Vampira (1921-2008)

Maila Nurmi didn't have many breaks in life. In later life she was reduced to selling hand-made jewelry to make ends meet. That was a far fall from the high life she claimed for herself, when she supposedly dated James Dean, Orson Welles and who knows who else. Still, she had her longevity, until this week, and there'd be the occasional trip to a convention to meet with the people who fondly remembered her, and those born too late to see her in her prime, too late even to see reruns of her TV show, since all copies are lost. Still, there were plenty of photos from back in the day, and there was Plan 9 From Outer Space, which presents the closest approximation of Maila Nurmi in the years of her glory, except that she doesn't talk. Already by 1957, that was the best she could do, three years after her TV show captivated Los Angeles and a Life magazine photo introduced the nation to Vampira.

Once upon a time it made perfect sense for local TV channels to have old movies introduced by station employees, on the assumption that the host did as much to sell the show as the movies themselves. Maila Nurmi was one of the first classic horror hosts in a lineage that extends to Elvira (whom Nurmi sued unsuccessfully for plagiarism) and a few surviving local characters. They dressed in weird outfits, strutted about on creepy or faux-creepy sets, and often mocked the very movies they were showing. Some hosts extended their outlook to the wider world, embodying the "sick" humor of the era. After the fact, many fans of horror hosts realized that they'd been given their first taste of satire. Characters like Vampira in Los Angeles, Zacherle in New York, Ghoulardi in Cleveland, helped introduce a note of irreverence at the alleged height of Baby Boom conformity. Some people might even claim that horror hosts were formative influences on the hippies to come.

At the same time, the horror hosts had an odd effect on the movies they played. For some fans at least, those films were not diminished by the hosts' antics, but came to share in the hosts' transgressive qualities. They came to be perceived, in the word of one big fan of Ghoulardi, as "psychotronic," signifying a quality that transcended low budgets and bad acting and exalted the sheer experience of watching outrageous scenarios. To that extent, the horror hosts are responsible for the concept of the cult movie, and for a certain way of seeing movies in general at a critical distance from mainstream standards of quality -- the sort of viewpoint that might name Grindhouse rather than Atonement, for instance, as the year's best film. All this begins with Maila Nurmi, for whom one fan, poaching from Plan 9, posted this tribute on You Tube. Take a look: