NEW YORK (AP) — Cassandra Peterson has entertained Halloween lovers as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, for more than four decades.
Peterson developed the character in the 1980s, after leaving her career as a showgirl — a decision she credits at least in part to Elvis Presley, whom she says essentially saved her life.
“He absolutely changed my life, 100%. I was a showgirl in Las Vegas. I was 17 years old, and he said, ‘This is no place for a 17-year-old girl. You need to get the hell out of here,’” Peterson, now 74, recalls. Presley told her she had a nice voice and could become a singer.
“And I was like, seriously? Really? But when Elvis tells you something, you think, maybe I can do this,” says Peterson, who did indeed do a stint as a singer.
After Peterson turned to comedy, a local television station in Los Angeles took a chance on her, hiring her to be a horror host. Her instructions? “Put together what you want and just do it,” as she remembered in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
And thus was born Elvira, with her signature towering black hair and plunging cleavage — a look that she was personally comfortable with but, at the time, was considered particularly risque.
“I mean, now everybody, every time you turn on the Grammys or the Tonys or whatever, everybody’s got that neckline. But back then it was like, ‘What?’” Peterson says.
After a successful run on television, Elvira hit the big screen with a series of feature films and guest appearances. Her cult following grew and led to more television and books. But there was one thing Peterson had on her wish list that she couldn’t get the greenlight for, until now: a cookbook.
“I decided I would be the ‘Martha Stewart of the Macabre,’” Peterson explains. “And I said to people, ‘This would be so fun to do an entertaining book only for my crowd, for my fans, for the goth crowd,’” she says. “And no publishers were down with that. … They said it was a Halloween book and there was already a million Halloween kind of cookbooks.”
Decades later, “Elvira’s Cookbook from Hell” is here, featuring spooky recipes for dinners, desserts, cocktails and appetizers. Peterson also fills the pages with creepy craft ideas, handwritten notes and photos of herself dressed as Elvira.
Peterson was involved in the book from start to finish.
“It was really hard, but I had a fabulous team that helped me,” she says. “We cooked all the recipes. Some did not make the cut. Some were not Halloween-y enough. Some were not goth enough. Some didn’t taste that great. And I really wanted everything in here to taste good. I didn’t want you to spend time making it and then go like, ‘Ugh. It looks scary, but it tastes horrible.’”
It’s not Peterson’s first book, though. That was “Yours Cruelly, Elvira,” a 2021 memoir that she says in some ways was easier to write, even if it did erode the separation between the flame-haired Peterson and the funereally campy Elvira — something she calls “the price of suddenly being myself.”
“Well, I’ve kind of totally killed my anonymity. And that was a fantastic thing to have for all those years, you know?” Peterson says. “I could go out, I could take my child to school, I could do shopping, I can do all of that without anyone looking at me twice, and now that I’ve put my autobiography out there and my children’s book and this book, I am getting recognized all the time.”
Nowadays, Peterson doesn’t inhabit Elvira often — her one regret is that she didn’t make her initial costume “a muumuu with flip-flops.”
“Because that’s why I quit being my character. I’m not kidding. It’s not about, ‘Can I get into it?’ It’s just about, like, ‘Girl, I don’t want to get into it,’” she says. “It is uncomfortable and tight. I mean, ask any drag queen. They’re not going to be wanting to do that stuff when they’re 74, I guarantee.”
