Maila Nurmi has died, at the age of 86. A Finnish-born model — she worked for Man Ray and the pin-up artist Alberto Vargas — and sometime actress, Nurmi was best-known as her alter ago, Vampira, the "beatnik ghoul-girl" with the long black tresses and long talon-like fingernails who began hosting movies on late night television in 1954. The Vampira character, whose look was reportedly inspired by the cartoon drawing that would eventually be christened Morticia Addams, first appeared on Los Angeles's KABC-TV. The station discontinued the show a year later, but Nurmi held onto the rights to the character and was able to revive Vampira on a different channel. Kinescopes of her TV work are now rare, much-valued ephemera on the collectors' market, but Vampira will remain undead forever in Nurmi's best-known movie role, in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, where she appeared made up as the character and was billed under the character's name.
Nurmi's other movie credits include The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College, and The Magic Sword. Her last film appearance was in the oddball cult project I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, made in 1998 from an unproduced script credited to Ed Wood; she herself was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood biopic. She was also a footnote Hollywood celebrity of the 1950s, fabled for her friendships with the likes of James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Orson Welles. (In her later years, she ran an antiques store, Vampira's Attic, on Melrose Avenue.) But her real place in pop culture history is as the first of the TV "horror hosts"; her success as Vampira led to a wave of wisecracking, ghoulish hustlers doing wraparound segments for TV showings of scary movies, most of whom never attained anything like her degree of national recognizability. Probably the best known of the latter day hosts, Cassandra Peterson's Elvira, was in fact the product of a failed attempt, by KHJ-TV, to revive the Vampira character with Nurmi's blessing. (Nurmi withdrew her consent for the use of the Vampira name and makeup after the station rejected her choice, Lola Falana.) She died peacefully in her sleep on January 10.