LOOKING BACK AT THE GHOUL OF MY DREAMS
New DVDs Celebrate the horror host phenomenon...
by Don Stradley
Vampira is one of those characters who was popular for a
brief time at the dawn of television, but stays in our imaginations for a
number of reasons, not the least of which was her grossly sexual
appearance. Also, there is so little
footage of her that she remains mysterious. Vampira and Me (2012), a labor of love from director R.H. Greene,
puts the phenomenon in perspective, even if it goes a bit overboard in
estimating her importance to American pop culture. True, she was friends with James Dean, she
sported some radical haircuts, and she glided
memorably in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From
Outer Space, but was she really, as Greene’s documentary suggests, a
harbinger of everything from women’s liberation to the Goth movement? I’m not
sure. But I will say that Vampira’s creator, Maila Nurmi, was a beautiful and
interesting lady who was not only ahead of her time, but possessed enough
chutzpah to light up Hollywood Boulevard on the stormiest of nights.
Nurmi was an unemployed 32-year-old actress and former model
when she threw together the "Glamour Ghoul" ensemble for a 1953 costume ball in LA. Her
plan was to attract TV producers, which she did . She
was hired to host a late night horror movie slot on KABC-TV (Channel 7 in the
Los Angeles area). She allegedly wrote her own jokes, and in her
own words, was a sort of “pre-Saturday Night Live,” appearing in skits during
the commercials, anything to liven up the often pitiful B-movies that were
being aired. Though she’s credited with
being the first horror host, and for setting the standard for all others to
follow, the hosting gig probably wasn’t what she’d had in mind. After all, she’d once been groomed by big
shot director Howard Hawks as the next major female star, perhaps another Lauren Bacall. On the other hand, Nurmi was
fully committed to the Vampira character, willingly starving herself to achieve
her creepy hourglass figure, and participating in a publicity blitz that would
have impressed Lady Gaga.
There were fan clubs, and articles in LIFE, but Nurmi’s fame
as Vampira was short-lived. As Nurmi describes in the documentary, she was “as
popular as Pamela Anderson for about five minutes.” An argument over who owned the rights to the
character stalled her career, and
effectively ended it. There were sporadic TV and movie appearances during the
remainder of the decade, but by the mid-1960s she’d vanished entirely. In between, she was stalked by weirdoes,
installed linoleum for a living, and owned an antique store called Vampira’s
Attic. The low point was when she endured a horrific assault by a lunatic who
kept her hostage in her own NY apartment for two hours. When Nurmi reported the attack, she sat
for a police photographer and modeled her bruises cheesecake style.
The dubious reputation of Plan Nine helped create the cultish Vampira fanbase of which Greene was a die-hard member.
Greene originally recorded his interviews with Nurmi in the 1990s as part of
another project, but promised to use the footage later on. With Vampira
and Me, he does a lot with a little.
There’s hardly any footage remaining of her original TV appearances, but
there’s plenty of other good stuff, including an amazing clip of Vampira
dancing in Las Vegas with Liberace. Though
the clips and stills from her prime are breathtaking, I especially enjoyed
seeing Nurmi as an older woman. She was still sassy, and able to laugh
about her past. I think she was a woman of high intelligence,
but perhaps too fragile in spirit to deal with Hollywood’s nonsense. Greene stumbles when he asks Nurmi to play
sociologist and explain why the 1950s generation gravitated to her Vampira
character. To Nurmi’s credit, she admits that she has no idea. Greene should’ve skipped such routine
questions and spent more time on the unfortunate Vampira vs Elvira lawsuit, when
Nurmi unsuccessfully sued Cassandra Peterson for stealing her character.
Nurmi, who died in 2008 at age 85, is an intriguing enough
presence to overcome Greene’s fawning, and the documentary succeeds in part because of her sly intellect. Greene tries to inject some rock & roll
atmosphere into the movie, for Vampira
inspired a number of rock songs (Nurmi even supplied some startlingly raw vocals for Satan’s Cheerleaders, a garage-punk outfit from Austin).
In my eyes, though, she’s less of a rockin’ 1950s character and more like a
new-age grand dame. Nurmi says at one
point that she and James Dean had known each other in past lives, were from
another planet, and were lucky to find each other here. She also claimed to have psychic powers. Fair
enough. Her smile still wins me over
every time. As someone says in the
movie, she was in on the joke, and she created the joke. There aren’t many
celebrities that I wish I'd known, but she’s one of them.
Like Bettie Page, Vampira's legacy has survived through the
sheer power of old photographs. One
could argue that other horror hosts had more impressive careers, but simply
lacked the dark sex appeal of Nurmi’s creation.
John Zacherley, for instance, had an impact that rivaled Vampira’s,
including a hit song called ‘Dinner with Drac’. As a character named “Roland,”
Zacherley was the ghoulish horror host on Philadelphia’s WCAU TV during the
late 1950s. Universal Pictures had packaged a number of their old Frankenstein and Dracula movies for televison, and Zacherley was hired to introduce them to a new generation of kiddies. It was called Shock Theater and was an immediate success. From there, he worked
regularly in Philadelphia and New York, doing everything from hosting teen dance shows to making live appearances at movie premieres. He spent much
of the 1970s as a popular radio disc jockey on WPLJ-FM. He also put out record albums, edited story
collections, and relentlessly worked the “cool ghoul” gimmick. Vampira may have been there first, but
Zacherley was there longer.
A recent DVD called Horrible Horrors (2013), a whopping two disc set with nearly
three hours of hit or miss junk, gives us a glimpse of Zacherley at work. We see a man who laughs at his own jokes, and enjoys
reveling in corniness. As Vampira, Nurmi took her act into something like
performance art; Zacherly looked more
like a whimsical economics professor dressed in a dime store Halloween costume. I think Zacherley enjoyed being “Zacherley”,
but he wasn't one to suffer for his work. He was having fun. Nurmi, I think, had bigger things in mind,
and hoped Vampira would lead to more important projects. I also think she
collapsed under the weight of her brief fame, until she became a sort of
prisoner of LA, where the spotlight drains of you of something that can't be replaced; Zacherly was a solid
soul from Germantown PA, a former military man who'd achieved the rank of major, and seemed much less enamored of La-La land.
The key to Zacherley’s fortune was his appearance. True, he told sick little jokes, but it was the cadaverous presence that put him over. I could never tell if he was supposed to be an undertaker, or a corpse. Maybe he was both, the dead looking after the dead. Zacherley took what Vampira established on her show and removed the sex from it, and relied more on silliness than weirdness. (There is a clip of him from the 1980s taking an E.T. doll and electrocuting it.) His audience, not surprisingly, was made up almost entirely of little boys. How popular was he? The DVD includes a scene from the old game show, ‘What’s My Line’, where Zacherley was the mystery guest. One of the panelists gloats, “My 13-year-old son wears two buttons on his coat, one of President Kennedy, and one of Zacherley.”
Zacherley, still alive at age 96, deserves a full-scale documentary treatment. There have been some books about him, but nothing like Green’s documentary on Vampira. As I watched Zacherley on Horrible Horrors, I couldn’t help thinking that he paled next to Vampira. Yet, he worked for decades, while her career lasted about two years. Why did he survive? Perhaps it had to do with how women are often treated in show business, kicked to the curb at a certain age. Or maybe it was because his humor was essentially dumb, and dumbness has proven to last as long as the cockroach.
There was only a fine line dividing Vampira and Zacherley,
and all horror hosts to follow, but it’s safe to say that Vampira was a kind of
artist, and that her work took a toll on her, while Zacherley was strictly a
working man with a journeyman’s instinct for making a buck. I’ll take one of her ear-splitting screams
over his hollow laughter every time. Still, he lasted and she didn’t. That tells you something, doesn’t it?
Vampira and Me, and
Horrible Horrors, are both available on DVD.
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