THIS MONTH
The EMPIRE Deep Dive
VAMPIRA
IN OUR REGULAR SERIES, WE EXPLORE A SLICE OF CINEMA LORE
WORDS TOM ELLEN
THE RED DRESS
AT FIRST, THERE’S nothing —only smoke.
Gradually, though, the fog dissipates and we can make out a dingy hallway, full of cobwebs and candelabras. There’s music, too: a fairground organ wheezing dementedly beneath a piano —one key tap-tap-tapping like a leaking pipe. And then, out of the darkness, she appears.
Her face is deathly pale, her wasp-waisted body clad in all black, her eyebrows like bats’ wings. As she reaches the end of the corridor she meets our gaze and emits a piercing, bloodcurdling scream —equal parts agony and ecstasy. As the camera jerks forward, seemingly as startled as the viewer, the woman purrs: “Ah! Screaming relaaaaxes me so...”
It’s 1954 and America has never seen anything like this. The Vampira Show was bottled lightning —a dirt-cheap late-night oddity created to showcase schlocky horror films, that somehow became one of the most influential TV series ever. Aired weekly at midnight, exclusively in the Los Angeles area, the show ran for just one season, between 1954 and 1955. In that time, it made a global superstar of its leading lady —the titular ‘Vampira’, played by Finnish-American performer Maila Nurmi —who would bookend each week’s featured B-movie with a litany of ghoulish sketches and campy double entendres. In a television landscape dominated by cosy, familial programmes like I Love Lucy —in which the female characters were typically cheery, demure housewives —The Vampira Show represented a genuine shock to the system. It was, as Nurmi’s biographer W. Scott Poole put it, “outsider art accidentally gone mainstream”.
The series briefly transformed Nurmi into Hollywood’s hottest property. She attended glitzy galas, featured in Life magazine photoshoots and palled about with the likes of James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley. Her show spawned fan clubs across the globe (many of which still exist today) and single-handedly galvanised the role of the ‘horror host’ —a film and TV trope that has gone on to prop up everything from The Twilight Zone to Guillermo del Toro’s recent Netflix hit Cabinet Of Curiosities. And it all started —as every episode of The Vampira Show always did —with that bloodcurdling scream.