W. Scott Poole - Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror

Praise for Vampira

Scott Poole has the chops, the Hollywood savvy, and the horror genres insider smarts to write a killer book on Vampira. Ill be first in line to grab a copy.

JONATHAN MABERRY, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Assassins Code and Dust & Decay

Horror hostess, bondage goddess, Charles Addams cartoon come to life, Vampira was every first-generation fanboys wet dream. Scott Poole takes us on an unforgettable ride through the overlapping underworlds of B+D magazines, Hollywood noir, and early political liberation movements that inspired actress Maila Nurmi to challenge a postwar culture bent on stifling womens, choices, bodies, and desires. This book is a subversive masterpiece.

SHERI HOLMAN, author of Witches on the Road Tonight and The Dress Lodger

W. Scott Pooles last book, Monsters in America, was a dazzling work of cultural history: smart, funny, subversive and wildly entertaining. He showed a special gift for playfully saying serious things. His new book is even more wonderful. The life of Maila Nurmi, better known as the late-night TV hostess Vampira, is a great, strange story in itself, but also allows Poole to explore our attitudes about sex, death, fear, and difference. The Lady of Horror was famous in the 1950s, but she is a remarkable symbol who connects backward to Poe and forward to Goth. She is as American as the Statue of Liberty.

CHRISTOPHER BRAM, author of Gods and Monsters and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

Vampira is up there with Vincent Price for lovers of the macabre, an icon whose shadow and influence lingers long after death. Shes not only important to modern children of the night for being the first TV horror host, but as the original Glamour Ghoul, whose style has inspired generations of Goth Girls to adopt the sexy undead look as their own. But there is more to her story than her ability to look good screaming, and Scott Poole, whose writing on the dark side of popular culture has proven to be some of the smartest, sassiest commentary on American society around, is the man to tell it.

LIISA LADOUCEUR, author of Encyclopedia Gothica

An expert critic of pop culture, W. Scott Poole is one of the finest historians of all that is wicked, salacious, and sexy in America. By looking into the life and times of Maila Nurmi, the former stripper turned televisions dark goddess of sex and death, Poole unveils a new side of midcentury America, which we too often forget the steamy, scary, and sensational.

EDWARD J. BLUM, author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Vampira represents a way to talk about fifties culture, especially about its political and moral pressures. Scott Poole has shown how brilliantly he can unearth cultural fears and desires.

JAMES R. KINCAID, author of Erotic Innocence

I got this graveyard woman... shes a junkyard angel

Bob Dylan, From a Buick 6

Copyright 2014 W. Scott Poole

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poole, W. Scott, 1971-

Vampira : dark goddess of horror / W. Scott Poole.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61902-420-5 (ebook)

1. Vampira, 19212008. 2. EntertainersUnited StatesBiography. 3. ActressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN2287.V315P66 2014

791.45028092dc23

[B]

2014014147

Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Soft Skull Press

An Imprint of Counterpoint

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to a teenaged Elizabeth Syrjaniemi and long, lonely afternoons in the 1930s with her comics and pencils, all her strange road before her.

And to Bogey and Bobo, devoted companions for the solitary.

CONTENTS

by Sheri Holman

by Sheri Holman

O ne summer night when I was seven years old, I snuck out of my bedroom and down the hall. My young, sexy parents were out doing what young, sexy parents did on Saturday nights in the 1970s, and my teenaged aunt had been left in charge. It was past midnight and the house was dark except for the flickering light coming from our black-and-white television in the living room. Id had another of the nightmares that plagued me back then. Abduction. Unfamiliar cars in the driveway. Formless dread. I padded in to see my aunt and glanced at the TV. An old woman in a nightgown caressed a butcher knife and cooed, You must die, die, my darling.

I was paralyzed with terror, but almost instantly the scene cut away to a backdrop dungeon where a fake vampire in a black unitard and scuffed sneakers strummed a ukulele. Perched on the edge of a prop coffin, Bowman Body told a handful of jokes too corny even for Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. And just like that, the horror was vanquished. I snuggled up next to my auntwho was grateful for the companyand watched alternating clips of gore and slapstick until I fell back asleep.

This was my first glimpse of Shock Theater, Richmond, Virginias answer to Creature Feature, in San Francisco, Chiller Theater, in Pittsburgh, Ghoulardi in Cleveland, Zacherley in New York. Until 1980 when cable swept away independent local television stations, every large to midsize market had its own late-night horror movie host. Dressed as ghouls and ersatz vampires, they introduced films from Universal Studios Shock! package, a bundle of 52 movies that included everything from Dracula and The Mummy to The Spider Woman Strikes Back. I was one of millions of kids who stayed up late or snuck downstairs to be initiated into the adult world of sex and violence from the safety of my living room.

Thirty-odd years later, the devotion I felt toward my childhood horror host found its way into my fifth novel,