Bloofer Lady: Vampira

 

We’ve had a lot of Bloofer Gents in recent years, so I think it’s time we returned to praise the beauty of a shady lady, don’t you? And we won’t be alone in singing the praises of this year’s horrifying hottie, as many rockabilly, psychobilly and punk bands have also waxed lyrical about Vampira’s deathly charms.

Actress Maila Nurmi wasn’t a stranger to the spooy side of things before reincarnating as Vampira; she’d already appeared on the Broadway stage in midnight show Spook Scandals, and adopted bat-shaped glasses after they were a prop in a photo shoot she did with Man Ray. A fortitous encounter at a masquerade – she went as the Charles Addams cartoon character who would later be named Morticia, and a television producer in attendance was looking for someone to host suspense films – led to the summoning of the spirit of our spooktastic siren Vampira. 

For five years or so, in the 1950s, Vampira was queen of the night. Life magazine ran an article on her. She appeared on the hugely popular Red Skelton Show. Nurmi played a Vampira-like zombie in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. People couldn’t get enough, it seemed, of those incredible 38-17-36 measurements and that scream. 

But then, somehow, they had had enough, and Vampira became a creature of story. Even the stories started to write her off – Hedda Hopper claimed Nurmi’s stories of being friends with James Dean were ‘cashing in’, for example. Footage from Vampira’s television appearances was mostly inaccessible for decades, leaving Plan 9, famously one of the worst films ever made, the most easily-seen footage of her. Possibly the nadir came in the early 1980s, when a TV studio wanted to resurrect Vampira, and Nurmi, who owned the character rights, arrived at the studio to discover they expected another actress to play the part. Nurmi went home, and took her character with her. (The actress was Cassandra Peterson, and so the ultimate dumb brunette, Elvira, was born.) 

Is that the end? Of course not. You can’t keep a legendary vamp down. Since the 1990s several documentaries have been made about Nurmi/Vampira, in the process revealing just what an influential figure she really was. Nurmi modelled for Disney’s iconic witch Maleficent, for example, something which was confirmed in the 2010s. Evidence of her visiting James Dean on set was found in the studio archives by people researching Dean, burying Hedda Hopper’s mean comments. 2012 documentary Vampira And Me even brought some of her early footage back to the screen, allowing new audiences to see her in her full ghoulish glory for themselves. 

Looking back from 2026, it’s easy to overlook just what a pop cultural figure Vampira was. Yet without her, and her success, we wouldn’t have had the horror hosts of the 1950s and later, and all the things those fed into. Maila Nurmi passed on in 2008, but Vampira will haunt the corridors of pop culture as long as they stand, serenaded by psychobillies and The Damned. 

Terrifying, trailblazing totty, we salute you!