Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Long-Lasting Scars, and Topics of the Body

Warning: Some book spoilers for the memoir: Yours Cruelly, Elvira.

A few nights ago, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Ghouls Night In, and was delightfully surprised when the weekly topic finally seemed to land on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and her fondest memories, remembered in her newest book: Yours Cruelly, Elvira. I haven't gotten the chance to read the memoir yet, but I can not tell you how excited I am to hear more from the mastermind behind Elvira, Cassandra Peterson, and her legacy. Still, I was happy getting a little sneak peek at the podcast, and while listening to Midge's and Penny's witty and wonderful voices, they revealed a crucial detail about Elvira that I had never heard about: In her book, Cassandra Peterson reveals that she's been someone who struggled with body confidence due to some scaring from a childhood accident.

Cassandra goes on to explain what exactly happened; when she was only two years old, Cassandra received multiple burns from a boiling pot of water. Apparently, this accidental encounter with the pot, boiling on top of the stove, ended up scaring at least one-third of her skin, almost killing her. Years later, Cassandra would undergo many skin-grafting surgeries and admitted to using things like long hair and a certain dress design to help her feel more confident in her character. Helping her to move on from the insecurity.

I think a story like this shouldn't be as sensational, given the commonness of scars and the wrongful shame placed on them by a society obsessed with smoothing and beautifying the skin. However, due to Cassandra's creation of "Elvira" was birthed from a physically campy, comedic presence, the lingering history Cassandra still had to her showgirling past, and all being completely emitted to the slasher/horror universe, topics of the body seemed inevitable. A formable center to the entire web of topics that spidered themselves into such a notable essence: The darkly, eternal vibes of such a Mistress.

And truthfully, Elvira was one of the first people who taught me that the body was something to be played with. That its appearance, its girth of great and expanding fullness, changing its shape as rapidly as the cycling of breath, was something worth protecting against the litigated eyes of exploitation. Creatures who drool over the chance to mold your body's meaning with their green, algae-like hands - that is why you must claim it. You can not afford to wait for death, the sight of your corpse laying down on the silver table of medicine, and believe that the morgue is the only space appropriate enough to speak of what you own. Finally titling yourself the body's owner. A property only valued by a grave.

Declare it yours today. Write it down in the papered parts of your flesh and whisper into the deep folds of your stomach. The parts of you, that are hard to reach, and congregate in the back. Elvira teaches us that when words fail, when sentences or statements are misused or misunderstood for the rigid, understander's gain, then speak with movement. Draw out your boundaries by not denying the ownership of mounds, of trees, dangling down in the middle, but by your decision on how the skin should or shouldn't be reckoned with. How the desirables are recognized by the rest of the world and what they're even allowed to desire.

I think if anything, learning about Cassandra's childhood fears of her scars adds a lot more depth to the urgency we felt while waiting for someone like Elvira; an example of societal beauty monsterized and smashed by the recipient's own hands. To see someone's narrative of choice not only displayed physically upon the flesh, but to see the displayer strike the judgments against their freedom with humor, was not just a grounding-breaking thought, but an arsenal of hope. An example, beaconing an option I myself and others were unsure existed outside the dark walls of a self-hating cave? The prisoning chambers of our own shame and disgust, poison the joys we could feel from setting our own narratives. Our own conditions on what it means to be inconsequently and fleshly received.

The rules of the body, and the way it slithers beyond perception, could never be stripped away from your laws of comfortability. Even when society's gavel barks at you, loudly.