Episode 414: Elvira, Folk Horror, “Shaun of the Dead”

Featured in this Show

• Cassandra Peterson reveals the woman behind Elvira, Mistress of the Dark

  Download

  Cassandra Peterson has spent the last 40 years playing Elvira, the Queen of Halloween, and the self-proclaimed “Horror Hostess with the Mostess.” And she’s become a pop culture icon along the way.

  Peterson hosted the popular syndicated TV series “Movie Macabre.” She also co-wrote and starred in two feature films, “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” and “Elvira’s Haunted Hills.”

  But, there’s so much more to Peterson’s story than her alter ego.

  She’s released a memoir, called “Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark.” It’s a funny, touching, and ultimately revealing look at how a little girl from Manhattan, Kansas became a horror icon. As she says, “the drama began only a year and a half into her life.”

  “My mother was dying Easter eggs, and she was outside, and we had a bunch of eggs boiling in a big cast iron kettle on the stove,” Peterson told WPR’s “BETA.” “I pulled a chair over, climbed up to look in at whatever was bubbling around there on the stove and must have lost my footing because I grabbed the pot and pulled it over on me,” Peterson recalled.

  Thirty-five percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.

  “And back in those days, 25 percent of your body burned third-degree was considered not survivable,” she said. “So it was really kind of a miracle that I lived through that.”

  In her memoir, Peterson writes that after the accident, she felt like a misfit with her burns and scars. But that feeling of being an outsider led to her love of horror.

  “Kids made fun of me and teased me and bullied me about my scars, and I became very shy and withdrawn,” Peterson said. “And at one point, sometime between the second and third grade, my cousin Danny took me to see my first horror movie, ‘House on Haunted Hill,’ and it just changed my life. I’ve talked to other people, fans, some who have scars or disabilities. And I guess they kind of see a fellow creature in horror movies that they feel like it’s them.”

  At age 14, Peterson left an unhappy home where she was emotionally and physically abused, and within three years she was performing at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas as the youngest showgirl in town.

  She decided to pursue a career as a show girl because of the 1964 film, “Viva Las Vegas,” starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret.

  “When I saw it, it was like some kind of epiphany,” she said. “This is what I want to do, I want to go to Vegas, I saw there were showgirls in the movie. I’d never even heard of showgirls or knew what they were. And suddenly I became obsessed with wanting to be one.”

  While she was working in Las Vegas, she met celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Tom Jones, but it was really her encounter with the King that marked a turning point in her life.

  Presley watched Peterson perform in Las Vegas. After the show, she attended a party in his hotel suite.

  “And when I met him, we began talking, and we talked for the entire night,” she recalled. “I mean, until the sun came up the next day, and he talked about everything in life. I told him I was in Vegas because of him. And he told me that it was no coincidence. And he got very heavy with a lot of things about astrology, numerology just having things happen because you want them to happen. And later he told me that he thought I should get the hell out of Vegas because I was too young to be there. And there was no place for a young girl. And it was kind of depressing because I thought I had, you know, finally achieved my dream of a lifetime. And that’s where I would be until I became the oldest showgirl in Vegas, which would be now. And that would be really old.”

  Presley also gave her advice: “He said, ‘You have a decent voice. Why don’t you take singing lessons and maybe, you know, get in a band or learn to be a singer?’”

  Because the King is the King, Peterson took his advice. She took singing lessons and before long, she was singing in her show. She left the show for Europe and joined a pop band in Italy where she sang.

  During her time in Italy, Peterson also appeared in a Fellini film. Eventually, she returned to Los Angeles which led to four and a half years working with the legendary improvisational and sketch comedy troupe, The Groundlings. She worked with the late comedian and “Saturday Night Live” star Phil Hartman and Paul Reubens, alias Pee-Wee Herman.

  “It was absolutely invaluable. I’d been toying around with comedy acting for several years before that, but hadn’t really gotten an opportunity to study it and think about it and learn more about it,” Peterson said. “So The Groundlings was absolutely the best place I could have found myself. I am terrible at remembering lines that were just absolutely awful at memorizing, so I thought, Oh, this is fantastic, you just make it up as you go along.”

  In 1981, Peterson auditioned for a gig as the hostess of a weekend horror show on the local Los Angeles TV station KHJ.

  “I think I was able to get the part because of my improv background, because the director really did want somebody who was sexy but also funny, and that wasn’t that in demand back in those days,” Peterson said. “So I think that the comedy improv lessons paid off in a big way for that interview. And obviously, I got it because here I am 40 years later, still doing it.”

  Peterson seems to be very proud of the fact that she became a pop culture icon later in life.

  She was 30 when she started portraying Elvira, which she jokes is over the hill for women in Hollywood. And since no one would represent her because of your age, she’s always declined to have an agent. One could argue Peterson has been subverting the patriarchy for her entire career.

  “That would be a nice way to look at it,” Peterson said. “I was able to get around not having an agent and just doing things more the way I wanted to do them, how I saw them. And I think that part is very similar to the character of Elvira because she pretty much gets herself into messes all the time. But then she gets herself out. She doesn’t need anybody’s help, especially a man.”

  In “Yours Cruelly, Elvira,” Peterson reveals she’s been in a 19-year relationship with Teresa Wierson, also known as “T.” Why did she want to disclose this information?

  “Well, I wanted to talk about everything in my life,” she said. “And I just turned 70 years old, and it’s like, ‘OK, if I don’t talk about this stuff now, when am I going to talk about it?’ But I’ve always kept my private life very private because I feel I’m protecting a character. It’s not me. If it was just me, the actress going out and doing roles on TV or in films, I’d tell people what my background was. But Elvira is a very well known straight horndog.”

  “And I didn’t want to inflict my personal life on her when I was married,” she continued. “I kept that quiet because I don’t think people wanted to look at Elvira and think, ‘Oh yeah, she’s actually at home with her husband and changing diapers on her baby.’ I don’t think people really wanted to know that. So the same thing with my relationship now. I just didn’t want to have that, nor have any reflection on be any reflection on the Elvira character.”

• The haunted history of folk horror: Filmmaker Kier-La Janisse on the growing subgenre

  Download

  What comes to your mind when you think of folk horror? Maybe that time Bob Dylan pulled out an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965? Well, that’s not the kind of folk horror we’ll be talking about here. We’re talking about a subgenre of the horror film.

  It’s a genre that author and critic Kier-La Janisse made an expansive documentary called “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.” The film explores the history of folk horror from the 1960s to the present day. It features more than 50 interviewees and touches on over 200 films.

  Janisse joined WPR’s “BETA” from the festival circuit in Spain to talk about the growing subgenre and how to define it.

  “I think the basic definition you could use would be to say a horror film that takes place almost always in a rural environment that deals to some degree with folk customs, practices or beliefs,” Janisse said. “And that often features small, isolated communities. And often there is a clash of belief systems that will happen between insiders and outsiders from those communities.”

  In her documentary, Janisse identifies three films that make up the “unholy trinity of folk horror,” “Witchfinder General” (1968), “The Blood on Satan’s Claw” (1971) and “The Wicker Man” (1973).

  In “Witchfinder General,” Vincent Price portrays a witch hunter named Matthew Hopkins, based on an actual historical figure. The film takes place in 1645 during the English Civil War and finds Hopkins traveling around the English countryside collecting money from various villages to eliminate people accused of witchcraft.

  “The Blood on Satan’s Claw” takes place in England during the early 1700s. A farmer discovers a deformed skull buried in a field and the skull has a kind of demonic power over the young people in the village.

  “All the schoolchildren start to become affected,” Janisse explained, “and that film is very focused on the youth revolt and what happens when this community of kids stops following the rules.”

  The third film in the unholy trinity is “The Wicker Man,” and what Janisse says is probably the most well-known of the folk horror films.

  It’s about a police sergeant who travels to an island off the coast of Scotland named Summerisle to investigate the case of a missing young girl. The island is home to an isolated pagan community. Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) is the leader of the islanders who worship their ancestors’ pagan gods.

  While all three of these films are very different, Janisse says people look at “the tendrils of folk horror kind of stemming from those films in some way.”

  “There’s probably more British folk horror than from anywhere else,” she added, explaining that the British tend to be very nostalgic about the history of their homeland so folk horror is a kind of film they tend to gravitate toward.

  “If you think about Australia or America, for instance, our history is very upsetting and it’s dealing with genocide and slavery and things that are living issues,” Janisse explained. “These things have not gone away. When we look back on our own history, it’s not with this nostalgia. It’s something that’s met with shame and guilt and a lot of negative feelings.”

  Janisse said that one of the things that distinguishes American folk horror from the folklore of other countries is the vast size of the United States. As people created settlements throughout the country, regional types of folk horror developed.

  “As you start looking at the way that people move to Appalachia and moved out west and moved to the Prairies, you realize that there is actually a lot of American folk art. It doesn’t look anything like British folk horror necessarily. People didn’t call these films folk horror. But when you think about it, ‘Children of the Corn‘ is absolutely a folk horror film.”

  One of the most compelling parts of Janisse’s documentary occurs during the discussion of the Indian burial ground trope that became very common in 1970s horror films. Jesse Wente is a horror fan and the executive director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office.

  In the film, Wente points out that the Indian burial ground is a piece of fiction created by white settlers.

  “So many of the horror films that deal with the Indian burial ground are about people building their houses on an Indian burial ground,” Janisse said. “What Jesse talks about is this idea that the threat of thinking about the Indigenous people that have been displaced by colonization, the threat of that for the settlers is that they have to face the fact that they have displaced people and that that can happen to them as well.”

  As Wente said in the documentary: “I’ll tell you one other thing about the Indian burial ground, though, that I sort of like it because if non-Indigenous people are going to be afraid of the Indian burial ground, then I got news for you. It’s all Indian burial ground.”

  Janisse said it was chilling when Wente said it, but it became even more chilling when the documentary premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Quebec in July 2021. The festival screening occurred around the same time that the bodies of over 1,000 Indigenous children were being discovered at the former sites of residential schools all across Canada.

  “Bodies of kids that were forcibly taken from their communities and put into residential schools with the aim of assimilating them into white culture by punishing them if they use their own language, not allowing them regular communication with their families in their communities,” Janisse elaborated. “And so many communities were just broken up and displaced and disconnected from each other. People have often talked about it as just creating that disconnection was an act of genocide in its own. It’s something that definitely creates the kind of anxiety that’s going to show up in horror films like this.”

  Over the last 10 years, there’s been a resurgence of folk horror films including Robert Eggers’ “The Witch” and Ari Aster’s “Midsommar.” Unlike earlier folk horror films, these newer films are deliberately folk horror.

  Janisse said one of the reasons for the resurgence in folk horror films is that there are definite similarities between the 1970s and our present era, as Howard David Ingham points out in the film.

  “He talks about the president being crazy. He talks about the environmental crisis. He talks about the rise of interest in occultism and everyday witchcraft and even the European referendum. Even that is in common,” Janisse said.

  She continued, “I think that there was more of a desperation about it in the 70s. They’re like ‘I need something to be a support system for me because the world is collapsing around me and I don’t know what to do.’ And I feel like we’re going through a lot of that now. And COVID has definitely exacerbated that and increased that curiosity for people that feel like there is a reemergence of interest in folk culture and that the folk horror films are just part of that.”

• A rom-zom-com: How 'Shaun of the Dead' became a cult classic

  Download

  In the early ’90s, up and coming comedian, writer and actor Simon Pegg and wunderkind television director Edgar Wright were vaguely familiar with each other’s work as they circled one another in the U.K. media world. The two would finally collaborate on the 1996 mini-series, “Asylum” — a dark comedy about an assortment of English residents trapped in a countryside asylum.

  While they were working on “Asylum,” the horror video game, Resident Evil, was released and the two of them discovered the other’s mutual love for all things zombie. Both had grown up utterly fascinated by the George Romero zombie classic, “Night of the Living Dead,” and its sequels, “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead.”

  “They realized they were both fascinated with zombie movies, George Romero zombie movies,” author Clark Collis tells WPR’s “BETA.”

  When the actor and director collaborated again for the groundbreaking U.K. slacker series, “Spaced” in 1999, they created an episode based on Pegg’s character playing too much Resident Evil 2 and hallucinating to believe everyone around him was a zombie to be dispatched.

  Wright and Pegg had so much fun creating the zombie sequences of that episode that on the way home from filming one day, the two of them decided to write a movie. Five years later, they would release their cult classic, “Shaun of the Dead.”

  “They both enjoyed shooting this scene very much. And then in the taxi ride away from the studio, Edgar said, ‘You know, we should make a zombie movie.’ So, they made a zombie movie,” said Collis, who is the author of “You’ve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead was Brought to Life.”

  Collis clarifies that this wasn’t as simple as it sounds. Neither Wright nor Pegg had written a proper, studio-budgeted script before and faced financing hiccups and real-world hurdles including the tragedy of 9/11.

  Collis explains that Wright and Pegg decided to make “Shaun of the Dead” not only as a homage — as the title pun alludes — to the Romero films, but to actually set their film in the same Romero-verse of zombie films, only in London. The pair followed the zombie rules Romero created and laid out in his “Dead” films.

  “George Romero also established over time a set of rules to do with zombies. You know: if you get bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie; and so on and so forth,” Collis explained. “And so what’s interesting is, in a sense, you’ve got a strict framework, a strict set of rules.”

  Although they set out to make a comedic horror film, Collis states Wright and Pegg wanted it to be clear they weren’t spoofing zombie films. They were instead making a serious zombie film – with state-of-the-art special effects and generally shocking scares – that mined the comedic elements from the slackers trying to survive it.

  “They’re very adamant that it’s not a spoof of zombie films. What it’s a spoof of is the kind of Richard Curtis-written, London-set romantic comedies like ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral‘ and ‘Notting Hill,’” Collis said. “I think they thought that it would be funny if they took the zombie aspect of it very seriously and clashed that with the romantic comedy genre.”

  The two creators jokingly referred to their film as a “rom-zom-com.”

  “Shaun of the Dead” was a semi-autographical account of both of their lives. Pegg stars as the titular Shaun whose reluctance to grow up angers his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield). This part of the story was somewhat of a filmed apology from Wright to his ex-girlfriend, Karen Beever, for not being a considerate partner. Beever also served as a producer on the film.

  Making matters worse is Shaun works a dead-end job, only wants to hang out at the local pub and is hesitant to leave his best friend and flatmate, Ed, played by relative newcomer at the time, Nick Frost. This setup plays off the real-life era when Pegg and Frost lived together as they struggled to make it in the comedy/acting business.

  The film follows Shaun and Ed’s hilarious attempts to deal with the zombie apocalypse using only their slacker resources and Shaun’s attempts to use the situation to win Liz back.

  Like Romero before them, Wright and Pegg injected a sociopolitical theme into the film. If you watch the credits sequence and opening scenes carefully, you’ll notice the zombie-like way people act at their jobs and move as they navigate London.

  “The idea is that essentially the experience of living in a modern city is very similar to the experience of what it would be like in a zombie apocalypse anyway,” Collis said. “That people just sort of shuffle around, don’t pay much attention to each other. They can be quite isolating.”

  Wright delivers this theme with a cinematic masterstroke early in the film with a pair of one-shots. The first follows Pegg from his flat to the nearby bodega and back again brainlessly engaging with the shop owner and the people on the street. Wright recreates this exact same shot after the apocalypse has hit and Pegg never notices what has happened.

  Collis argues Wright’s directing flare is what keeps the film fresh and rewatchable all of these years later.

  “It’s something of a magical realist sequence,” he said. “Things like that are absolutely crucial to the visual look of the film and the style of the film and the comedy of the film. And yes, I’m sure, is a big part why the film was a success. And, you know, even more so why … it continues to be beloved over the years.”

  After the breakout status of “Shaun of the Dead,” Wright and Pegg briefly considered a sequel. Instead they, along with Frost, collaborated on an unofficial trilogy of films venturing outside zombies with 2007’s “Hot Fuzz” and 2013’s “The World’s End.”

  They did however earn the ultimate prize. After “Shaun of the Dead” reanimated interest in the Zombie film genre, Romero himself returned to his zombie-verse with 2005’s “Land of the Dead” and invited Wright and Pegg to have cameos as the undead.

  “George asked Edgar and Simon what they were going to do next, and they said they had this idea for a comedy which became ‘Hot Fuzz.’ And George Romero said, ‘Oh, so you’re escaping’ meaning, you know, you’re escaping the horror genre,” Collis said. “And I think this reconfirmed with Edgar and Simon that they were making the right move to move on from horror.”

  Collis said he feels the legacy of the film is that it still holds up today. He also argues that because the film is so dense with horror homages and jokes that it remains eminently rewatchable.

  “You could watch it and be like, ‘I’ve seen this film 117 times and I did not notice that little thing. I did not notice that little joke.’ Or maybe that there are so many jokes that I did notice it on the seventh time of viewing,” Collis said. “I think there are a lot of comedies from that period that have not aged well, and I actually think this gets more and more impressive with each passing year.”