Apple pie, baseball and Vampira? In 1954 actress Maila Nurmi took to the airwaves as the first-ever horror host via her Vampira persona, and in doing so set off a national craze as she told her youthful viewers to kill their parents (they didn’t), communicated a wanton sexuality outside of the accepted nuclear family norm, and found herself plastered across tabloids worldwide following the death of her estranged friend James Dean.

Taking an in-depth look into the lives of artists and the collections that fuel their work (as presented by Gemr, the #1 app for collectors worldwide), the docu-series’ twenty-fourth episode takes a look at artist, designer and monster kid Micheline Pitt’s collection of rare, hand-painted images from internationally acclaimed “Glamour Ghoul” Vampira, as well as her own recreation of Vampira’s iconic bat glasses through her company La Femme en Noir, and so much more.

A dive into her fascination with the late actress and artist Maila Nurmi, who in the 1950s set off a national craze via the creation of her prototypical goth scream queen persona Vampira, Pitt says of the icon, who laid the framework for all horror hosts to come in her short-lived KACB-TV series “The Vampira Show” (1954-1955) and again later in Ed Wood’s cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), “She really influenced so much of who I am today.”

Watch the episode right here right now!

Now in its third season, future installments of Collection Complete (which has been described by HorrorBuzz as “Compulsively watchable nerd’vana for both collectors and casual viewers”) are set to showcase the collections of Boulder City, Nevada monster-maker Tom Devlin and Jason Egan of The SAW Official Escape Room, as well as other items in Pitt’s impressive assemblage of vintage pop culture ephemera, the whereabouts of those barrels from JAWS, and much, much more.

Subscribe to the series’ Youtube channel here to see previous episodes of Collection Complete, and for more on Collection Complete, ‘like’ them on Facebook here and follow them on Instagram at CollectionComplete and on Twitter at @CollectionComp.

 

About the Author

Norman Gidney is a nearly lifelong horror fan. Beginning his love for the scare at the age of 5 by watching John Carpenter's Halloween, he set out on a quest to share his passion for all things spooky with the rest of the world.