Vampira and Me: L.A. Film Festival Premieres R. H. Greene's New Documentary

Greene admiringly refers to his subject's creation as "anti-suburban terrorism," positioning Vampira as a proto-feminist, anti-patriarchal performance-art work in protest against her times (notably unlike her successor, Elvira, whose cleavage-spilling, cheeky sluttiness was in tune with the late–20th century rise of third-wave feminist self-commodification). In the era of cheerful female submission, Nurmi conjured a sex icon who seduced only to withhold; in one of the brief extant clips of Vampira in character, Nurmi sips from a glass full of dry ice and purrs, "A vampire cocktail. You like it? It hates you." This from a woman whose body was both a come-on and a warning sign. Her exaggerated hourglass dimensions (cinching her waist to fit into the costume, as detailed in Vampira and Me, involved steam baths, fasting and Nurmi's homemade flesh-reducing treatment) "made it seem," as Greene says in his voiceover, "like she didn't have a womb." Rather than affirm the baby boom's fertility-minded ideals, Vampira vivisected them.

It took a couple of generations for the full impact to be felt, but by the 1980s, Vampira's sartorial image was being widely appropriated by goths, and eventually her aura sampled by pretty much everyone else; her detached cool, and her blurring the line between life and performance, made her, Greene notes in the movie, "the birth mother of hipster irony." After punk bands The Damned and The Misfits recorded songs referencing her creation, Nurmi lent her own voice to a recording by a band called Satan's Cheerleaders — another archival gem that Vampira and Me resurrects.

Vampira and Me

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More About

• Maila Nurmi
• R.H. Greene
• Ed Wood (Movie)
• James Dean
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

"Maila didn't even like punk," Greene says. "But she knew exactly what a scream from the margins was, and how to give it."

Package edited by Karina Longworth and Veronika Ferdman. See LAFilmFest.com for information on screening times and locations.