I’m going to start this article off by admitting a bias: I love Elvira.

I don’t know why, exactly. But like blue-jeans, my love of comics, and that weird clicking sound in my jaw when I eat, Elvira has been around since my childhood with no sign of disappearing any time soon.

I remember as a kid seeing her in beer commercials, as well as hosting horror films on television. And while her appearance was definitely memorable, there was something about her that really made her stand out. Well, two things, actually. Look hard. See if you can find them.

These days I understand her appeal: despite her provocatively slutty appearance, Cassandra Peterson, the woman who plays Elvira, cleverly cultivated a non-threatening, goofy personality that cuts through the sex appeal and makes the character, well, a lot of fun.

Plus she has big boobs. That always helps.

So what’s Cassandra’s story? More than just a slammin’ bod, Peterson joined the well-respected comedy improv troupe the Groundlings in 1979, where she refined her comic skills that she’s so well-known for today. Shortly thereafter, she took a job as the hostess of horror movies on a local Los Angeles television station. She was such a success that she became the first horror host to be nationally syndicated, and soon the whole country knew who Elvira was.

This success led her to star in her very own movie, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, which she co-wrote, and it quickly became a staple of local programming around Halloween.

Since then she has been everywhere for almost three decades. She has starred in national commercials for Pepsi and Coors, made hundreds of appearances on talk shows and variety shows, and been a Halloween staple in America and abroad. According to her website, the Elvira costume is the most purchased female Halloween costume of all time. And wouldn’t you know, beneath all the vampy Elvira drag, there’s quite a lovely lady underneath.

Elvira even jumped on the reality show bandwagon in 2007 with The Search for the Next Elvira. But fear not, fans, this was not an indication that she was ready to slow down, merely a way to find other Elviras to make live appearances. After all, there’s no replacing the real deal.

All signs point to the fact that Elvira is still in the thick of her career. She’s carved quite a unique niche in the entertainment world: she’s sexy without being threatening, and surrounded by spooky things but is never truly morbid. She’s adorable and clever, and I for one think we could all use a little more Elvira in our lives.

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Three and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

Jennifer’s Body is the second film from Juno scribe Diablo Cody, who once again puts her ear for snappy dialogue to use and turns it into the unbilled third star of her film.

As for the plot? Not as great, but more on that later.

For starters, what can I say that hasn’t already been said about Megan Fox, who plays the titular Jennifer? We all know she’s smoking hot. Her PR people have been unrelenting in their determination to brand her as a man-eating sex goddess, and her character in Body is really just an extension of that brand, with the focus being more on the man-eating, less on the sex goddess.

Still, you have to applaud Fox for taking a role which requires her to be covered in blood and gore and be, frankly, unhot for much of the time, when I’m sure she’s been offered dozens of roles that allow for unblemished skin all the way through the script.

Amanda Seyfried, who seems to be mostly overlooked in favor of Fox (which is true for their characters as well), really shines as Needy, the reluctant hero of this film. Anyone who saw Mama Mia knows how radiantly beautiful she is, and yet she spends the entire film in mousy glasses and unkempt hair, and no one makes a peep. Maybe gentlemen really don’t prefer blondes.

The plot, as I mentioned before, is uninventive — anyone who’s seen the previews knows Jennifer gets possessed by a demon and starts killing her male classmates — but I almost wonder if it was run-of-the-mill on purpose. After all, what makes this film fun, more than anything, is seeing Megan Fox go all Baraka-from-Mortal-Kombat on poor, unfortunate teenage boys.

The other enjoyable factor is, of course, Cody’s dialogue. I found myself cracking a big smile when Jennifer is tired of Needy’s mourning over the death of dozens of their friends from a fire and tells her to “MoveOn.org.”

Another memorable moment is when, while having sex with her boyfriend, Needy somehow psychically witnesses Jennifer murdering a boy, and she begins to scream and sob. Worried, her boyfriend asks if he hurt her, and then, with hope in his eyes, asks “Am I too big?”

It is in these moments when you have to surrender to Cody’s clever vision — a horror movie that’s fun. Twisted and dark, yes, but it never goes too long without a laugh. While it’s my belief that Cody will never find a better actor to deliver her dialogue than Ellen Page, Seyfried and Fox do an admirable job.

There is one thing that bothered me, though. Written by a woman, directed by a woman, with the two lead roles being women, it struck me as surprisingly exploitative in one particular scene in which the two girls, both of whom are sexually active with boys, have a nice little makeout session, and this is after Needy knows Jennifer is an evil demon.

It makes no sense, and is extremely unnecessary. Hints of their sexual attraction to each other pop up every now and then, but never as a sympathetic, realistic plot point — merely, it seems, as a way to titillate male viewers. In my head I pictured Diablo Cody writing this and thinking, “Okay, if I want boys to come see a girl-made horror film, I should give ‘em what they want: two hot chicks making out.”

Believe me, I am in no way against hot chicks making out (or anyone making out for that matter), but it seems like that’s the one time the film forgot it was self-aware. It actually could have been milked for comedy and been really funny by playing on the exploitative nature of cheesy horror films, but no … just close-ups of lips and tongues for no reason. Then Needy remembers Jennifer’s a demon and jumps away, and the plot picks up right where it left off, as if the kissing never happened. Bizarre.

A note to Diablo Cody: Your work is really good, and you should trust in it. You don’t need to go this route just to sell tickets.

All in all, if you’re into horror films, this is certainly one of the most original I’ve seen in a while. I recommend it, and make sure you stay for the credits to catch a satisfying epilogue.

Final thought: While the film takes place in a town called Devil’s Kettle, we’re never told what state it’s in, though from the sizable occult section in their school library, I’m guessing it’s probably located somewhere near Sunnydale, California.

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Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, not to be confused with the Rick Rosenthal-directed 1982 film of the same name, is set to debut this Friday. This is, as evidenced by the title, Zombie’s second Halloween film, the first one coming out in 2007 and being, of course, a re-imagining of the notorious 1978 slasher classic, John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Though up until now the movies had a mostly-vague continuity, everything was rebooted once Zombie took over, thus starting the story again from the beginning. When movie franchises go on this long and are sequeled, retconned, and reimagined within an inch of their lives and our wallets, it makes one a little cross-eyed. But maybe we’re just thinking about it too hard.

So what’s the skinny on the movie series named after the scariest night of the year? Well, on Halloween night in 1963, a 6-year-old boy named Michael Myers, for reasons no one could understand, brutally stabbed his teenage sister to death. He was locked away for the next fifteen years and studied by a psychiatrist named Dr. Sam Loomis, who concluded that the boy was simply pure evil. No condition, no mental illness, just evil in human form.

On Halloween in 1978, he broke out of his asylum and went after his younger sister, Laurie, who didn’t even know he existed, pausing along the way to slice and dice her friends. After a battle with the surprisingly plucky Laurie (during which she stabs him in the neck with a knitting needle, in the eye with a hastily unbent wire hanger, and in the chest with a knife), he is shot repeatedly by Dr. Loomis and then falls out a second story window.

But he lives.

The sequel picks up right where the first film left off, and in the end Michael is set on fire and seen dropping dead, engulfed in flames.

But he lives!

In other sequels, Michael is run over, shot a bajillion times, buried alive, and beheaded.

But still he lives!!!

So what’s the deal, really? Is he just so into killing people that he’ll take a bullet or two, or does it really not affect him?

Well, the beheading, which seems the most difficult to recover from, occurred in Halloween: H20, and was immediately retconned in the following sequel to show that Michael switched his clothes and mask with an EMT worker, and that EMT worker was actually the one who was beheaded. So that explains that “death.”

But as for the other instances where death seems inevitable, yet Myers lives on — what’s up with them?

Is he a zombie? Is he immortal? People can do unbelievable things when they’re psychopathic killers, but they can’t cheat death.

According to Debra Hill, Carpenter’s writing partner, Michael Myers is immortal…sort of:

“The idea was that you couldn’t kill evil, and that was how we came about the story. We went back to the old idea of Samhain, that Halloween was the night where all the souls are let out to wreak havoc on the living, and then came up with the story about the most evil kid who ever lived. And when John came up with this fable of a town with a dark secret of someone who once lived there, and now that evil has come back, that’s what made Halloween work. We didn’t want it to be gory. We wanted it to be like a jack-in-the-box.”

So there you have it, right from one of the writers of the original. At least as originally envisioned, Michael Myers was never meant to be merely a psycho with a knife - he was a force of and for evil.

And evil never dies.

Wooooooo….

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It’s no secret that most horror films follow pretty specific formulas (varying somewhat depending on their sub-genres — slasher, supernatural horror, thriller, etc.)

In fact, the idea of the formulaic horror film was even parodied in the classic self-aware horror movie Scream, a movie so chock-full of meta-consciousness that it even started its own horror sub-genre: scary movies that feature characters who have seen all the scary movies.

But perhaps no horror movie cliche is more observed and understood than that of the Final Girl — the lone female who survives to the end of the movie, long after most of the other characters have been killed, and inevitably confronts whatever Big Bad may be threatening her. It is with this character that we have come to discover the term “Scream Queen.”

The phenomenon is particularly noteworthy given that most other movie genres still either mostly ignore female characters, or portray them in superficial or stereotypical ways.

Perhaps the Final Girl that sparked the current trend in horror is Laurie Strode, a young babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis who was stalked by a masked serial killer in John Carpenter’s terrifying masterpiece Halloween.

In many ways, Laurie is the prototypical Final Girl: she begins the story as a normal, unassuming young woman, a student in high school, in fact. She often questions her own abilities just in everyday life.

But when the going gets tough (and her friends get hacked and slashed), she discovers an inner strength she didn’t know she had and becomes capable of fighting back against the bad guy, and often succeeds in vanquishing him.

In fact, it almost sounds like your standard Hero Myth.

So does this make the horror genre, well … feminist?

It’s true that these movies sometimes include scenes of women being victimized, enduring things that male characters are rarely subjected to — and sometimes seemingly for the “entertainment” of the audience.

And let’s face it: these movies are almost always written and directed by men.

But unlike almost every other film genre, women are usually the “movers” in horror films — the protagonists, the central characters who drive the action.

What a concept!

Some even see a kind of feminist symbolism at work: the killers, who are almost always male, symbolize the misogynistic hatred that some men have for women, and are often armed with a knife or stabbing instrument — a representation of the phallus in its most violent form — which they then use to murder the Other (women) along with their own rivals (men).

The Final Girl, in order to defeat the Killer, must then assume a phallus of her own — grabbing a butcher knife from the kitchen, finding a shovel in the garage — that she then turns upon the owner of the true phallus, the Killer/Man.

Once the Killer is slain, the Final Girl will often look with revulsion on her murder weapon — a symbol of her momentary descent into masculinity — before she casts it aside, hoping to never be forced to wield it again.

In many ways, this is unabashedly pro-female. And yet usually these movies are targeted to young, adolescent males, with the promise of not only gratuitous gore, but the high probability of seeing a young woman topless.

But that’s specifically slasher films. What of horror films that deal with the supernatural?

Recently, there was a spate of horror films based on Japanese movies, such as The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, etc. All of these films featured a woman as the protagonist who goes up against not a flesh and blood male killer, but evil spirits and ghosts.

Intriguingly, these films place the female’s intellect above all their other attributes — as the stories mostly involve them having to solve some sort of mystery in order to discover why they are being plagued by the restless evil dead.

But what about when women are also the antagonists? In 1968, Roman Polanski terrified the world with Rosemary’s Baby, a chilling demonic thriller about a young urban couple who move into a creepy old apartment building that hosts some eccentric neighbors.

Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, soon becomes pregnant, and is attended by her elderly neighbor Minnie, who, it later turns out, is conspiring with just about everyone else in Rosemary’s life to help bring the devil’s child — Rosemary’s child — into the world.

Never was a kindly old woman creepier.

And in 1996, goth high school girls had their day in the sun (or, more likely, their day hiding from the sun) when The Craft opened in theaters. The film featured four girls, all outcasts, who spend their day learning spells and magic, which they use to their own selfish ends.

When one of the girls, Sarah, realizes the harm they might be doing, the alpha girl of the group, Nancy, turns the other two against her, and the suspenseful plot leads up to an all-out magical battle as the two girls take each other on.

Despite the stereotype of horror films being a guy’s-movie type of film, anyone who’s gone to see a horror film in the theaters in the past decade knows that girls and women are extremely well-represented in the audience, often outnumbering the men.

Why would this be? Well, women no doubt enjoy seeing other women on the screen in powerful roles, not as militant post-gender warriors, but as realistic women who become heroic when the situation calls for it. Duh.

Filmmakers, of course, know full well the price they must pay to be able to tell these “feminist” stories: in order to draw the adolescent boys into the theaters too, they have to offer more than a little gore and a female nipple or two.

But when you consider that in 2009, these female-driven stories still aren’t really being told anywhere else, well, that’s a price worth paying, don’t you think?

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