horroroftruant:

Vampira 

An aspiring actress, chorus girl and cheesecake model who posed for Vargas and worked with a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe, Maila Nurmi’s moment came in 1953 when she attended Lester Horton’s annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in Hollywood dressed as the then-unnamed ghoul-woman from Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons. 

“I bound my bosoms, so that I was flat-chested,” Nurmi says, “and I got a wig, and painted my body a kind of a mauve white pancake with a little lavender powder so that I looked as though I’d been entombed.” To everyone’s surprise but her own, Nurmi defeated 2,000 contestants and was named best-costumed reveller at the ball. So strong was the impression she made that KABC-TV producer Hunt Stromberg Jr. spent five months tracking her down in order to offer her TV work as hostess of a late-night horror show. Unwilling simply to rip-off Addams creation (an irony, since Nurmi herself was the victim of much plagiarism in subsequent years), Nurmi decided to create her own unique persona, and the campier, sexier Vampira took to the airwaves. 

An instant sensation which spawned fan clubs all over the world and led to Nurmi’s being featured in a multi-page spread in LIFE Magazine, Vampira also attracted the attention of a B-Movie director named Ed Wood and his down-and-out star-performer, horror great Bela Lugosi. It was Lugosi who saw Nurmi on TV and told Wood he’d like to work with her some day. Wood, the much-maligned director of Bride of the Monster and the cross-dressing classic Glen or Glenda (which he also wrote and starred in, as a man addicted to drag), honored Lugosi’s request in typically oddball fashion. Years later, when Nurmi’s fame had waned thanks to what she terms a blacklisting, and after Lugosi died, leaving behind some unexploited movie footage, Wood cast Nurmi as Lugosi’s undead wife in an unlikely zombies-of-the-stratosphere scenario, and the schlock-horror classic Plan 9 From Outer Space was born. 

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