Celebrate Vampira’s Birthday Right Here on Dread Central
Steve Barton
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In our never ending quest to bring you every damned thing that’s cool imaginable, we’re proud to help celebrate the birthday of great and forever sexy Vampira along with a lot of familiar faces — right here on DC!
That’s right, kids! On December 11th Dread Central has a ghoulish birthday treat planned for fans of the first horror host — the one and only Vampira.
This year Vampira, aka actress Maila Nurmi, would have been 87 years old. Nurmi is best known as the corset-waisted host named Vampira that had its beginnings on a popular West Coast TV show which aired on April 30, 1954 on KABC-TV and lasted for only a year. “The Vampira Show” was covered in LIFE Magazine, and the show got fan mail from around the world although no one was able to view it outside the Los Angeles area. Nurmi was the Godmother of Goth before it existed, which was a wake-up call to the button-down suburbia of the Eisenhower decade. In 1956 Nurmi met movie director Ed Wood, Jr., and she appeared as Béla Lugosi’s wife in what’s now referred to in pop culture as the “worst movie ever made”– Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Forty years later Vampira was resurrected by director Tim Burton and brought to a new audience in the movie Ed Wood with Johnny Depp in the titular role and Lisa Marie as the glamour ghoul herself. The real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, passed away in January, 2008.
Documentarian Kevin Sean Michaels began a collaboration with Nurmi on Vampira: The Movie (Alpha Video) in 2004, which won the 2007 Rondo Award for Best Independent Feature. The documentary featured many interviews including Forrest J Ackerman, Sid Haig, Lloyd Kaufman and Vampira-phile Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects, Repo: The Genetic Opera), who attended her funeral.
Shortly after the movie’s completion in 2008, Michaels penned some songs and went into the recording studio with new material for the Vampira: The Movie Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. On hand for the music was Ari Lehman, the first Jason Voorhees in the original Friday The 13th. The song’s lyrics are based around the characters of Plan 9 from Outer Space.
“Vampira Chant” is a 10-minute music video and is the first video off the Vampira: The Movie Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD (order yours below), featuring songs by Ari Lehman, Bill Moseley, Curse, Mustang Lightning and others.
The video is a tribute to Nurmi’s creative spirit and based on a story told by Maila to director Kevin Sean Michaels. It is presented by VAMP Productions and stars Bill Moseley and Ashlynn Yennie (The Human Centipede) and will premiere exclusively right here on December 11th.
Stay tuned!
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Categorized:News
