Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror
3/5
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Currently unavailable
About this ebook
This whip-smart piece of pop culture details the life of the cult horror figure, as well as the much wider story of 1950s America, its treatment of women and sex, and a fascinating swath of Hollywood history.
In Vampira, Poole gives us the eclectic life of the dancer, stripper, actress, and artist Maila Nurmi, who would reinvent herself as Vampira during the backdrop of 1950s America, an era of both chilling conformity and the nascent rumblings of the countercultural response that led from the Beats and free jazz to the stirring of the LGBT movement and the hardcore punk scene in the bohemian enclave along Melrose Avenue.
A veteran of the New York stage and late nights at Hollywood's hipster hangouts, Nurmi would eventually be linked to Elvis, Orson Welles, and James Dean, as well as stylist and photographer Rudi Gernreich, founder of the Mattachine Society and designer of the thong. Thanks to rumors of a romance between Vampira and James Dean, his tragic death inspired the circulation of stories that she had cursed him and, better yet, had access to his dead body for use in her dark arts.
In Poole's expert hands, Vampira is more than the story of a highly creative artist continually reinventing herself, but a parable of the runaway housewife bursting the bounds of our straight-laced conventions with an exuberant display of camp, sex, and creative individuality that owed something to the morbid New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, the evil queen from Disney's Snow White, and the popular, underground bondage magazine Bizarre, and forward to the staged excesses of Madonna and Lady Gaga. Vampira is a wildly compelling tour through a forgotten piece of pop cultural history, one with both cultish and literary merit, sure to capture the imagination of Vampira fans new and old.
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Reviews for Vampira
1 rating2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A fascinating look at the mysterious life of the cult classic scream goddess, Vampira. Although not much is known about her life, author W. Scott Poole did a great job fleshing out what he good and writing about the history of the decade, women's rights, and the culture of the time. Filled with fascinating photos and interesting tid bits, this retrospective is on more than Vampira, it's about the culture of the fifties in which she emerged and how she shattered all the stereotypes and housewife tropes. It reads as if it's a long scholarly essay, but it's worth plowing through to learn some interesting facts about her association with James Dean, Elvis, Marlon Brando, Ed Wood, Orson Welles, and Liberace. Intriguing, but it could have been wrapped up a little more concisely.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book is enjoyable, although I had a few problems with it. The author admits at the beginning that the biographical details of Maila Nurmi's life are so scant that the book deals as much with the context with which the Vampira character emerged, and the influence it exerted, as much as it did with the performer herself. I have no problem with this approach, and I actually appreciate that it isn't trying to tease out scant biographical information, and is trying to source what it has. But there are some avenues that remain tantalizingly unexplored by the book. Because so little of her act has survived, the author concentrates (understandably) on the importance of Vampira's image, which ultimately ends up seeing a little shallow: it occasionally seems like her importance rests on how striking she is visually, where I think the author is trying to contend that there was more to it. And, after the fall of Vampira, why were all the other horror hosts that came in her wake -- Ghoulardi, the Bowman Body, etc. -- men, up to the ascendance of Elvira? With the author insisting on Vampira's mixing of sex and death and humor, what sort of influence did she have on something like the rise of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie that mixed horror b-movie tropes with alternative sexuality quite openly, and something that was engaged with as camp by its audience? For that matter, can her influence perhaps extend to other performative artists who constructed alter egos, such as David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust? Why does Maila Nurmi continue to be such an active interest of certain groups, including drag queens, where other "female female impressionists" (like Mae West) have not? For that matter, what about the character did the author connect with? (Also, am I the only one who sees "Rocky and Bullwinkle"'s Natasha Fatale as essentially a Communist Vampira?) I think a more interesting text would have traced the influence of the sort of gothic and camp strands that Vampira worked through 20th century culture, from Theda Bara on, with a heavy emphasis on what Vampira introduced. As it stands, it sometimes feels that she is important just because the author keeps saying she is, and I say this as somebody who actively sought out a book on Vampira to read.I would also mention that there were a couple cases in the book that the information that is presented in the book is simply incorrect. For instance, the comic character Vampirella is indicated as being designed by Trina Roberts. I had a hunch that this wasn't correct, and checking Wikipedia I found that it was Trina Robbins, a well-known comix artist. She is referred to as Roberts three time in the course of the paragraph. These sorts of errors (and I noticed a couple others) end up undermining the story the author is trying to tell: given that so much of the information about Maila Nurmi is obscured by time or speculative, you would hope that something this easy to corroborate would be correct.As a meditation on Vampira, I think the book works, and at times gets across the excitement of seeing her on-screen in 1954. I think it's less effective in contextualizing it, and seems to ignore certain things (like the rise of the femme fatale in Film Noir) that would seem to feed into what Nurmi eventually did.