Cassandra Peterson
I had this grand idea that Elvira's kind of the Santa Claus of Halloween - at the malls, you'd have an Elvira there. Girls would dress as Elvira just like guys dress as Santa Claus, and it's not the real thing, but they'll pose for pictures, sign autographs. Of course, I couldn't go around to every mall, so we'd have to get more Elviras.
Horror, for me, has to involve some sort of fantasy. Horror is something that is in your dreams or your nightmares.
People think being Elvira is a lot of fun - and it is - but I was doing a lot more bizarre stuff before then, just being a dancer and a showgirl and traveling around Italy in a band and working for Playboy Club, and later being a model and meeting a million and one people and being kind of a groupie... It's all been really interesting.
Every year, I have to spend another hour working out. Pretty soon I'll be spending eight hours working out just to fit in the costume. I have the feeling that the minute I stop doing the character, boom, Roseanne Barr.
Women like to be scared, but they don't like the blood and the gore, and especially movies that have violence and torture involving women. Women don't want to see that, I can tell you for damn sure right now.
I am very, very anti-slasher.
To me, the scariest movie ever made to this day is 'The Exorcist.' It still scares the living hell out of me, and it's because of the fantasy element. It's the exorcism. It's the Devil. It's not a guy breaking into your house trying to torture you or cut your whatever off. Those kinds of movies don't do it for me, and I don't call them horror.
If ever there was a holiday that deserves to be commercialized, it's Halloween. We haven't taken it away from kids. We've just expanded it so that the kid in adults can enjoy it, too.
I've made a career off of Halloween.
How would Elvira run the state of California? Well, there isn't much I could do that is worse than what Arnold Schwarzenegger has done. Running it into the damn ground. If I was running the whole nation? I would have free Netflix movies for everyone.
It is so hard nowadays to find a movie that I like. I don't mind blood and gore. But I mind when its a slasher film, and its some guy looking for women. I am opposed to that kind of thing. Blood and gore? I love that kind of thing.
I would love to do something like 'Tosh.0,' where I host Internet clips. I did host 'Talk Soup,' which is similar. I love doing that, making fun of video clips on the Internet.
I knew I would grow up and wear a costume one day, and that's exactly what happened.
People always say, 'Who is your audience?' and I could never put a finger on it - and I wouldn't want to put a finger on it.
I love, love, love music - have since I was a kid, and I'm still really into music - and I became a singer because I was too stupid to learn how to play an instrument, I guess.
People come up to me at conventions and say, 'I was such an outcast, I felt like such a geek, and when I saw you, you made me feel like such a normal person.' It's my favorite thing to hear, because that's how I felt when I was a kid. If Goth would've been around, I would've definitely been Goth. But there wasn't such a thing, so I was just weird.Collection: Kids
If I retire doing the character, I don't think the character has to retire. There will still be caricatures of Elvira. You know, Dracula still works, and he's dead.Collection: Character
I always say there are no coincidences.Collection: Coincidence
I have a thing about underwear. I have to wear thongs. Since I was a showgirl in Las Vegas, and I was wearing G-strings all the time, I got this thing where I cannot stand to have on regular underwear. It drives me out of my mind.Collection: Vegas
I have a lot of good days I'd like to relive.Collection: Good Day
[Vincent Price] taught me how to cook fish in my dishwasher.Collection: Taught
I was your typical struggling actress. I went to every audition, took a million acting, dancing and singing lessons and spent years wondering where my next meal was coming from.Collection: Struggle
I can't tell you how exciting it was, because Vincent Price had made a huge impression on me when I was a little kid. I just loved him in films. And so meeting him and becoming friends with him was a big deal for me.Collection: Kids
Ive made a career off of Halloween.Collection: Halloween
I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff." Well, no such thing.Collection: People
One of the things that's kind of persistent is that I am the model on the cover of Tom Waits' album, Small Change.Collection: Small Changes
[Vincent Price] had a fish recipe where he wrapped [the fish] in aluminum foil and put in these herbs. And then you put it in the dishwasher and then you wash your dishes, and when you're done, your fish is steamed and it's perfect. But he was very sophisticated as far as art and food and all of that went.Collection: Art
I'm driving down the freeway the other day, on my way to Knott's Scary Farm probably, and I hear this report on NPR that the whole lemmings thing was faked in the 1950s. They were shooting a wildlife documentary in the '50s, they found a group of lemmings, and the crew chased them all off a cliff. No lemming has ever jumped off a cliff, purposefully, ever. Isn't that unbelievable?Collection: Npr
A lot of people bring it to me at conventions. At first I was going, "I can't sign that. That's not me." And now I just say, "Eh, whatever."Collection: People
People were really staying away from me. And that's kind of when I split up with all my best friends at school - they were going, "Something's happened to her, she's totally weird" - and found my new friends, who were Beatles fans.Collection: School
I love the old movies from my past, when I was growing up. I just have a special place in my heart for them. They kind of feel like comfort food to me, so watching them is just cozy and warm.Collection: Growing Up
I think, cumulatively, I probably have done more photo sessions than just about everyone. Maybe as much as a supermodel. I know they model all the time, but have they done it for 35 years? I don't think so.Collection: Thinking
When I was Elvira, it was probably the phase of my hair getting too high. I thought that if really high hair was good, then really higher hair was even better. So I just started having my hair get higher and higher. In some of the pictures, we had to cut off the picture because it was like Marge Simpson. So that was embarrassing. The wig phase.Collection: Cutting
I hate to sound cliché, but it would probably be the day my daughter was born. That was a pretty amazing experience.Collection: Daughter
I do not remember the '70s, for who-knows-what-all reasons.Collection: Remember
I got to do the Rose Bowl Parade - which is the largest parade in America - with a float. That was a fun opportunity.Collection: Fun
I believed that lemmings really jump off of cliffs.Collection: Lemmings
When Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark came out, I got to go to Japan and Australia and France, Italy, Germany, everywhere with the movie. That was great, because I love traveling.Collection: Dark
To me, the scariest movie ever made to this day is The Exorcist. It still scares the living hell out of me, and it’s because of the fantasy element. It’s the exorcism. It’s the Devil. It’s not a guy breaking into your house trying to torture you or cut your whatever off. Those kinds of movies don’t do it for me, and I don’t call them horror.Collection: Cutting
I vaguely remember doing [all my] photo sessions, but definitely there were some surprises there for me.Collection: Remember
I'm really proud and happy that we finally got it together thanks to Tweeterhead, which is the company that put it together for me. It's something that I always wanted to do, but really did not have the time to work on myselfCollection: Together
It certainly changes your life. So that may be a cliché, but I think any woman would say that [day when her baby born] would have been the most special day of their life.Collection: Baby
I have a lot of good days I'd like to relive, but that [ the day my daughter was born] was one that's still with me.Collection: Daughter
I had these couple of hippie guy friends who were super broke and living in the attic of somebody's house and they were like, "We don't have any food, man." And so I decided to go to the grocery store and steal chicken pot pie. And I stuck it inside my clothes. I took a couple frozen chicken pot pies and stuck them inside my pants, and I got caught walking out of the store. And they took me in the back room, and - luckily, I was 14, but I had a fake ID saying I was 18, so they didn't call my parents.Collection: Couple
I just chased bands all over the country. The biggest one I saw was Jimi Hendrix.Collection: Country
I was a complete mod and had to wear mod clothes and have a Beatle haircut, and I tried to talk in a Liverpool accent.Collection: Clothes
I can't stand VPL, visible panty line. So I'm wondering how many other people out there are wearing thongs.Collection: People
I've met a lot of famous people. I'm lucky enough to have been able to be Elvira. I would probably have to say the most famous is probably Elvis Presley, though. I spent an evening, a night, and part of the next day with him.Collection: Night
The biggest surprise was a picture my mom sent me, just about the time that we were about to wrap up the book, of me as a 5-year-old dressed in my first Halloween costume that she made for me. I said, "What's this? I never saw this photo." And she said, "We made you this black-and-orange Halloween costume out of crepe paper" - we were too poor to have fabric back then - "and you wanted to go as the Queen Of Halloween." And I was like, "What?" And she said, "Yeah, the Princess Of Halloween, the Queen Of Halloween, something like that.Collection: Mom
People think, "Oh my god, you've been doing this job for so many years, it must get boring." It's like, "No, hell no," because I get to sing, I get to dance, I get to be on TV and in films, I get to do merchandising, licensing, show up at conventions, write, or take photographs for my book. There are so many different things going on for me that it never gets boring. It's always fun and interesting.Collection: Fun