldn’t stand me because I would loiter for an hour or more, hoping that maybe someone else would come in or that I would hear a conversation about something I loved and might feel comfortable to join. The few times I did, she looked disgusted at the very sound of my voice, but I kept coming back, sometimes because I knew how much it bugged her. I never left the store without renting a tape. She always smiled at me as I left, but not because I was giving her money and that she was happy that I was leaving. She smiled because she knew I had to ride a bicycle through traffic to get back home, and maybe, just maybe, today would be the day.

            In 1987, my family moved to Florida, and everything changed. We lived in the Tampa Bay area, and I didn’t think anything could be better than my first Saturday morning cartoon experience in a new state and a new home. I didn’t know how wrong I was until I saw a promotion for a horror movie at noon. It was Creature Feature with Dr. Paul Bearer on WTOG-44, and he was hosting Legend of the Dinosaurs, a movie I had seen just released on VHS before my family moved but didn’t get the chance to rent. Not only did I have the chance to see a horror movie I’d been anxious to see, but I also got to watch it with a new friend for the first time since It Came from Hollywood several years earlier. This was what I had been missing with Elvira, and that void was filled quickly with more options than I could pick for one viewing time slot. The USA Network had Commander USA, TBS had Grampa Munster, but I found myself coming back to Dr. Paul Bearer almost every Saturday because he had the best movies of my life. War of the Gargantuas. The Devil Rides Out. Lake of Dracula. Dr. Blood’s Coffin. The Illustrated Man. War of the Worlds. Frankenstein Conquers the World. 20 Million Miles to Earth. Valley of Gwangi. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Tarantula. Attack of the Mushroom People. The Giant Claw. Die, Monster, Die! House on Haunted Hill. The Creeping Terror. It Conquered The World. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Forbidden Planet.  Dr. Paul Bearer showed all of these and so many more on his Creature Feature, and it was heavenly.

I would be remiss not to mention briefly the impact of Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear on USA Up All Night some years later, but even that started with Dr. Paul Bearer on a Saturday afternoon in Florida. He ended every show telling viewers to stay tuned for Lynne Austin and Hooters More Than a Movie in which the original Hooters girl would showcase yet another broadcast movie from the Hooters in Plant City. Every once in a while, especially when it was horror, I would tune in for movies like Student Bodies (coincidentally the only host segment you can find from her show on YouTube, available only because someone recording a Dr. Paul Bearer show left the recorder running for 20 extra minutes).

The downside of this TV movie broadcast cornucopia was that it was mostly limited to television. The adjustment period of moving made 1987 and 1988 dismal years for movie theater experiences. I watched these movies on television but got to see little to no horror in theaters during those years. I didn’t get to see Elvira, Mistress of the Dark in a movie theater, and I wasn’t properly introduced to her until some years later when I finally caught the movie on local television. Imagine my delight to find out that Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson and her co-star Edie McClurg were members of The Groundlings with Pee-Wee Herman and Cheech & Chong. I’d consumed most of their work at an early age as well, and this was a perfect blend of watching the movies I loved the most with some of the people who made me laugh the hardest. Additionally, I could catch Cassandra Peterson and several other Groundlings on one of my favorite shows of the fledgling original programming days of Nick at Nite, the Siskel and Ebert parody On The Television. More and more, I didn’t have to watch my horror movies alone. People were on television talking about them, making funny jokes about them, and showing them a level of respect that I understood. I could talk about my love of horror hosts and horror movies all day and night, but this trip down Memory Lane is taking up about half the length of this movie review. Enough preamble.

            Elvira, Mistress of the Dark looks, on its surface, like a parody/satire of horror movies and Elvira’s own television horror host show. It is, but as I watched it in October 2017, I saw it as something so much more. October 2017, in the raw-nerve meat of long, long overdue discussions about sexual harassment, gender inequality, consent, promiscuity, and the male power dynamic in Hollywood and even all the way up to the highest levels of American government. With a so-called president who “grabs them by the pussy” and hundreds upon hundreds of women and even men coming out of the woodwork to share experiences of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape at the hands of high-profile men in film and television. October 2017, the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death, herself a victim of sexual assault by her own father as well as multiple physical abuses from a boyfriend that likely contributed to her health deteriorating more rapidly. Victims are finding the strength to speak out while fashion designers, defense attorneys, and friends of those people in power continue to pull the “Look at the Way She Was Dressed” card, targeting people like Rose McGowan with the courage to speak up and threatening them with the details of their own sexual histories. As if any degree of self-confidence or skin exposure or even full nudity comes within a thousand miles of consent. As if Cate Blanchett should have to tell the world that wanting to look sexy and enjoying looking sexy don’t mean that a woman wants to fuck you. It’s that self-confidence, skin exposure, and implicit boundary of consent that brings me to Elvira, and she’s come up with better ways to shine a light on it through comedy than I could. Making any jokes about Elvira’s skin exposure similar to the ones she makes constantly about herself here, however, would be ungentlemanly and in bad taste (though it might make me eligible to write reviews for Ain’t It Cool News… oh, wait). Her personality is the crucial factor, and that’s what I love and respect about her and everything she represents. Elvira is a symbol of that courage to be yourself and to speak out for yourself, and this movie presents it in some of the most beautiful ways I’ve ever seen.

            Here, nearly twenty years earlier, we have this little piece of cinema offering the discussion in full on a silver platter and disguising it as a TV character movie spinoff. Elvira begins her movie with the final scene of the Roger Corman film It Conquered the World, showcasing the brilliant female empowerment of Beverly Garland as well as Peter Graves’ poetic speech about Man as “a feeling creature, and, because of it, the greatest in the universe.” I can’t think of another movie better suited to give insight into what Elvira does and who she is. Suddenly, we are thrust behind the scenes of the unseen final episode of Elvira’s Movie Macabre in a world where Elvira is Elvira, not Cassandra Peterson in a wig and make-up. Like the Munsters or the Addams Family, Elvira is connected to the supernatural and otherworldly while walking freely in the human world. This is the pinnacle of the parody view of the classic monster archetype. The Frankenstein monster, the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, and the other assorted “children of the night” are something other than human, walking the world of humans without being a real part of that world. They are ghosts, shells of our former lives, reminders of our past mistakes, and the embodiment of our personal fears that truly come from the visage in the mirror rather than the features of the creatures. I refer back to Gilbert Gottfried again and his interview with Bobcat Goldthwait, in which Gilbert explained the human connections that horror fans like myself share with the monsters as symbols of the stages of life from birth to adolescence to death. They are something removed from us, but they are of us. They are outcasts of humanity, yet there is something we see of ourselves in them that unlocks feelings of empathy and sometimes envy. The Frankenstein monster is the innocent and misunderstood child who didn’t ask to be born, yearning for love and acceptance. Dracula has confidence, agelessness, and lack of inhibition that many of us wish we shared. The werewolf is puberty and the struggle with emotional control over selfish and hormonal urges on the road to adulthood. The mummy, though Gilbert was hard-pressed to find a representation for it before laughing it off and moving on, is the inescapable hand of mortality and history and the reminder that your own mistakes and hubris always catch up to you.

            Elvira’s first interaction on screen might as well be a real life Hollywood producer in the news right now. In what must have been a nod to Ed Wood and the man who funded Bride of the Monster, Elvira discovers that the television station that airs her show has come under the new ownership of a rich Texas businessman. He takes one look at her and immediately puts his hands on her, playing the victim when he is rejected and humiliated on live television. “I thought you said she was a nympho!” he exclaims. We are introduced to Elvira drawing her line of consent, and a man crosses it because of how she looks and what he has heard about her possible sexual past. Now, where have I heard that one before? Oh, right, it was from Lisa Bloom just a day ago (as of this writing) threatening Rose McGowan with the “She’s No Angel Herself” card. Elvira has ambitions and integrity, and she isn’t going to let even a man this powerful stand in her way or grope her. She quits, and she does so without being entirely certain that she has the money to finance what she has planned for the next stage of her life. She sets off on that journey in an opening credits montage that collects many more of the daily struggles of women in society and then seeks to tear them down completely. She picks up an ax-wielding hitchhiker, the archetype of the slasher villain preying upon young women, and she sends him screaming into the night because she shows him aggression and does not fear him. She dispels the notion that any woman who looks like Elvira can get out of a speeding ticket, but she presents it as a failure to get a laugh rather than a failure to use her physical advantages. A gas station attendant refuses to serve her and ignores her advice, leading to his own downfall as the gas station explodes in a ball of fire. An Amish couple in a horse and buggy look at her and smile, both seemingly envious of her freedom for their own different reasons. Maybe they’re just being the unconditionally polite and religious people they are, but you have to wonder about that when you see where Elvira is headed next. Her car breaks down in the small, repressed town of Fallwell, Massachusetts, “A Decent Community.” The name is either a clever mockery of Jerry Falwell or a made-up parody of the city of Falmouth and mere coincidence. I’d like to believe the former. The kindly old mechanic, nice to her face, waits until she leaves to mutter, “Nice tits.” He’s a gentleman, but he’s not too old or too blind. The woman running the local motel doesn’t want to rent Elvira a room simply because of how Elvira looks, and the old woman’s husband can’t stop looking. It becomes clear in an instant that this is a town where abstinence-only education is the only sex education. Repression is the norm. Upholding a façade of a wholesome community has drained away the town’s ability to enjoy life, and these people have become slaves to their own archaic traditions. Elvira becomes the object of desire for a lot of pent-up men both young and old, she becomes the inspiration of young men and women trying to discover their own freedom and self-image, and, perhaps most importantly, she becomes the target of people in power and in charge of the local community. She triggers jealousy, inhibition, and insecurity in the ruling townspeople that is so strong that they are willing to deny reality and burn her at the stake as a witch. They are willing to destroy her because she makes them reflect upon their own lives in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable. To the ruling class of Fallwell, Elvira is a witch, a monster. They don’t truly believe that this could be possible because they are caricatures of blatant hypocrites, and they are no less inclined to exploit corruption and evil influence to take the easy route to get rid of their problem. Meanwhile, we see the “sympathy for the monster” in the teenagers of Fallwell, the young and innocent people who are struggling with identity and see Elvira as something new and strange. They see, to some extent, what is on the inside and recognize that the outside is an extension of it not to be confused or separated.

            In her horror host persona, she is a supernatural being. The make-up implies that she is one of those fictional immortals, but what, here, is Elvira in relation to the concept of the classic monsters? In Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, she is descended from the supernatural, but she is subject to mortality just as any other human or monster would be. The truth, however, is something beyond the concept of the monster. Elvira is 100% free-thinking, free-acting woman, not to be pursued without consent. I’ve heard plenty of “macho” men in my lifetime describe this as a monster and do everything in their power to weaken or destroy it. Just look at any Republican meme about Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter what you think of her politically or even as a person. The example is valid and prevalent. Elvira, in this movie, is reviled by the townspeople for her strengths. Society has done a bang-up job portraying the free-thinking woman as more fragile, less capable, and less deserving than a man in this world, or, even worse, a threat to the status quo that men rule the world. Equality remains a fledgling concept to be fought for. While character actors like Beverly Garland struggled to lift more women up, they still were (are) portrayed more often in popular culture as the victim of the monster, the destructive harlot (which is not, for the record, synonymous with the unrepentant whore despite efforts to the contrary), or the princess in need of rescue, and it was predecessors to Elvira such as Dracula’s Daughter and Vampira who began embracing their supernatural power over the opposite sex and leveling the playing field. They would suggest, in some instances, that men were not necessary at all. They would put men’s weaknesses on display and challenge them, and they proved they needed to be challenged. Elvira took this challenge to a new level with humor that falls just in between self-deprecation and self-denigration. It depends upon the situation, but she has an entirely human expectation of her audience. She enjoys the attention and embraces her assets, but this is where the comedy ends. More specifically, this is where Elvira’s sense of humor ends if she believes that harmless and forgivable disrespect has become overt and deliberate. To look upon Elvira with any thought whatsoever is okay, but that’s where consent comes in immediately. You look at Elvira on her terms. She is exposing no more and no less than she feels comfortable exposing, and she expects to be seen. There are boundaries and limits even when the punchlines keep coming. We are allowed to keep laughing. We are allowed to keep looking. We are not allowed to stop thinking. We are not allowed to assume consent based on Elvira’s behavior or words. If you spy on her without permission, she will give you a reprimand. If you judge her on looks alone, touch her without permission or try to force yourself on her, then she may “tie your weenie in a granny knot.” She doesn’t suffer fools or injustice unless her free will dictates it ultimately harmless to her. All the while, she encourages others to fight for their own free self-image while fighting the injustices that come at every turn of her own. She inspires me to do the same.

            And then there’s Edie McClurg. I have loved Edie McClurg with a passion since the first time I saw her in Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie. I had the rare pleasure to see her perform stand-up comedy on television one night many years ago, and she is hysterically funny. This, however, made me a little sad that she was typecast so often despite being capable of so much in comedy, but she absolutely shines as Chastity Pariah. Her role on Small Wonder, Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark are, for the most part, the same person. Edie McClurg’s Chastity Pariah is the Anti-Elvira, making this the most essential portrayal of her character, typecast or not. Elvira has many enemies, but Chastity Pariah is the woman who thinks she is on equal footing in her community. She thinks she calls the shots, but she has surrendered her womanhood to the façade of the wholesome community. She believes in her false power so strongly that she will do anything to defend it. She places the blame for the corruption of her community’s children upon Elvira rather than to look at the children themselves, see problems Elvira has uncovered, and think about what needs to be addressed and discussed. She refuses to look beneath the surface of Elvira, and she, like the local motel owner and many of the other women in town, judges on looks and reputation alone. She thinks and acts as though she knows what is best for everyone, but she negates that when she never takes a single moment to think about what might be good for herself. And when Elvira takes her “revenge” on Fallwell in the form of a witch’s recipe for Ecstasy casserole at a community potluck lunch, showing them all that they are free human beings and not draconian robots, Chastity Pariah gives in to herself more than anyone. She proves to be the most repressed and pent-up, the least capable of exercising any real personal freedom. When the orgy is over, Chastity Pariah and her ruling class see it as a violation rather than a possible self-awakening. They continue to deny the truth within themselves despite having it drawn out of them, insisting that they were forced to do something they didn’t want to do and even turning on each other for taking part in it. I’m sure someone could make a counter-argument that this was blurring the line of consent and the equivalent of taking advantage of someone drunk at a party, but I think the movie makes it fairly clear that Elvira was giving them a taste of freedom from themselves. And this result wasn’t Elvira’s intent in the first place; it was supposed to be a reptilian creature, but she fudged the recipe.

            I could have watched two or three more movies for my October horror film festivities tonight, but instead I spent the rest of the moonlight hours fleshing these mid-movie thoughts into something more coherent. I can put too much thought into the possible underlying messages of things, but I think that I finally see this movie exactly as it was meant to be seen. I like to think I always have seen Elvira the way she wants to be seen. Elvira herself says that she wants to be remembered by two simple words… “any two, as long as they’re simple.” Those two simple words are Cassandra Peterson, an amazing comedian, performer, kindred spirit and matron saint of movie lovers. And I’ll give you three more words for good measure: Icon. Hero. Legend.