Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, now presents craptacular horror flicks on DVD.

Cassandra Peterson says, "Happy Halloween Canada!"

You know her as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Fresh from weekend parties and getting ready for tomorrow night's hauntings, Elvira is primed but under intense pressure.

"Yeah, it's special all right," she says, cutting her words with a sardonic laugh in an interview with Sun Media. "This is a very busy, busy time for me. I really know how Santa and the Elves feel right before Christmas.

"But I kind of look forward to it. Obviously, I love Halloween and Halloween has always been my favourite holiday since I was a child -- and more so now!

"Halloween is a great holiday for a lot of reasons but, first of all, it's secular and it's wonderful to be free of religion. Second of all, you don't have to have any boring meals with your relatives. Thirdly, you don't have to run out and try to find presents that nobody needs.

"And it's completely hedonistic. You just get to have fun, dress up in your fantasy or live out all your wildest, weirdest dreams. It's such a great opportunity for psychopaths -- and everybody else."

Peterson's exaggerated Elvira character -- a delicious mixture of sensuality, sass and sarcasm -- has been a Halloween icon since 1981.

Despite some fleeting brushes with fame -- Federico Fellini met her in Italy and gave her a small role in Roma -- Peterson was a struggling actress until Elvira.

Through TV appearances, then myriad Elvira promotions from pinball and video games to her own brand of Night Brew beer, Elvira has turned every day of the year into fright night.

With all due respect to her rivals -- from Vampira to Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and its successors The Film Crew -- The Mistress of the Dark is still the master in the art of unearthing shlock and presenting them to cult audiences with her unique brand of humour.

So no one was better to introduce our own Sun Media celebration of trash on DVD.

There has been a virtual avalanche of the tawdry, tacky and simply senseless movies in September and October, all leading to Halloween 2007.

The Kansas-born Peterson has directly added to the pile. She has just released her second wave of two-disc, double-feature DVDs under her own banner, Elvira's Movie Macabre. There are three releases in the new wave. One packages Blue Sunshine with Monstroid; another has Maneater of Hyra with The House That Screamed; the third has Gamera, Super Monster with They Came From Beyond Space.

Peterson, now 58 but still looking fabulous, darling, has Elvira figured out and refined. "There are three parts of the Elvira character that appeal to people. At least one element appeals to each group of people. That is why I have such a large and varied fan base."

First there is her sexiness -- that famous thrust up and pushed out cleavage. Second is the biting, intelligent humour. "The third part over the whole thing," she says, "is the dark part, the metaphysical part, the spookiness."

Men go for the cleavage, she says. "Then I think the humour appeals to the women. The women like seeing someone who is sexy but who is self-depracating and isn't afraid of showing off her ... assets!"

Recently, Peterson has also received fan mail from girls in their teens and early 20s who admire her and write, in Peterson's words: " 'Elvira is my hero because she stands up for herself, doesn't put up with crap from guys and really is kind of a great role model.' It is kind of wacky when you think that, but it is kind of true." I call Elvira "a goth girl with gumption" and Peterson loves the phrase.

Each of Elvira's DVD selections is pure shlock. But she makes them fun through her introductions and periodic interjections. The DVDs also give you the option of playing the flicks straight, Elvira-free, but why would you bother?

"It did give life to these old movies," Peterson says of Elvira's intros. "Someone was sitting down and commenting upon them and not trying to BS everyone that it's a really great movie. Someone was actually saying things that people at home were thinking.

"Unfortunately, nowadays, that type of movie doesn't come that often any more." There are a few real howlers, such as Showgirls and Basic Instinct 2, she says, but bad movies today lack a critical ingredient she loves in the shlock of the 1950s through the 1970s.

"There was a naviete that really doesn't come along anymore."

'No one cares about Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks'

It isn't easy to be Elvira -- or any other lover of the truly wretched, downtrodden and trashy titles in the history of movies.

The problem, according to Cassandra Peterson, creator of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, is that shlock has not been preserved properly for the DVD era.

"The issue," Peterson says about bringing her own line of Elvira's Movie Macabre to DVD, "was literally finding the films.

"That became the big, gigantic challenge."

For every title, she says, "(the challenge) was finding it in one piece with all the scenes in it and not in such a horrible quality you couldn't even see it on the TV."

The Movie Macabre series is now up to six releases, meaning 12 movies. Peterson had originally been hoping for 500 -- because she has properly, and expensively, preserved her Elvira introductions for that many.

"It was really disappointing that they just had to scrounge," she says of her backers at the DVD company Shout! Factory.

"When they went out to get these films, they had a big dose of reality."

Restoration is another factor. Foundations and studios naturally restore classics -- Peterson mentions Casablanca as a prime example -- because they have historical importance and are also commercially valuable.

"But no one cares about Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks. Not even me, as a matter of fact.

"But they should!"