Vampira and Me

This intimate and moving portrait of a lost goth icon brought tears to my eyes. It's rare to see a movie and know that it was made with love, but this is a film like that. Director R. H. Greene has excavated pretty much every frame of film featuring Maila Nurmi as her barrier-shattering creation Vampira, the majority of which he personally found and presented here for the first time in over 50 years. In that way, this film is quite a present to pop culture history. But the core of this documentary is the on camera interplay between Greene, the unseen questioner, and Nurmi, the regal, coquettish, gleeful, sad-eyed changeling. You can feel the love, and knowing Nurmi at least got that kind of affection from Greene and others makes the rest of her story--a real Hollywood tragedy--easier to bear. Thoughtful comments by cult comedian Dana Gould stand out, as does the amazing side story of Voluptua, a character created by men to capitalize on Vampira's popularity who proves by her bombshell sex kitten submissiveness just how radically feminist Maila Nurmi as Vampira really was. An amazing story, for horror fans and anyone who cares about the media age.