Elvira, Mistress of the Night. It’s a title that most of us slores can relate to (or at least slores by men’s definitions). The character was born in 1979 after Cassandra Peterson created it as a spoof of a Valley Girl (ironic, yes) and was fully formed and put to good use when KHJ-TV offered her the horror host position on Friday Night in 1981. Of course, this ruffled the feathers of kitsch OG Vampira (Maila Nurmi), who sued Elvira at the outset for ripping off her likeness. Elvira won in the end, going on to create her own iconic name in the camp horror genre, to the financially prosperous tune of endless franchising potential.
Despite the critical flops of her two movies Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (released in 1988) and Elvira’s Haunted Hills (released in 2001 and which she financed with her then husband and manager), Elvira was never in danger of losing her clout as the premier emblem of a life spent living Halloween all year long. That is, until Fairuza Balk’s cult status elevated as the years since The Craft came out in 1996. In the role of Nancy (a name endlessly tongue in cheek considering just how non-Nancy she is), Balk gave life to a new type of Mistress of the Night, one that was neither purely malevolent and certainly not purely benevolent. Torn by the poles of good and evil, in many respects, as a result of being an adolescent–that time when your priorities and aims can be so easily swayed toward the vain–Nancy’s drunkenness with power is what proves to be, ultimately, far more bewitching and complex than anything Elvira ever did, limited in its L.A.-based superficiality as it was (after all, Peterson was that quintessential tale of a girl from the Midwest who moved out to L.A. after a fluke discovery–depth was never going to be her forte).
While, of course, there’s nothing wrong with mixing sex and satire in the form of a Morticia Addams-inspired package, “the kids” want someone more three-dimensional than that now (which is strange considering the fact that we are slouching evermore towards idiocracy). Nancy Downs is that someone. For to lend further relevance to her ascending cult figure status over Elvira’s, Nancy was speaking out against the sexual misconduct of men (whereas Elvira either ignored it or simply packed her bags and left–a key plot point in the first movie she starred in as the character) when no one else would, “raging” to Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich, no man of whom can ever match his fuckboy performances) before killing him for his insolence, “The only way you know how to treat women is by treating them like whores! When you’re the whore! And that’s gonna stop! Do you understand?” He clearly didn’t, and most men still can’t catch up to what Nancy was saying almost two decades ago. All while dressed in goth attire and bondage accessories that make Elvira look practically like Pollyanna. Well, if Pollyanna put out.
What’s more, unlike another revived cult favorite of the 90s, Wednesday Addams (immortalized by Christina Ricci), Nancy’s personality and even look again stand apart far more for their depth, for their indication of someone who–not a girl, not yet a woman–is having an existential crisis. One that pertains primarily to what plagued most white teen girls in one of the more frivolous capitalist decades: “She doesn’t wanna be white trash anymore. And I told her, ‘You’re white, honey. Just deal with it.'” What Rochelle (Rachel True) couldn’t understand in making this boiled down assessment, however, is that to tell a girl like Nancy, all constant infuriation over the patriarchy (though some sick part of her was most infuriated of all that she couldn’t be accepted by it for not meeting its ideals), that she couldn’t have something–be treated a certain way–was to make her want it all the more. So it is that while she might not have been the “winner” at the end of The Craft, she’s ended up with something much more valuable: the power of usurping someone as iconic as Elvira from her perch.
It has to be said then: Now is the time. This is the hour. Nancy’s is the magic. Nancy’s is the power. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s the unshakeable thirst for 90s nostalgia that seems to balloon in October (see also: Hocus Pocus). Whatever the reason, there’s a new cult leader–more mistress of darkness than mistress of the night–in town.
