The show that launched Cassandra Peterson as the popular character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. In 1981, six years after the death of Larry Vincent, who starred as host Sinister Seymour of a Los Angeles weekend horror show called Fright Night (1970), show producers began to bring the show back, and decided to use a female host. They asked 1950s' horror hostess Maila Nurmi to revive The Vampira Show (1954). Nurmi worked on the project for a short time, but quit when the producers would not hire black actress Lola Falana to play Vampira. The station sent out a casting call and Cassandra Peterson won the role because they liked how she could be sexy and funny at the same time. Producers left it up to her to create the role's image. She and her best friend, Robert Redding, came up with a sexy punk/vampire look and came up with the name Elvira. The show was then retitled Elvira's Movie Macabre.
Elvira became big in L.A. as the host of this show, but it was the Coors beer company that helped springboard her to national fame. In the 1980s, Coors decided to dub itself "the Official Beer of Halloween." They signed Elvira up to do a series of commercials, then placed cardboard cutouts of her in liquor stores and beer distributors across the country. Her star factor and popularity rose exponentially. But then it suddenly ended after several Halloween seasons. Though the Coors marketing department loved the campaign, the Coors family, on the other hand, was very religious, and they disapproved of her being the spokeswoman for their company. Her association with horror iconography, no matter how satiric, freaked them out. All marketing featuring her was promptly ended. No longer associated with Coors, she went on to start her own beer brand, dubbed Elvira's Night Brew.
Shortly before taping the first episode, producers received a cease and desist letter from 1950s horror hostess Maila Nurmi, host of The Vampira Show (1954). The letter stated that besides the similarities to her Vampira character, the format and costumes of her show, 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 Cassandra 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.