I had this grand idea that Elvira's kind of the Santa Claus of Halloween - at the malls, you'd have an Elvira there. Girls would dress as Elvira just like guys dress as Santa Claus, and it's not the real thing, but they'll pose for pictures, sign autographs. Of course, I couldn't go around to every mall, so we'd have to get more Elviras.

I had a dream about riding a black cat, and then the next day I was at this antique mart, and I found this little devil riding a black cat - an Austrian bronze, tiny little thing. It was super tiny. And it was kind of like, "Oh my God, my dream came true." Except it was a devil, of course. Not me.

People were really staying away from me. And that's kind of when I split up with all my best friends at school - they were going, "Something's happened to her, she's totally weird" - and found my new friends, who were Beatles fans.

I felt like I kind of got to know [Elvis Presley], and got a little peek inside what was going on there. That was pretty amazing.

The biggest surprise was a picture my mom sent me, just about the time that we were about to wrap up the book, of me as a 5-year-old dressed in my first Halloween costume that she made for me. I said, "What's this? I never saw this photo." And she said, "We made you this black-and-orange Halloween costume out of crepe paper" - we were too poor to have fabric back then - "and you wanted to go as the Queen Of Halloween." And I was like, "What?" And she said, "Yeah, the Princess Of Halloween, the Queen Of Halloween, something like that.

I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff." Well, no such thing.

Horror, for me, has to involve some sort of fantasy. Horror is something that is in your dreams or your nightmares.