Vampira Forever

A Glam Ghoul’s Forgotten Legacy of Iconoclasm

Maila Nurmi, in costume as Vampira, is shown on the set of The Vampira Show, effortlessly glamorous despite the ominous environment around her.

by Lilly Sayenga

Swedish actress Maila Nurmi is best known for her role as Vampira, the titular hostess of the 1950s late-night horror series “The Vampira Show.” Vampira’s look has been repeatedly pirated, while the ghoul herself is largely forgotten. This odd cultural phenomenon brings to light (or, rather, darkness) an interesting rhetorical crossroads: that of the lost icon. As one of the first figures to push the “gothic look” into the public eye – predating both the TV adaptation of The Addams Family and the Goth subculture itself – Vampira is an fascinating case study of the social power of symbolic iconography. Rhetoricians Roland Barthes and Alan Trachtenberg focus on how this concept applies to visual renderings of the human body in their respective works “The Harcourt Actor” and “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Myst…