Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror

Pop culture critic Poole (history, Coll. of Charleston; Monsters in America) sure knows a monster when he sees one. He continues his macrocultural exegesis in this microquasibiography and cultural (especially the 1950s) explication of TV's first and most revelatory horror host. Maila Nurmi, the eponymous Vampira, was a deliciously sexy siren from the graveyard with a deathly wan pallor, 19-inch cinched waist, talons for nails, a busty chest, and an orgasmic scream to die for (really, check it out on YouTube). Her show, Dig Me, Vampira, ran for one season only, 56 episodes (none of which, sadly, exist today), on Los Angeles's KABC channel 7 in 1954. And yet, as Poole incisively explains and illustrates throughout, Vampira's social and artistic influence has been pervasive and subversive. She was going to be made a star by Howard Hawks (didn't happen), bombed around with James Dean and Elvis, toured in the 1950s with Liberace, and was in Ed Wood's 1959 masterpiece, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Why we should care, and care v-e-r-y much, about this seemingly peripheral C-list celebrity is made artfully clear in Poole's excellent work.