Elvira, the vampy, campy horror hostess with the enormous, um, following, envisions an America ruled by an army of her clones, one in every shopping mall and car wash.
When she had an “open casket call” last summer, 2,000 women (and men!) applied for the job.
“It was insane!” she says.
The results can be seen beginning at 9 p.m. Saturday when “The Search for the Next Elvira” starts a three-week run on the Fox Reality Channel that ends on (of course!) Halloween.
Even by Elvira’s generous standards, things got a little bizarre — for instance, the woman wearing a straw peasant hat and a veil who ran up and down the stage shrieking in Chinese until security men tackled her.
“She didn’t make the cut,” Elvira says.
But bizarre is pretty much the norm for Elvira, who’s spun a 26-year career out of a swooping Goth mini-dress, double-entendre wisecracks (her dream date: “the guy with the biggest bulge — I’m referring to his wallet, of course”) and an undying affection for scruffy little horror movies.
From a gig hosting movies such as “Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks” and “Werewolf of Washington,” former Vegas showgirl named Cassandra Peterson has turned Elvira into a haunted-household word: a syndicated TV star with three movies of her own, a string of lucrative commercial endorsements, lines of CDs and DVDs, and even a couple of pinball machines named after her. So, for that matter, is the computer system in the Stealth bomber.
It all started when an L.A. TV producer saw her do a couple of comic sketches in 1981 with the Groundlings, an improv-comedy troupe, and invited her to audition for a job hosting horror movies at his station KHJ. “I got the part. Then he said, ‘Come up with a spooky look,’ ” she says.
The look — black wig, moonbeam makeup accentuated with panda eye shadow and the tiny dress, undergirded by an industrial-strength bra, that showed off those Vegas legs and cleavage — was Elvira’s. The movies were KHJ’s, backlot quickies with cheapie zombies and vampires that came packaged with the more expensive films KHJ wanted to buy.
“There was no ‘picking’ involved,” Elvira hoots at a question about who chose them. “We got them out of Dumpsters in the back of the building.”
In two beats of a bat’s wings, her show was nationally syndicated as “Movie Macabre.” It lasted until 1993, not that there’s any lack of demand for Elvira now.
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“I notice people about 30 years old and younger who come up and say, ‘Are you the real Elvira?’ ” she says.
So here she is with a reality show in which aspiring young Elviras will face challenges just like the contestants on “Survivor,” except these will involve “furry little rodents and creepy crawling things and coffins, getting buried alive — and lingerie, of course,” she says.
“They will also have to be fearless and have a fantastically cheesy sense of humor and real true love of the horror genre. … It’s not all about what a great figure they have. Although they’ve got to have that too.”