Let's Play... Elvira

Elvira
Accolade, 1990

originally played on Amiga, PC

There’s no way to go through this one without talking about Elvira’s breasts. Absolutely no way whatsoever. Not just prominently displayed on the box art, informing the font used in the company name, but also right in the middle of the back of the box: “Can someone help me find my chest?” So let’s just get them out of the way now, as with Elvira, the self-proclaimed “hostess with the mostest”, fans are very used to this sort of self-objectified feminism. Elvira uses the objectification of women to her advantage, with an irreverent punk rock wit which made a generation of men want to be her sub. An ironic gesture to the kind of oppressive gender constrictions which women faced for most of the twentieth century. That the female body could be objectified for commercial gain was not the problem; horror cinema is all about the objectification of bodies both male and female. The problem, rather, centres upon the beneficiary of this process of objectification.

Elvira, reprising her TV role as 'lounges gracefully'

Elvira herself is of course not an entirely original creation on the part of actress Cassandra Peterson. She references the many ‘horror hotties’ who are used to bolster ticket sales to a largely (or at least perceived) male audience throughout the medium’s history. More specifically, Elvira performs in a tradition of television hosting in which an attractive horror-themed actress introduces late-night horror and science-fiction films broadcast on television station throughout North America. Most of these personalities were limited to being regional celebrities, but a few such as Vampira and Elvira gained national attention. Not just an attractive body, the quick-witted Elvira constantly served as a foil to male desire at the same time as she was herself fully empowered by it (most visible in the financial returns from her celebrity status). This trope has long been used in both counterculture and mainstream cinema and television. By the late 1980s, Elvira was fully exploited across a range of products, including pinball tables, toys, numerous comic book series, a feature film, and of course videogames. In addition to television duties, she hosted a series of horror film releases on home video which, while tame, were still inevitably watched by every fan of the genre. Sadly, while her likeness has been reproduced relatively successfully in Elvira (1990), her persona and most especially her wit have not been so equally-well rendered. What does remain, however, is an appreciation for horror films by the game developers, evidenced by nearly every scene in the game.

A video store near my friend Ryan O’s house used to rent us absolutely everything in the store. A family run business, the owners clearly didn’t care what children watched, although we never did venture into the porn section concealed behind a red fake velvet curtain to fully test out their permissiveness. By the look of the crazy weirdos who went back there, they must have had some fucked up shit on tape in the back room. So no porn, but we could rent anything else. Violent martial arts films with heads being destroyed with weapons in red plumes of death; cable access and direct-to-video softcore thrillers, often starring the same five naked people and their clearly fake breasts; b-list American slashers and Italian zombie and revenge movies. The Italians with their lack of censorship always made the goriest films. I wasn't a big fan of their slashers (except for the eye trauma), but the zombie films are often amazing. It didn’t matter what the rating was – most of the films were unrated anyway – the clerks allowed my friends and I to take the movie home one for 87 cents or five for three dollars.

confusion guides the game's opening, as you are cast into a jail cell

Obviously it was the covers which grabbed us. My religious mother was always horrified when she saw them laying around the house, but there was never any attempt to take them away. We never had ‘the talk’ about movies the way that we had ‘the talk’ about N.W.A. or Iron Maiden and ‘the talk’ about satanic-looking Dungeons & Dragons books, or ‘the talk’ about the copy of Husler she found under my bed in grade seven. One of my favourite muttertrauma moments happened on my tenth birthday. My father had started a yearly tradition of renting a laserdisc player for my birthday and then keeping it through Christmas. Laserdiscs were rare and precious like holy water to video fans in the '80s. While libraries stocked copies of films, laserdisc was really the first home video medium which intended consumers to purchase titles rather than rent them. Of course, the VHS kids of the '90s who turned over rooms of their houses to libraries of horror, anime, or foreign films may wish to dispute this statement. However, in the early 1980s cassettes were priced higher than laserdiscs for the simple reason of their mechanical complexity as well as the time required for their duplication. Still, nobody except rich people bought into laserdisc as it was not a recording medium. Everyone wanted to try the exciting new hobby of taping their favourite shows, especially when they weren’t home to watch them. Laserdiscs felt like something you purchased if you already had a VCR. Even though VHS had shitty picture and sound quality and the cassettes never lasted for long without being damaged, people put up with the faults of the VCR because they could tape Miami Vice and Monday Night Football.

For my birthday, my father and I rented laserdiscs of The Evil Dead (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Black Hole (1979), and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Two of them were for the birthday party with my friends, and two were for later. I picked Evil Dead and Raiders for the party. The Indiana Jones film went fine, and everyone was a big fan of the face melting scene. There’s something about Stephen Spielberg’s early career that I find rather interesting, namely that he really did love grossing out and disturbing children. After making Raiders, with its somewhat infamous and thoroughly entertaining face-melting scene, Spielberg famously ghost directed Poltergeist (1982), a film with so many fantastically gory scenes that the film industry invented the new rating of PG-13 to indicate films meant for teenagers and yet which included violence, gore, and softcore nudity. A perfect rating for the Elvira: Mistress of the Dark film which came out in 1988 to the delight of tween boys everywhere. I’ve always been fascinated by this fetish of the gaze in early Spielberg, an interesting element of his filmmaking practice which in his institutionalization in Hollywood has entirely disappeared along with any attempt at making interesting films. Obviously a hit at a party full of a dozen boys aged nine to twelve, Raiders segued into The Evil Dead without any notice from my parents hovering on the periphery. It was during the tree rape scene that my Anglican minister mother brought a tray a cupcakes into the room, placed them on the coffee table, and stared intently without saying anything. The film wasn’t stopped, but I wasn’t allowed to have birthday movies on laserdisc again.

Lists are sometimes a good thing. I used to walk through video stores making them. Often the cover art was enough to be convincing. Favourite covers included The Company of Wolves (1984), Sole Survivor (1983), The Supernaturals (1986), House (1986), The Gates of Hell (1981), Hellraiser (1987), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Sleepaway Camp (1983), Scanners (1983), The Visitor (1979), Chopping Mall (1986), Death Spa (1989), Basket Case (1982), Frightmare (1983), Creepers (1986), The Howling (1981), Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Return of the Living Dead (1984), Zombie Lake (1981), Night of the Zombies (1981), Visiting Hours (1982), Future Kill (1984) – still the film with the highest awesome-cover-to-shit-film ratio – Mausoleum (1983), Revenge of the Dead (1983), Burial Ground (1981), and Squirm (1976). Are any of these movies any good? Of course not, with only a few exceptions. But their appreciation is a process greater than the characteristics of any one film. The thing about genre appreciation of this kind is that no individual text is complete or interesting in isolation. An intertextual matrix of relations between texts, their social usage, and the individuals who consume them guides the production of meaning and affect. In this sense, a genre text is never really complete, and this is true even for influential films such as Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980). Themes, conventions, and tropes animate texts in an equal and polyphonous discourse of social uptake and use value, and indeed come to define the genre and differentiate it from the mass of other possible textual experiences.

I didn't make it

With this idea of intextual referentiality that Elvira the game proper can be fully appreciated. The game takes pleasure in presenting a variety of awful things to players: decapitated heads, bloody stakes hammered into vampire hearts, eyes gouged out and necks ripped open, knifeplay and hangings, and maggot and other atrocities as inventory items. The tone of the game indicates that Horror Soft are clearly invoking in particular the history of Hammer horror films such as Dracula has Risen From his Grave (1968) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Players are tasked with retrieving Elvira’s chest (see the clever pun?) so that she may cast spells in order to defeat the game’s ultimate bad guy, in this case a bad girl. This spellcasting component most obviously marks Elvira as a genre hybrid. Unlike most role-playing games, Elvira does not present players with the ability to cast spells directly by means of mana points or spellbooks. Instead, as in an adventure game, players collect reagents and bring them to Elvira for her to create items which function like spells. Arguably, movement and exploration functions more like an adventure game than most RPGs. While appearing to be a standard grid-based game like Eye of the Beholder (1990), or Might and Magic Book 1: Secret of the Inner Sanctum (1987), as in many graphical adventures most rooms are only presented from specific vantage points and do not allow for the illusion of a 3-D representation of space. However, unlike most adventure games, other than Hero Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero? (1989) which became the Quest for Glory series (1990-1998), combat is an involved, somewhat tactical affair much like in a role-playing game, functioning in real-time much like Dungeon Master (1987) or Eye of the Beholder. Awkward and imprecise, Elvira's combat is perhaps the least interesting thing about the game. Once players have learned to time their actions against opponents after a few hours of playing, there is relatively little variance to encounters except the amount of damage their can cause and withstand.

combat involves timing mouse clicks for attack and defence

Elvira does indeed have the “look and feel of a graphical adventure”, especially if that adventure is in the degenerately comedic vein of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) or Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls (1990). British developer Horror Soft – later to change their name to Adventuresoft (in fact, their original name) with the release of Simon the Sorcerer (1993), their most famous game – were clear genre aficionados, displaying a sophisticated knowledge not only of adventure and role-playing convention, but also a thorough love of horror cinema and all things macabre. While not as well known as their later, more mainstream Simon releases, Elvira demonstrated that licensed properties did not have to be quickly-produced, haphazard attempts to cash in on creative energy expended in other media. In the world of digital games, this is a very rare thing indeed.

you'll probably end up in the soup

Most of the game plays like a classic adventure game with lots of inventory objects to find and manipulate. Many of the game’s set encounters – a vampire asleep in her bed, a man who turns into a werewolf, a mad chef keeping Elvira out of her kitchen – are not combat encounters but rather inventory puzzles. These portions of the game are quite good if you like late '80s, early '90s graphical adventures. Luckily, Elvira is not a pixel hunt game, as objects are always visible (or hidden behind other visible objects). Puzzles are usually quite logical and hints are often given during conversations. Save often, as players can easily fuck themselves over by destroying inventory items or getting killed in combat. After combat has been mastered, however, the game can be finished in a few hours. All really neat and tidy, really. Except for the massive amounts of triumphantly visceral gore. 

the end: wanting, but not getting

Elvira would be a fun remake, but we'll probably never see it. A fairly competent sequel Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus was released in 1991, and the company made one more horror game Waxworks (1992) before turning to wizards and British humour and mainstream success.