Vampira and Me

I have always been interested in the Vampira character portrayed by Maila Nurmi. She created an iconic image as the ghoulish vampire woman surrounded by a web of mystery. During the 1980's, when I first saw her image, I became a fan. The fact that she was an Scandinavian like myself fueled the interest. Unfortunately there was never enough facts or information about Maila Nurmi to make me know enough of her career and life as a misfit in the Hollywood system. This documentary film is an excellent telling of her life and the creation of Vampira. An objective telling of how her short lived fame during the mid 1950's brought both happiness and tragedy into her life. Vampira was a character that grew out of an era in change, where teens became rebels and rock'n roll was the new beat. An underground culture that grew to the surface and changed a generation of young people. Like Bettie Page, Vampira became strong iconic figure with a look nobody could forget. The camera caught images that never aged and continues until today to attract peoples attention. "Vampira and Me" is like an unholy grail must see for anyone who love the character Vampira and the woman behind her creation. A story told with love and compassion from her number 1 fan and also supported by all the people who loved her image and kept her underground fame alive. It is especially interesting to see unseen and rare footage of Vampira that proves she also was a great comedienne. Also fun to the see images of her early days as a pin-up model. This documentary has much heart and at times you can not help feeling sad, her career and life deserved much better. But once you adventure into the road towards Hollywood in search for fame there is no telling of the outcome, everything is at risk, especially your life. Maila Nurmi was a woman with talent and intelligence, a survivor. This documentary tells her strange tale of the unexpected, almost like it was meant to be. See it, you will love it!

This film explores everything about the life of Maila Nurmi from her childhood, to the height of her fame, her downfall, her death, her relevance on pop culture, relationship with James Dean, and so much more in all less than 2 hours. Very few details of her life go untouched and it feels like the complete life story on someone who is a very important icon. Most of the film is Maila being interviewed herself so you get to know each detail of her life in her own words. This allows you to feel you're experiencing the events along with her. She is the only one who is seen being interviewed on screen. All of the other interviews are only audio so this film feels like the true, authentic story of Maila's life. Her story is an inspirational one because it showed someone who worked so hard to achieve so much. Yet she was still thrown away like trash, taken advantage of, hurt, betrayed, and overcame all of it to still be an icon to horror/cult film fans, Goths, and a Hollywood legend in general. While she talked about her times of misfortune and fall from grace, she never seemed bitter or resentful; but rather she seemed to be someone who felt lucky to have achieved success and embraced it with gratefulness.

This is a great documentary which captures the life of an icon very well, and also lets you have an idea of what the 1950s were really like and how different Maila was compared to what other women of that time period were expected to be. She was a truly special, unique person who was one of a kind, and you could see that from this documentary. The director was a personal friend of hers and you could tell how much he cared about her from his narration and the fact that he produced such a documentary in memory of her at all. I would recommend this to any fans of Plan 9 From Outer Space (although it surprisingly doesn't get mentioned a whole lot, the documentary shows there is so much more to the person Maila was than just an appearance in a cult movie) and anybody else who wants to know about the mysterious character.

This intimate and moving portrait of a lost goth icon brought tears to my eyes.

It's rare to see a movie and know that it was made with love, but I would say this is a film like that. Director R. H. Greene has excavated pretty much every frame of film featuring Maila Nurmi as her barrier-shattering goth creation Vampira, the majority of which was found and presented here for the first time in over 50 years. In that way, this film is quite a present to pop culture history.

But the core of this documentary is the on camera interplay between Greene, the unseen questioner, and Nurmi, the regal, coquettish, gleeful, moist-eyed interviewee. Nurmi was clearly bloodied by her adventures in Hollywood as Vampira but she comes across as (mostly) unbowed, or at least willing to make the sacrifices that were required to give the world her creation. Knowing Nurmi at least got respect and affection from Greene and other second and third generation fans makes the rest of her story--a real Hollywood tragedy--easier to bear.

Thoughtful comments by cult comedian Dana Gould stand out, as does the amazing side story of Voluptua, a rip-off character created by men to capitalize on Vampira's popularity. Voluptua proved by her sex kitten submissiveness just how radically feminist the self-sufficient Vampira really was--when men tried to recreate Vampira's success, they created a blow-up doll, where Nurmi created a feminist icon. An amazing story, for horror fans and anyone who cares about radical.depictions of women in the media age.

Vampira and Me (2012)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

The name Maila Nurmi might not jump out at you but that's because she's better known under her character name of Vampira. This touching and wonderfully detailed documentary takes a look at the life of Nurmi who is probably best remembered today due to her silent performance in Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE but many fans will always remember her as the horror television host who influenced Elvira.

Clocking in just under two hours, it's hard to imagine that any fan would watch this and leave it feeling disappointed. There really wasn't too much known about Vampira but this documentary certainly makes you feel as if you understand everything about her, her character and her rather sad life. The documentary features an interview that the actress gave before she passed away in 2008 and we get to hear her story from her own words. Stories include how the Vampira character came to be, how the show ended, her years of poverty, working with Ed Wood and her notorious relationship with James Dean, a relationship that would have many blaming her for his death.

This is certainly an extremely well-made documentary that features all sorts of terrific information. It was great getting to hear these stories from the woman herself but we're also given some terrific film and television footage. The documentary covers pretty much every aspect of her life and it doesn't shy away from any of the sadness that she felt. Sadly, the majority of the Vampire television show is lost forever with only two minutes of footage surviving and we do get to see that here as well as two other television appearances.

There's not much surviving footage of Vampira in her prime, so there's only so much they could do here, but the interview with her in her old age was great and she was quite candid and sharp. Overall, a very well made doc about a legend that deserved better in life.