Magnificent Carcass: Morticia, Vampira, and Elvira (2024)

Maila Nurmi emerged in the mid-1950s on television sets across Los Angeles as the midnight horror movie hostess Vampira, a striking supernatural creature with a morbid wit. Against the backdrop of Cold War conformity, Vampira was an anomaly, a macabre femme fatale who was also high camp. Combining sex, death, and humor, The Vampira Show proved to be a smashing success. While original, Vampira drew on a familiar archetype, the vamp, appealing because she symbolized an escape from normalcy, both forbidden and liberating.

Yet, most people have not heard of Vampira, or often confuse her with Elvira, another horror hostess who came much later. Elvira became a household name in the 1980s, when the network created the character modeled on the success of Vampira without giving Nurmi credit, and to add insult to injury, produced a cheap ersatz. With camp performance, art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art, and then the lines blur until the distinction between reality and fantasy, performance and interpretation, and inspiration and copyright infringement becomes questionable. Maila Nurmi revived and altered the Morticia Addams cartoon for her performance as Vampira, a persona which then mutated to become the Elvira franchise. Together, they form a kind of unholy camp trinity of the femme fatale archetype: Morticia epitomizes what I would call “soft camp,” Vampira is a perfect example of high camp, and Elvira is unmistakably low camp.

Morticia Addams, matriarch of Charles Addams’s eponymous cartoon family, began as a nameless, two-dimensional character. Addams claimed Morticia was not inspired by anyone in particular, although he noted she had “a little bit of Gloria Swanson” in her. However, one can infer the “vamp” archetype of the 1920s and 1930s could have influenced the creation of Morticia.

Addams admitted he based Morticia on qualities he found attractive in women. He was drawn to raven-haired, slender, mysterious, domineering women. Charles Addams’ three wives closely resembled Morticia, although he created the character in 1933, years before he met his first wife, Barbara Jean Day (pictured below in a publicity photo), in 1942. Day resented her association with Morticia and lopped her hair off, donning a pageboy style for the rest of her life to distance herself from the character.

Addams’s second wife, also named Barbara, was a lawyer who managed to convince Addams to sign over all his legal rights to the cartoon to her. She attempted to take out a life insurance policy on him and may have been plotting to kill him, according to his lawyer, who encouraged Addams to get a divorce. They divorced after two years, but Barbara retained the rights to the Addams family, even stalling the production of the 1964 television series to ask for more money, which she received.

(Addams’ three wives, left to right) Barbara Jean Day, Estelle Barbara Barb, and Marilyn Matthews Miller.

Although Morticia first appeared in 1937 in Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoon, it took several years for her character to evolve. Initially, Morticia looked like a frumpy goth housewife and wasn’t given particularly witty dialogue; she was less glamorous than the version of Morticia Addams brought to life by Angelica Houston in the 1991 film or even Carolyn Jones in the 1964 TV series.

Morticia developed into a domestic dominatrix, a character Addams described as:

“the real head of the family and the critical and moving force behind it. Low voiced, incisive, and subtle; smiles are rare. This ruined beauty has a romantic side, too, and is given to low-keyed rhapsodies about her garden of deadly nightshade, henbane, and dwarf’s hair… She is a thoughtful hostess in her way, and if a guest needs anything, he is advised to scream for it. The children are instructed to observe the amenities and always kick their father good night.”

None of the Addams Family characters were given names until 1963, during the development of the television series.

Maila Nurmi with contestants in the Bal Caribe Costume Contest, 1953

A decade prior to this, another invocation of Morticia was born. Maila Nurmi, who was then working as a pinup model and chorus girl, attended a masquerade ball in 1953, thrown by choreographer Lester Horton. Nurmi dressed as a female vampire, inspired by the then-unnamed Morticia Addams, and won the costume contest. Television producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr., approached her to host a television horror film night as the character.

Not wanting to plagiarize Charles Addams, Nurmi modified the character, taking inspiration from the Dragon Lady from the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and the evil queen from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She said that as a child of the Depression, she saw the evil queen as a role model, not because she was evil but because she was beautiful, commanding, and rich. Later, Nurmi would serve as a model for Maleficent, the evil queen from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Nurmi’s then-husband Dean Reisner thought of the name Vampira. The costume Nurmi would wear as the character, a long black dress with tentacle-like sleeves, was similar to Morticia’s.

However, Nurmi, inspired by an S&M magazine, Bizarre, styled herself for the rock-n-roll 1950s generation, vamping it up with fishnets, heavy eyeliner, and red lipstick, which dripped from the ends of her mouth like blood. She described the Vampira co*cktail as, “one part Greta Garbo; two parts each of the Dragon Lady, Evil Queen, and Theda Bara; three parts Norma Desmond; and four parts Bizarre magazine.”

“A scar on the hand the hand might be quite continental, But demons are a ghoul’s best friend.”

Nurmi committed to her character, going to extreme lengths to attain a tiny 17” waist. Before going on television on Saturday night she would: fast for two days; sweat out calories in saunas; and rub papaya powder on her waist and sleep with a rubber tube around her midriff, essentially digesting her fat away in the way a steak is tenderized. Ultimately, her morbid methods for sculpting her flesh created sadomasoch*stic proportions that contradicted the feminine ideal, a healthy body capable of bearing children.

Vampira differed from Morticia in more than just appearance. Where Morticia was a wife and mother, Vampira was single and childless. Morticia was witchier, growing poisonous herbs and carnivorous plants, presumably for spells, while Vampira was, as her name suggested, vampiric, sleeping in graveyards and joking about feasting on men. Morticia was ladylike and, like the rest of the Addams family, pleasant to strangers and confused by their aggrieved response to the family’s grotesque interests. The Addams Family satirized the nuclear family by resembling but upending its structure—they found the rest of the world odd but still welcomed interactions with them. In the television series, the family went out of their way, usually financially, to help perfect strangers. In contrast, Vampira, a vaguely supernatural woman who lived in an attic, existed in the world of fantasy apart from society, allowing audiences to accept her as something outside of reality while she subverted their gaze. Nurmi, who said she’d always felt like she was from another planet, saw Vampira as a mythical creature that had existed for centuries.

Almost all of the footage from The Vampira Show, which was broadcast live from 1954 to 1956 on two different networks, has been lost. The show only broadcast locally to the Los Angeles area, but Vampira achieved national popularity, drawing fans such as Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, and Nurmi’s good friend, James Dean. Although the show wasn’t recorded, the network initially promoted it with publicity stills that still survive, and Vampira was profiled in LIFE magazine.

“I’ve got a wonderful offer to make to you tonight. It’s a new hospitalization plan called the Yellow Cross. It’s for people who unsuccessfully try to commit suicide. The plan pays all the bills ‘til you’re well enough to try again. If you’re interested in such a plan, I'll be glad to get in touch with you. Of course, I hope you never have to use it. It’s disheartening to hear of an unsuccessful suicide. And remember our slogan: if at first you don’t succeed, die, die, then die again.”

“A Vampira co*cktail. You like it? It hates you.”

“How do you feel about children? Do you like them?” “Oh yes. Delicious!”

Vampira made public appearances around Los Angeles, driving around in a hearse, screaming at stoplights, and signing autographs for children, who were among her biggest fans. She was nominated for an Emmy for Most Outstanding Female Personality but lost to Lucille Ball. Vampira was the very first of many midnight horror hosts, so while she was only on television for a relatively short, undocumented time frame, she left an imprint on the public imagination.

“She recently discovered, to her own horror, that a number of children, aged seven, watch her show regularly. One of them even offered to send her a test tube of her favorite co*cktail- from the Children’s Hospital.”

Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams in the 1964 Addams Family TV series.

A decade later, in 1964, Carolyn Jones was cast in the role of Morticia in the live-action Addams Family series, the first time the cartoon was brought to life in a major performance. Although Morticia Addams was a distinct character preceding Vampira, The Addams Family recycled some of the same jokes Vampira had performed. In an appearance on the George Gobel comedy show in the mid-1950s, Vampira, ironically performing as the character Mrs. Jones, enters a man’s house and asks if it’s alright if she smokes. When he says sure, assuming she means a cigarette, she lies down, and smoke emanates from her body. Carolyn Jones as Morticia did the same bit on the television series, only with a laugh track and some additional dialogue.

About two minutes of footage from The Vampira Show was recovered in the 1990s through clips re-shot through kinescope, but these were outtakes, not live broadcasts. Maila Nurmi had never seen her own performance until then, when Finnish filmmaker Mike Ripatti made an obscure documentary, Vampira: About Sex, Death, and Taxes (1995), and unearthed the clips. The only other record of the show is word-of-mouth from viewers who were alive when the show aired. Sensual and witty, Vampira begins each show by gliding through a smoke-filled hallway lined with candelabras and then emitting a high-pitched scream which fades into an org*smic cry. “Screaming relaxes me so,” she jokes.

Some of Vampira’s bits included making co*cktails with eyeballs floating in them, playing with her pet tarantula, and jokes about death, suicide, and murder. “You may ask why I have no electricity in my attic. Don’t you know electricity is for chairs?” In the 1950s, that kind of female character with (sometimes literal) gallows humor had never been done, especially for a mass audience on television. It was a time of nuclear family conformity, especially for women, who were expected to remain in the domestic realm, and Vampira was an outsider and disruptor. Nurmi was once under contract with major movie producer Howard Hawks, but tore up their agreement. She said she didn’t like auditioning for movies because she didn’t want to compete with others for roles. However, with television, performers could attract a mass audience by appearing on screen as one particular character on a weekly basis for an extended period of time, rather than in film, where actors usually amassed a following by playing different roles in multiple films. Nurmi saw her performance as a TV horror hostess as similar to being an evangelist. She said, “I decided I wanted to become an evangelist and had to sponsor myself. How could I do it? Well, television was just warping people's minds - and they paid big. I thought I'd satirize soap operas, take improbable people and make them do all these bourgeois things. Since Charles Addams had already done it in comic form, I wanted it to bring it to television.”

Nurmi usually appeared in full costume as Vampira when doing interviews, rarely breaking character. From a Philadelphia TV Guide interview: “She affects black English cigarettes in a black holder almost a foot long and drinks only Bloody Marys at lunch. ‘It’s almost bedtime, you know,’ she says artlessly at high noon.”

“All work and no slay makes Vampira a dull girl. I sign epitaphs, not autographs. I’m a vampyromantic; I like to set people afire. See you next week at 11 p.m. That’s postmortem.”

The first iteration of The Vampira Show was canceled in 1955 for indeterminable reasons, though many have speculated there was a conflict between her and the network over creative control. Nurmi owned 51% of the Vampira character, and the network wanted to propagate the Vampira character not by broadcasting Nurmi as Vampira on national television but by casting many actresses locally as Vampiras in cities across America. Others believe she was blacklisted. After the untimely death of Nurmi’s friend James Dean, tabloids blamed the horror host for his death, alleging that she cast spells on him which caused his car to crash.

A Whisper magazine headline reads, “James Dean’s Black Madonna.”

Nurmi had sent Dean a postcard a few months prior to his death which showed her in a cemetery with the tagline “Darling, come and join me!” meant in her macabre humor. However, the tabloid reprinted the picture out of context. Consequently, whether because she demanded creative control or due to the controversy surrounding James Dean, Nurmi was out of work and broke by the late 1950s. She had only earned $75 a week doing the show and was not paid for outside appearances due to a loophole in the contract, which wasn’t even between Nurmi and the network but rather between “Vampira” and the network. Nurmi retained rights to the character, but the network could control where the character appeared.

Nurmi after a lunatic beat and held her hostage in her apartment.

Tabloids didn’t differentiate between Vampira the character and Maila Nurmi the person, often treating her misfortune as a cruel joke. When a man tried to molest her in public in 1955, a headline ran reading, “Clutching Hand Brings Screams from Vampira!” In 1956, a stalker broke into Nurmi’s apartment and tortured her for several hours, beating her and dragging her up and down the stairs of her apartment complex, which caused her lifelong walking problems. The paparazzi showed up immediately, and Nurmi, perhaps in a state of shock and conditioned by her previous work as a pinup model, posed for the camera with her bruises, her expression a mix of stoicism and dissociation.

Nurmi after rescuing a cat from a fire in her building.

In 1956, a serious fire also broke out in her apartment building, burning off her hair. When her abusive ex-boyfriend Chuck Beadles was arrested for prowling around her apartment that same year, tabloids printed her full address. In later interviews, Nurmi refused to discuss these incidents but said the Vampira character had summoned an “inverted fandom,” and claimed someone had once left a dead cat on her doorstep, which horrified her because she loved animals.

By 1959, Nurmi was desperate for money, so she agreed to appear as Vampira in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, now considered to be one of the worst movies ever made, if not the very worst. Nurmi had met Wood in the late 1950s but hadn’t thought much of him nor wanted to star in his movies. She said of Wood, “I just thought he was a low-born idiot. With no talent at all. Just a brazen, foolish idiot . . . You know, I thought he was just a goon . . . But then over the years as I've mellowed and grown a little more sensible, and I began to look at this man after, after the fact. And I thought, ‘Incredible what he managed to achieve!’ Without any help!’” Nurmi found the dialogue of the film to be so insipid she insisted on playing the character mute. She’s in the film, billed as “Vampira,” for 15 minutes, seemingly in a trance the entire time. She said, “At the time I thought it was horrible. I knew immediately I'd be committing professional suicide, but I thought, ‘What choice do I have?’ Somehow, I seemed to be dead already.” The film was panned, but it eventually developed a cult following, introducing Vampira to modern audiences.

“The best part of working on Plan 9 was riding the bus in full drag!”

These traumatic incidents, combined with her being fired and publicly ridiculed, took their toll on Nurmi. She quit acting, and in the 1960s made a living by cleaning houses and installing linoleum floors, sometimes selling her handmade jewelry and costumes. There’s conflicting information about her life after The Vampira Show, but her biography, Glamour Ghoul, written by Nurmi’s niece Sandra Niemi, claims that celebrity friends such as Marlon Brando helped financially support her. Gloria Paul, who was cast as the sensual romance movie host “Voluptua” after the success of The Vampira Show, said that she and others occasionally left groceries at Nurmi’s door because she was too prideful to acknowledge her need for help. All three of Nurmi’s marriages failed within a few years. Sometime in the late 1940s, Nurmi had an affair with Orson Welles, who described her body as a “magnificent carcass.” She claimed to have given birth to their child, however put the baby up for adoption because he had reconciled with his wife Rita Hayward. This experience put her off having children of her own. Allegedly, decades later, Nurmi’s mother was working as a maid at a hotel where Orson Welles was staying, and confronted him about the child and demanded $200. He gave it to her, and she quipped, “Genius my ass!”

Singer/Actress Lola Falana, who would have made a more interesting Elvira

In 1981, KHJ-TV hired Nurmi to consult on a revival of the show, and in early talks with the network, they discussed hiring a younger actress to play Vampira. Nurmi claims she brought her old scripts from the original show to help develop the character, and was told by the network she would have a say in choosing the actress who would play Vampira and would receive a cut for each episode that aired. Nurmi wanted to hire a Black actress to play Vampira and suggested Lola Falana, but the network didn’t like the idea. Nurmi, who was initially expected to get executive producer credit, was fired, and Cassandra Peterson, now known as Elvira, was hired without her knowledge. Nurmi refused to sign a contract that would have given Peterson the rights to her character, and sent a cease-and-desist order. The network therefore couldn’t do the show using the name Vampira, so they changed the character’s name to Elvira and dressed Peterson in a different black wig, a bouffant-mullet style hairpiece more on trend for the 1980s. Peterson said she was also inspired by Patricia Morrison (pictured below), a punk bassist known for playing with bands such as the Bags, The Gun Club, and The Damned. Morrison, who was familiar with Vampira, was not flattered by Elvira’s imitation of her. Morrison said,

“I was frankly horrified when I saw the Elvira character. Maila as Vampira represented to me a strong, cold beauty with a delicious, naughty wit. I felt Elvira was ‘for the boys’ with the goofy comments and boob jokes. I was trying on my own to be a strong female, and Elvira did me no favors.. There was a piece in a newspaper where CP [Cassandra Peterson] talked about Elvira and said she ‘got the idea from a girl in a band playing at Club 88 [Morrison]’… I spent years being called Elvira!”

Peterson claimed she had never seen The Vampira Show, and in the documentary Vampira, the Movie, she said she’d had no idea who Maila Nurmi was until she sued her. In Peterson’s 2022 memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira, though, she details a meeting between Peterson, Nurmi, and network representatives:

“Our meeting that day was seriously awkward. It was plain to see from the photos she shared that she’d once been a very statuesque and beautiful woman, but it was also clear that she’d lived a very hard life. She had only a tooth or two left in her head and she rambled on incoherently about subjects that didn’t relate at all to what we were there to discuss.”

Nurmi’s lawsuit against Peterson alleged that Peterson had stolen Nurmi’s act, noting 150 similarities that were mostly aesthetic. There were also a few catchphrases that Elvira copied, such as Vampira’s old sendoff, “Bad dreams, darlings!” However, because there was no footage of The Vampira Show, there was little evidence to demonstrate similarities that constituted copyright infringement. Moreover, Nurmi couldn’t afford the legal fees, so the case was thrown out. While Nurmi argued that the Elvira character was almost identical to Vampira, she also criticized Peterson’s interpretation, saying, “I didn't want Vampira to be anything but perfect. I certainly didn't want her to be portrayed as a slu*t!”

After Nurmi’s lawsuit fell through, she took to papering the parking lot of the Los Angeles Press Office with flyers and placing personal ads in newsletters that read, “All those who resent Elvira’s brazen thievery, write to Vampira, 723 N. Heliotrope.”

In 1982, the LA Weekly also published an open (and very high camp) letter Nurmi had written to them, excerpted below:

“Dear Editor:

Three Jeers! To laugh aloud when alone is, psychologists declare, a sign of madness. Knowing this, I was none-the-less guffawing aloud some supremely unvampire-like guffaws as I rollicked thru “The Best of the Worst.”

And lo-fathom my delight- to come upon (while in this sublime state) your selection of the most disappointing cleavage!! Elvira, Interruptus of the Dark!! Mistress of the Mediocre!!”

The letter goes on to include an unhinged poem:

Beach balls made of silicone

Sneering, droning monotone;

Of such things the maid is fashioned;

Then a smugness add a dash and;

Watch the silly slattern slu*t;

Pull her punches, preen and strut;

For Vampira’s private ingrates;

Satan’s puppet proudly gyrates;

And what will new tomorrows bring?

More of this disgusting thing?

Deeper necklines, public hair;

Don’t you wish that you were there?

The above is my literary opinion.

Print if you like-I take full responsibility- let her try to touch my Transylvania bank account!!

Vampira

In her defense, Peterson had no part in creating the Elvira character, and, having grown up in Kansas, had likely never even seen the show (which was broadcast locally to Los Angeles when Peterson was three years old), so Vampira’s anger would have been better directed at the network. Peterson, a natural redhead, initially suggested a flowing, romantic Victorian costume, inspired by Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers . However, the network insisted Peterson do the character in a plunging floor-length black dress with black hair, more akin to the Vampira costume.

Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers

In her memoir, Peterson wrote, “I was just a ‘gun for hire,’ not involved in the terms of whatever agreement she’d made, or hadn’t made, with KHJ.”

Beyond Peterson’s outfit, the set for Elvira’s show was almost identical to the set Nurmi had originally designed for Vampira, including a red Victorian couch, dry ice, and candelabras. Additionally, the new show followed the format of a late-night horror hostess appearing in between films, which Vampira had pioneered, likely why the network had approached Vampira to revive the show in the first place.

Despite aesthetic and structural similarities, Elvira’s persona barely resembles the Vampira seen on what little footage survives. Elvira affects a Valley girl accent, makes trite puns, and is more sarcastic than spooky. There isn’t anything dark, mysterious, or subversive about her beyond her costume. Beneath the black clothing and dramatic makeup, she resembles more of a bimbo archetype who makes and is the punchline of frequent boob jokes. She’s still portrayed as tough and unwilling to be disrespected, but she is primarily viewed as a sex object. Vampira was sexy and seductive but in a more destructive and otherworldly sense. She never set out to be inviting or approachable, signing off with lines like, “All work and no slay makes Vampira a dull girl. I sign epitaphs, not autographs. I’m a vampyromantic; I like to set people afire. See you next week at 11 p.m. That’s postmortem.” Whereas Elvira poured beer on the laps of men who harassed her, Vampira put them into a deadly trance. When Vampira made a guest appearance on The Red Skelton Show, a popular proto-sketch comedy program, she walks up to a group of men and screams, causing them to faint. One of the men leers at her, and she says, “Would you like to go out with me after you're dead? I like you; you’re just my type, a red-blooded American boy . . . Why don’t you invite me over sometime after you cut yourself shaving?” (perhaps a riff on Mae West’s iconic one-liner “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”). Elvira is chronically sarcastic, making middle-of-the-road fat jokes and mocking women she deems less sexy than she is. Vampira’s humor was more deadpan, directed at the artifice of society rather than putting down individuals around her.

Peterson reflects on the comedic style of Elvira in her memoir:

“[It] was pure vaudeville—schlocky jokes . . . The show always opened with a line or two welcoming viewers to Movie Macabre and introducing myself:

‘Yes it’s me . . .

That gal in the wig whose talents are big

The gal who puts the sick in classic

The gal who put the boob back in Boob Tube

The gal with the yucks who’s working for schmucks

The cute high school dropout who looks like she’ll pop out . . . Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.’”

Boob jokes may not be inherently bad, but I can’t recall ever hearing a successful one. Perhaps Elvira’s wisecracks, which serve to draw attention to her cleavage in a self-deprecating way, made her appeal to straight male audiences, which is why the show’s viewership was mostly male. The Hollywood Reporter’s review of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (the film adaptation) notes, “EMOTD is a movie-length tribute to what horror movie hostess Cassandra Peterson considers her two greatest assets. Unfortunately, those assets aren’t comedic timing or a rapier wit.” The New York Times wrote, “Elvira is not what you’d call a class act, but she is a successful one.”

In contrast, Vampira’s audience, though niche because the show was limited in its broadcast, mostly appealed to women, gay men, and people who considered themselves outsiders. Housewives wrote to Vampira for fashion advice. The Vampira Show was so outside of the norm of 1950s culture that even people who weren’t interested in goth aesthetics related to Vampira. They appreciated the audacity of a woman who went on television in the middle of the night and screamed, not because she was being chased but just because she felt like it. While the look and format of The Vampira Show and Elvira’s Movie Macabre are almost identical, each actress’ approach is different. Nurmi as Vampira had a philosophy behind her performance both in how she related to the audience and subverted societal norms. Peterson didn’t put that level of thought into Elvira; the show was meant to be a cheesy joke. This distinction makes Vampira high camp and Elvira low camp.

Peterson, who has been in a relationship with a woman for almost 20 years, said she didn’t come out until recently because she worried she’d lose her straight male audience. hom*ophobia is obviously real, however, a true high camp queen would never have this problem because her primary audience would never be straight men in the first place. Camp, as a sensibility, is a spectrum that encompasses the highbrow and lowbrow, gay and straight, and everything in between. In general, high camp is intended for women and gay men, and low camp is for straight men.

Elvira’s personality is crasser than Vampira’s was, especially in contrast to Vampira’s affected aristocratic style. In the film Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Elvira is rude to service workers, starts fistfights with people in a small town, and presses her breasts up against the windshield of her car when washing her car window. Vampira was coy and caustic, sipping her smoking co*cktail and saying things like, “A Vampira co*cktail, you like it? It hates you.” Nurmi, the daughter of Finnish immigrants who grew up in a fish cannery in Oregon, said she could do low or high class but not middle. As Vampira, she spoke in a vaguely condescending mock-aristocratic tone, calling her audience “darlingz” and smoking from a long cigarette holder.

There is a sophistication divide between the two characters, not unlike the one between The Addams Family and The Munsters (the latter another derivative show created after the success of The Addams Family TV series). While the Addams are rich eccentric goths, the Munsters are working-class monsters. The distinction between high camp and low camp is supposed to parallel the distinction between high and low art, but there is also something classist about this dichotomy, not necessarily in the characters represented but in the way such camp is classified based on the audiences it attracts. The Collins Dictionary defines high camp as “a sophisticated form of camp” and low camp as “an unsophisticated form of camp.” What qualifies as “sophisticated” is subjective, but typically high camp has higher artistic ambitions. In Susan Sontag’s essay, “Notes on Camp,” she argues high camp is usually “deliberate” and intentional, whereas low camp is “naive” and unintentional. Low camp is also often equated with being low budget, which often by virtue of financial limitation sometimes produces unintentional effects which differ from the director’s original vision. However, many films that are universally considered high camp, like those of John Waters, were produced on a low budget. The Vampira Show had a much lower budget than the Elvira movies, but Vampira is high camp no matter how sh*tty the production in which she appears, whereas Elvira, even with all the money in the world, will always be low camp. Low camp is often marked by lust, gore, bad writing, dated fashion, and/or outdated special effects. Low camp movies such as Friday the 13th aren’t notable for challenging the status quo in the sense a high camp movie like The Rocky Horror Picture Show is, but are relevant because they idiosyncratically capture their times. The Addams Family franchise could be considered high camp because it was a social commentary, however it lacks the exaggeration and aggressiveness to be fully high camp, therefore I would argue it is “soft camp,” a term I apply to subtler forms of camp.

Lisa Marie in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood as Maila Nurmi/Vampira (sans wig)

Tim Burton’s 1995 biopic Ed Wood featured Lisa Marie (Burton’s then-girlfriend) as Vampira/Maila Nurmi. According to the 2007 documentary Vampira and Me, Marie consulted with Nurmi for her performance, although Nurmi never ended up seeing Ed Wood. The film, while enjoyable, provided a warped representation of Vampira. Lisa Marie’s rendering of Vampira, itself a performance of a performance, bears little resemblance to Nurmi’s performance in the film clips of The Vampira Show. Rather, the Ed Wood performance affects a kind of Vampira/Elvira hybrid. Perhaps because at the time no Vampira footage was available, Marie’s portrayal of Vampira had to rely on word of mouth, so Marie had to invent her own Vampira. The result was a dry, monotone, sarcastic Vampira who, like Elvira, implied that the movies she was introducing were beneath her. Based on the TV scripts that survive, Vampira’s attitude toward the pulpy, often third-rate movies she introduced wasn’t demeaning, instead she poked fun at institutions such as marriage. For instance, one line introducing a film Apology for Murder reads, “And now back to the movie. Let’s see if the young couple can do away with the girl’s husband. Murdering him is the best way, it seems to me. After all, divorce can be such an unpleasant thing.”

In truth, Vampira resembles Morticia Addams much more than Elvira resembles either Vampira or Morticia, but Vampira did give Addams credit for inspiring her character. Additionally, at the time Nurmi performed Vampira, Morticia Addams was still a cartoon who had never been personified, whereas Elvira was not only imitating Vampira’s character but playing the same role she’d held—a horror movie hostess—and reaping the financial rewards and mass appeal Vampira had never achieved. Legally, there isn’t enough evidence to prove Elvira plagiarized Vampira, but artistically, ethically, and morally, Elvira is a knockoff Vampira in the way Spirit Halloween labels its Wednesday Addams costumes “Midweek Cutie” to avoid getting sued. It’s also likely Vampira’s character was too strange and abrasive for mainstream American audiences and would have been even in a 1980s revival. Thus, Elvira’s earthier, lowbrow humor allowed her more mass appeal than Vampira.

Elvira was not the first horror movie hostess to riff off Vampira’s act, just the one who did so most explicitly and successfully. As the first late-night movie hostess, Vampira set the blueprint for hundreds to follow. Vampira and Her Daughters, an encyclopedia of television movie hosts from the 1950s through the 1990s, names other movie hostesses who copied the look and format of The Vampira Show.

Moona Lisa was a late night science-fiction movie hostess in the 1960s who had a similar aesthetic to Vampira, who with long black hair and a plunging black ensemble in a smoke-filled room, ended her show with the sendoff, “Happy Hallucinations, Honeys,” adopting a version of Vampira’s sendoff “Bad Dreams, darlings!”

Tarantula Ghoul

Tarantula Ghoul, played by Suzanne Waldron, hosted a House of Horror program in Portland, Oregon from 1957-1959 that was admittedly influenced by the success of The Vampira Show, though all of the footage from this local show is lost as well. From the photos, Tarantula Ghoul made her character less sexy and more beatnik-like, diverging from Vampira’s cold, sultry persona. Her brand of humor is similarly high camp: she satirizes the Daughters of the Revolution with her “Daughters of the Salem Witchcraft Trials” organization; criticizes the zoo for not having prehistoric animals; and complains to the Highway Commission after they “remove the few decent death traps left.”

While most television horror hosts were men, there were several other horror hostesses from the 1980s and 1990s, including drag queen Crematia Mortem (“The Ghostess with the Mostess”) who vaguely resembleVampira. At a certain point, these hosts on low-budget, locally broadcast programs seem more like Halloween dress-up acts than copycats of Vampira, however, none of them generated the profit or attention the Elvira franchise did.

In the early 1980s, Nurmi wrote in her notebook:

“Now as I still count pennies for each can of tomato soup, the world has come to believe that the word “Vampira” is in the dictionary. That it is the female word for the male “Vampire.” They believe that Vampira herself is in public domain & lift my product. This is America! Where, then is this pauper’s attorney?

Am I, an impoverished and demoralized cripple, going to continue in this fashion while those who stole from me continue on in ill-gotten gluttony?”

Today, most people know of Elvira but not Vampira. Elvira is ubiquitous and real, whereas Vampira exists in the public imagination, if at all, mostly as a mythological character. Because so little footage of her survives, she is an apparition, a memory, an idea. Most studies on Vampira have examined what she represented as a cultural phenomenon rather than the content of her performances. Nurmi was never financially compensated for creating the character, eventually losing the legal rights to Vampira (likenesses of which were reproduced on merchandise without her benefiting). However, she managed to amass a level of fame still impressive for a local TV show that was broadcast for less than two years. Even though she lost the lawsuit, her later years brought her some recognition. The Misfits wrote a song about her, and she was embraced by goth and punk subcultures and became a fixture in the LA punk scene.

Cassandra Peterson ended up playing Elvira for decades, somewhat haphazardly accepting the success the role brought her. The Elvira’s Movie Macabre franchise achieved national success, spawning two movies, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988), and Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001), both considered critical and box office failures. A horror show starring Elvira was revived in 2010 and again in 2014 on Hulu. Peterson continues to make public, television, and movie appearances as Elvira and still lends her likeness to various brands.

In 2008, Maila Nurmi died in poverty at the age of 85 in her one-bedroom converted garage apartment. She wasn’t discovered for a few days, and her cat died with her; her dog was deemed too aggressive and had to be put down. She had no living family, and funds for her funeral service were entirely raised by friends and fans. However, she does hold prime real estate at Hollywood Forever Cemetery overlooking the fountain lake, having somehow made one smart investment in her life, a peaceful plot for the afterlife.

Morticia Addams: High Femme, Soft Camp

Vampira: High Camp, Soft Ghoul

Elvira: High Femme, Low Camp