VAMPIRA
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Early life
Born as Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi, she claimed to be the niece of the Finnish athlete Paavo Nurmi, who began setting long-distance running world records in 1921, the year before her birth.[3] She moved to the United States with her family when she was two years old and grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, home to the largest Finnish-American community in the state. She and her family lived in Ashtabula until 1939, when they moved to Oregon.
She graduated high school in Astoria, Oregon ,[4] before arriving in Los Angeles . She modeled for Alberto Vargas, Bernard of Hollywood and Man Ray, gaining a foothold in the film industry with an uncredited role in Victor Saville’s 1947 film, If Winter Comes.
She reportedly was fired by Mae West from the cast of West’s Broadway play Catherine Was Great in 1944 because West feared that she was being upstaged. On Broadway, she gained much attention after appearing in the horror-themed midnight show Spook Scandals, in which she screamed, fainted, lay in a coffin and seductively lurked about a mock cemetery. She also worked as a showgirl for the Earl Carroll Theatre and as a high-kicking chorus line dancer at the Florentine Gardens along with famous stripper Lili St. Cyr. In the 1950s she supported herself mainly by posing for pin-up photos in men’s magazines such as Famous Models, Gala and Glamorous Models. Before landing her role as ‘Vampira’, she was working as a hat-check girl in a cloakroom on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.[5]
Origin of Vampira
The idea for the Vampira character was born in 1953 when Nurmi attended choreographer Lester Horton’s annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in a costume inspired by a character in The New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams. Her appearance with pale white skin and tight black dress caught the attention of television producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr. (1923-86), who wanted to hire her to host horror movies on the Los Angeles television station KABC-TV, but Stromberg had no idea how to contact her. He finally got her phone number from Rudi Gernreich, later famed as the designer of the topless swimsuit. The name Vampira was the invention of Nurmi’s husband, Dean Riesner.
On April 30, 1954, KABC-TV aired a preview, Dig Me Later, Vampira, at 11:00 p.m. The Vampira Show premiered on the following night, May 1, 1954. For the first four weeks, the show aired at midnight, moving to 11:00 p.m. on May 29. Ten months later, the series aired at 10:30 p.m., beginning March 5, 1955. Each show opened with Vampira gliding down a dark corridor flooded with dry-ice fog. At the end of her trance-like walk, the camera zoomed in on her face as she let out a piercing scream. She would then introduce (and mock) that evening’s film while reclining barefoot on a skull-encrusted Victorian couch. Her horror-related comedy antics included ghoulish puns such as encouraging viewers to write for epitaphs instead of autographs and talking to her pet spider Rollo. She also ran as a candidate for Night Mayor of Hollywood with a platform of “dead issues”. In another publicity stunt, KABC had her cruise around Hollywood in the back of a chauffeur-driven 1932 Packard touring car with the top down, where she sat, as Vampira, holding a black parasol. The show was an immediate hit, and in June 1954 she appeared as Vampira in a horror-themed comedy skit on The Red Skelton Show along with Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney Jr..[6] That same week Life magazine ran an article on her, including a photo-spread of her show-opening entrance and scream (June 14, 1954, pp. 107, 108, 110).
When the series was cancelled in 1955, she retained rights to the character of Vampira and took the show to a competing Los Angeles television station, KHJ-TV. Several episode scripts and a single promotional kinescope of Nurmi re-creating some of her macabre comedy segments are held by private collectors. Several clips from the rare kinescope are included in the 2006 documentary Vampira: The Movie.
Nurmi made television history as the first horror movie hostess. In 1957, Screen Gems released a syndicated package of 52 horror movies, mostly from Universal Pictures, under the program title Shock Theater. Independent stations in major cities all over the U.S. began showing these films, adding their own ghoulish host or hostess (including Vampira II and other lookalikes) to attract more viewers.
Nominated for an Emmy Award as ‘Most Outstanding Female Personality’ in 1954, she returned to films with Too Much, Too Soon, followed by The Big Operator and The Beat Generation. Her most notable film appearance was in Ed Wood’s camp classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space, as a Vampira-like zombie (filmed in 1956, but released in 1959). In 1960 she appeared in I Passed for White and Sex Kittens Go to College, followed by 1962′s The Magic Sword. The classic clip from Plan 9 from Outer Space featuring Vampira walking out of the woods with her hands pointing straight out, was used to start the original opening sequence of WPIX Channel 11 New York’s Chiller Theatre in the 1960s.
Awards
* Being the originator of the Television Horror Host sub-genre of movie shows, Maila Nurmi and The Vampira Show received a special citation at a ceremony on the event of the 50th Anniversary of the television Emmy Awards. Escorting her to this ceremony was long time friend Sid Terror.
* Nurmi was inducted into “The Horror Drunx” Hall Of Fame as Horror royalty in 2007.
* Nurmi was inducted posthumously into the Monster Kid Hall of Fame at the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards. “Vampira: The Movie” won a Rondo for Best Independent Production as a tribute to Nurmi.
In popular culture
* In 1958, singer Bobby Bare recorded a song about Nurmi’s character titled “Vampira.”
* London Punk pioneers The Damned paid homage to Vampira with the track “Plan 9 Channel 7″ on their 1979 album Machine Gun Etiquette. A video of this song was made by The Damned’s record label, which featured Damned singer David Vanian’s then wife Lori as Vampira.
* The New Jersey horror-punk group The Misfits also recorded an original song named after and based on Nurmi’s character. Versions of the song date to 1979, but it was not released until 1982 on their first full-length LP Walk Among Us.
* The Devin Townsend Band had two songs, “Vampolka” and “Vampira”, on the album Synchestra. “Vampira”, the first single from the album, was made into a music video.
* The Greg Kihn novel Horror Show has a character based on Vampira.
* In 2004 The Moon-Rays band out of Chicago recorded “Blues For Vampira” that was featured in the Horror Host Documentary American Scary during the Maila Nurmi segment.
