Elvira's Movie Macabre

Elvira's Movie Macabre (or sometimes simply Movie Macabre) is an American comedy television show that airs B-grade horror movies, occasionally interrupted by comments from the hostess, Elvira (played by Cassandra Peterson). In some episodes during intermission, Elvira would get an unexpected phone call from a character called "The Breather" (played by John Paragon) who would only call and tell Elvira weird jokes. The title shown here is the title under which the film was shown on the show; many B-grade horror films were rereleased with different titles.

In the late spring of 1981, six years after the death of Larry Vincent (who starred as host Sinister Seymour of a local Los Angeles weekend horror show called Fright Night), show producers began the task of bringing the show back. Deciding to use a female host, producers asked 1950s horror hostess, Maila Nurmi, to revive The Vampira Show. Nurmi worked on the project for a short time, but eventually quit when the producers would not hire Lola Falana to play Vampira. The station continued with the project and sent out a casting call. Peterson auditioned against 200 other horror hostess hopefuls and won the role. Producers left it up to her to create the role's image. Her best friend, Robert Redding, and she came up with the sexy punk/vampire look after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Since they were unable to continue with the Vampira character, the character Elvira was used instead. What followed was Elvira's Movie Macabre, featuring a quick-witted Valley girl-type character named Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, with heavily applied, pancake-horror make-up and a towering black beehive wig to conceal Peterson's flame-red hair.

Shortly before the first taping, producers received a cease and desist letter from Nurmi. Besides the similarities in the format and costumes, Elvira's closing line for each show, wishing her audience "Unpleasant dreams", was notably similar to Vampira's closer: "Bad dreams, darlings..." uttered as she walked off down a misty corridor. The court ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that "'likeness' means actual representation of another person's appearance, and not simply close resemblance." Peterson claimed that Elvira was nothing like Vampira aside from the basic design of the black dress and black hair. Nurmi claimed that Vampira's image was based on Morticia Addams, a character in Charles Addams's cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker magazine.

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