Elvira’s Movie Macabre (1981–86).
At the end of a long corridor, a door creaks open to reveal a blinding light and a thick fog. The figure of a woman appears, as if from the beyond. Foreboding organ music accompanies her sashay toward us, cobwebs breaking against her ample curves. Lightning cracks, a wolf howls, and we are delivered to the black void of a soundstage, illuminated by gothic candelabras, with a red Victorian couch at its center, on which Elvira lounges, cooing little come-ons and giggling at her own jokes as she introduces this week’s feature, Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973).
Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira is part Sunset Strip stand-up comedian, part Southern belle, part self-effacing ditz, and part glamorous Hollywood host. Peterson conceived of her as a vampiric bombshell with a valley-girl punk affect and a Ronette’s mass of teased-up hair. Her dress was short, black, and low-cut, and her Kabuki-inspired makeup accentuated Peterson’s cheekbones to create a face that was a little corpse-like, a little New Wave. Elvira’s weekly television show, Elvira’s Movie Macabre, aired locally in the Los Angeles area from 1981 to 1986 and eventually spun off into a series of VHS releases, two feature films, a CBS pilot, a string of Tonight Show appearances, ad campaigns for Coors Light and Mug Root Beer, two revival series, and a streaming special. Peterson made Elvira into one of the gods of 1980s American entertainment, sitting atop Mount Olympus alongside the likes of ALF, Mr. T, and Pee-wee Herman.
Elvira’s infectiously lovable comic persona could breathe new life into a B movie twenty years past its expiration date, and she had a knack for introducing bygone media to her viewers. On Movie Macabre, which aired at midnight on Saturdays and replayed on Sundays, she would comment before and after commercial breaks with puns and double entendres that were corny, yes, but also properly horny, with frequent reference to her bulging cleavage. Before a commercial break, she lets viewers know she’ll be right back after the sponsors get something “off their chest.”
Peterson had been a member of the Groundlings, the famed Angeleno improvisational comedy troupe. Fellow alumnus John Paragon—who would later appear as Jambi the Genie on Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–90)—played a recurring obscene phone caller called “The Breather.” The sharp attitude and style of the Groundlings shines on Movie Macabre—broad humor, precise comic delivery, and a literate cultural intelligence—helping it achieve a level of irony and acerbic hipness that set it apart from the other local horror hosts who still haunted the airwaves throughout the ’80s.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988).
Horror hosting as we know it began in 1957 with Universal Studios’ Shock Theater syndication package, which included 52 films made before 1948, including such classics as Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein (both 1931), as well as lesser-known fare like The Strange Case of Doctor RX (1942) and Weird Woman (1944). This was followed by Son of Shock, released by Columbia Pictures’ television subsidiary in 1958, which included twenty more films from the back catalogues of both Universal and Columbia. These would usually be broadcast late on weekend nights, often introduced by a costumed host whose act could give the recycled media a degree of freshness. A capable host could recontextualize an all-but-forgotten exploitation film such as Captive Wild Woman (1943) as something new and, in a way, implicitly postmodern, playfully prying open its closed, fictive sovereignty, making us aware of its artifice.
While the idea of an external and internal narrative commentary was not wholly new to the dramatic arts—consider the chorus of the Greek tragedy, or the benshi who speak alongside silent films in Japan—the tone of the commentary that typically accompanied Shock Theater was distinctly contemporary. In the first half of the 1950s, EC Comics published Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror: three horror titles that had a decisive influence on the first generation of horror hosts before a moral panic linking their gory tales to juvenile delinquency forced their abrupt discontinuation. Each presented short stories, often moralizing in character, and each was “hosted” by its own principal narrator: the Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper, and the Old Witch, respectively, though all made appearances in the others’ books. The Crypt-Keeper introduced and closed out his stories with puns and turns of phrase that were both morbid and funny, referring to a particularly gory climax as a “shattering ending” that was “really side-splitting!”
The late 1950s and early ’60s represented the height of monster mania in the United States, and magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, published by James Warren and edited by Forrest J. Ackerman, served as important supplements to the films that Shock and Son of Shock were serving up. In the pages of Famous Monsters a sort of monster hipster speak was codified, filled with self-referential aggrandizement and plays on words. “For every tick there’s a tock,” Ackerman writes in the first issue. “If you want to know what makes monsters tick, why they’re such a click and even why YOU get such a kick out of them, you've come to the right magazine.”
Top: Disc-O-Teen (1965–67). Bottom: Svengoolie (1979–present).
Throughout the late 1950s and ’60s, horror hosts flourished on local television channels; different cities boasted their own undead heroes who would bring films to a devoted audience every week. The early greats represented a bizarre cadre of ghouls, vampires, and weirdos. There was the muttering, cantankerous, vampiric mad scientist Zacherley (John Zacherle, who moved from Philadelphia’s WCAU, where he had been known as Roland, to New York’s WABC), who would interact with a variety of creatures in his cheesy lair and laugh in a jolly yet unsettling manner. Later came Svengoolie on Chicago’s WCIU, a counterculture clown who wore skeleton makeup, a mustache, and a goatee, rounded out with a top hat and a mass of black hair. On his loose-format program, he leaned heavily into parody and schtick. All of them were indebted to Vampira, the progenitor of the horror-host form, whose Los Angeles program predated the Shock Theater package by a year. Later immortalized in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) and in a song by the horror-punk group The Misfits, Maila Nurmi’s Vampira was an image pulled from the deepest corners of the teenage subconscious: a vampire with an impossibly tiny waist, severe eyebrows, long nails, and a porcelain-like pallor. She delivered her lines in a disaffected drone, part living-dead affect, part bored-to-death malaise. Like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster or Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Vampira presented something simple and elemental lurking in the human mind, a perfect intersection of sex and death, painted with strokes broad enough for anyone to see and feel.
The presence of such hosts could be spooky, but also comforting; they were there with you, watching the film, making a solitary act communal. Monster mania reached its apotheosis with Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s enduring classic “Monster Mash” (1962), the ABC sitcom The Addams Family, and the CBS sitcom The Munsters (both 1964–66), in which the nuclear family was reimagined as Frankenstein’s monster, a vampire, and a young werewolf to impressive comic results. Once the phenomenon peaked the fever broke, horror fan magazines, comics, and television shows declined. Many horror hosts tailored their skills to animation programs, disco dance contests, and radio. Though some—like Tampa Bay’s Dr. Paul Bearer, New Orleans’s Morgus the Magnificent, and Indianapolis’s Sammy Terry—maintained their programs throughout the 1970s and ’80s, by the time Elvira arrived on the scene, the format was ready for an update.
After the death of KHJ’s longtime Fright Night horror host, Larry Vincent, the producers sought to revive the format with a female lead. They approached Nurmi about rebooting The Vampira Show with a new, younger host. She wanted a serious actor to play the part and suggested Tony-winner Lola Falana for the role, who would have been the first Black horror host. The producers refused, which led to Nurmi quitting the project entirely. After putting out a casting call, KHJ found Peterson, a model with some small acting roles to her name, including an uncredited part in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972). Peterson’s first idea was to present a valley-girl character she had developed during her time in The Groundlings in the fashion of Sharon Tate from Roman Polanksi’s Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). In the end, Peterson, with the help of her costume-designer friend Robert Redding, went with something more familiar: a sexy vampire.
Elvira bore a close resemblance to Vampira. At the top of every episode, Vampira appears at the end of a long, dark, fog-filled hallway, strewn with cobwebs and candelabras, and moves toward the camera. A key difference is that Vampira greets the camera with a blood-curdling scream, whereas Elvira exudes a come-hither allure—pure shock versus pure seduction. Nuri sent a cease-and-desist order to the new show and later sued Peterson for stealing her likeness. The court ruled in Peterson’s favor stating, “Likeness means actual representation of another person’s appearance and not simply close resemblance.” Despite the obvious influence, Elvira became a more complete character than most horror hosts, with a singular comic finesse.
Part of the appeal of many of Peterson’s predecessors was their slapdash approach, full of those sometimes charming, sometimes excruciating hiccups of live TV. Hosts like the muttering Zacherley, or The Bowman Body of Petersburg, Virginia, who came off like an undead Bob Newhart, presented audiences with fairly raw and improvisatory performances. It was exciting, even endearing, when a gag wouldn’t go quite right or when a pause lasted just a little too long. This wasn’t the case on Movie Macabre, where Peterson’s jokes and commentary were smooth and concise; the anarchic weirdness of Morgus the Magnificent or Svengoolie was replaced by a well-rehearsed character doing polished bits. Elvira derided the schlock she showed as “the worst of the worst”, but she implicated herself as part of the films’ seedy worlds. While hosting The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973) she claims to have attended the wedding, invited by “the organist.”
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988).
In 1988, after five popular seasons of Movie Macabre, the refinement of Peterson’s Elvira character was put on display in her first film, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, written again with John Paragon. In the mold of Tim Burton and Paul Reuben’s visionary Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)—which features Peterson and Paragon in small roles—much of the humor is grounded in the assumed acceptance of the character’s radical idiosyncrasies. The entire film seems to be riffing on the idea of a star vehicle. Elvira arrives in an unsuspecting small town in a customized convertible—like a goth Barbie—and proceeds to shake up the conservative establishment. There’s a touch of Mae West bawdiness to the jokes, but the majority of the film’s humor radiates from a deeper level of diffuse parody, in which the innocence of a show-must-go-on heartwarmer like Summer Stock (1950) is suffused with the ’80s sexual mania of Revenge of the Nerds (1984) or Zapped! (1982).
Elvira never completely disappeared from pop culture, but other talents stepped into hosting roles. Monsters, mad scientists, and the undead were no longer in the anchor seat, though. TNT’s MonsterVision (1991–2000) boasted Joe Bob Briggs (played by the film critic John Irving Bloom), a Southern intellectual who waxed philosophical about the junk movies he showed outside his trailer. USA Network introduced Commander USA’s Groove Movies (1985–89), featuring a cigar-chomping retired superhero who showed movies from his “Video Vault” beneath a suburban mall. The format continued into the 1990s in a modified form, with shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–2000) and Beavis and Butthead (1992–97). Unlike horror hosts of the past, whose jokes would also celebrate the monsters on screen, lending them a type of horror celebrity, these Gen-X creations did away with any reverence for the media that made up the bulk of their programs. Instead of saving their commentary for introductions and commercial breaks, they would interrupt the action, mercilessly riffing on movies and music videos as they played. Eventually, the last vestiges of this framework gave way to a glut of reality TV and talking-head comedy shows like Talk Soup (1991–2002), I Love the ’80s (2002), and Tosh.0 (2009–20), where commentators’ dissection of media was front and center.
This doesn’t mean that horror hosting is six feet under. Far from it. These days, one need only browse YouTube to find a motley collection of DIY ghouls recording and uploading their own shows. There is New Castle After Dark, a sober affair hosted by “The Management”—two guys who dress like magicians at a sex club, smoking, swilling Guinness, and putting on aristocratic airs. Or Creature Features, also carried on select local television stations, in which a “has-been rockstar” hosts movies from his haunted mansion, a set with a Spirit Halloween–level production value. Many of these new hosts’ fashion senses and attitudes draw on rockabilly and steampunk, evincing a confluence of ’50s and ’60s nostalgia with more recent subcultural affinities. Over the years, at conventions and through tape trading, the memory of horror hosts was kept alive by fans, and it seems quite appropriate that they’ve now inherited this time-honored tradition.