It might be tough to hear but Jeremy Dick of MovieWeb and others might need to hear this in regards to an Elvira revival being shut down: she needs to stay back in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, like a lot of young boys I took a look at Elvira and got a little excited since quite honestly she’s gorgeous in a very vampy and kind of trashy way, but at the same time she’s funny and can rock horror TV like no one else. But her time was back in the 80s and 90s where she was the most popular and young men and even grown men were prone to flipping out when they saw her barely concealed cleavage bounce onto the TV set. If guys are being honest and want to admit it they watched her show for her, not for anything else, and I’ll gladly state that yes, shew as the main attraction and that was how it was set up. But in this day and age we’ve moved beyond that kind of act a bit and the average viewer, while they might respond kindly to Elvira and manage to get into her type of humor, still wants a little more for their money than a bunch of one-liners from an admittedly fun lady wearing a lot of eye-liner.
It’s hard to criticize Elvira largely because she was a part of our lives while a lot of us were still growing up, and if some guys are honest she probably helped manage a few cases of early onset puberty in a very big way. She was a gimmick in a time when horror was still pretty campy and was trying to change and become more edgy, more punk, more serious and definitely more capable of scaring the living hell out of people. The movies that came out around this time existed on a broad spectrum, and she kind of did her own thing in relation to this, becoming a fixture that a lot of us cared about since she was fun, she was visible, and she was basically an icon during the 80s. It is a little surprising to see that Netflix doesn’t want to sign her up since it seems that this would be a worthwhile platform for her, but as far Shudder goes it seems to be kind of a ‘duh’ moment since Shudder seems more interested in the type of hardcore slasher movies and doesn’t really go in for the camp that Elvira tends to bring with her. It’s a hope it sounds like that Hulu or Showtime or HBO might want to take her on, but as Gina Carbone from CinemaBlend has written, it might be that we’ll see her in something else that could be a little more enticing.
Those of us that remember her 1988 dive into the theater titled Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, might start buzzing about a return to the big screen or at least a streaming network if she can make this work. It’s not a sure thing unfortunately but it does seem as though it might be on her mind at the very least. Would it work? That’s hard to say, since if Elvira really wants back in on the horror train then she’s going to have to get a bit edgier in her act and likely go all out when it comes to really giving the people what they want. If your mind went to that dirty place then stop it, I’m talking about the overall story and what she might have to do in order to really get people on board with the idea. The woman behind Elvira, Cassandra Peterson, is in her late 60s and while she’s still an attractive woman it’s not likely that we’d ever see the kind of extremes that some people might think about. But seeing her in another movie that builds off of the first one might be kind of nice since it could allow her to close out her career or perhaps pass the torch to another scream queen that might be deemed worthy, a character that might play a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter, or just an interested part. HBO could get down with a movie like that, right? Or if there’s room in their schedule for an Elvira show it might even be worth the effort of bringing her back and giving her the opportunity to bring some closure to the character.
Honestly though, Elvira does belong to a different era, and despite the 80s nostalgia we’ve seen running rampant in previous years it’s time to acknowledge that not everything needs to be brought back from that decade, and sometimes what we want to see needs to change just enough to fit into the current era. I’m usually the one saying don’t change the source material, but even I can acknowledge when things need to change just enough to fit in.
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