Horror, for me, has to involve some sort of fantasy. Horror is something that is in your dreams or your nightmares.
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.
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.
I always say there are no coincidences.
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.
I have a lot of good days I'd like to relive.
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 knew I would grow up and wear a costume one day, and that's exactly what happened.
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.
[Vincent Price] taught me how to cook fish in my dishwasher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ive made a career off of Halloween.
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?
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.
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.
One of the things that's kind of persistent is that I am the model on the cover of Tom Waits' album, Small Change.
[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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
