Editorials
Maila Nurmi, Vampira: Transgressive Sexuality & Queer Connections in 1950s America
Vampira and Elvira were not friends. Maila Nurmi, known primarily as Vampira, the original horror hostess of the 1950s, was a complicated, enigmatic, and profound woman. Amid 1950s-era misogyny, Vampira miraculously emerged among the smiling white housewives that plastered homemaking magazines and the objectified, doe-eyed young women in gentlemen’s magazines such as Playboy. Nurmi used these harmful images to her advantage, luring ogling men with her sleek black dress and come-hither voice, then subjecting them to her dominatrix attitude and piercing scream. Not to mention, B horror movies!
“The shock value of Vampira,” explains W. Scott Poole in his book Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror (2014), “came from her refusal to submit to the male gaze. She wanted to attack it instead […]. Vampira represented both homage and satire of the pin-up tradition. Cheesecake came with a heavy dose of gothic morbidity and transformed the sexual politics and imagery of mid-century America into a sandbox she could play in.” Nurmi’s albeit-brief success as a late-night horror hostess on The Vampira Show in the 1950s paved the way for her predecessor, Cassandra Peterson.
Elvira’s Emergence: Cassandra Peterson’s Homage to Vampira
Peterson, known worldwide as the seductive and hilarious Elvira, modeled her Valley Goth Girl horror hostess character after Nurmi’s sexy macabre creation decades earlier. Studio executives advocated this aesthetic decision after Peterson tried first to have her character be more of an homage to the late Sharon Tate. Unfortunately, Nurmi did not appreciate the executives’ directive decision and took Elvira’s eventual stardom as a slap in the face. Despite Peterson’s consistent admiration for Nurmi’s Vampira, Nurmi would never accept Elvira as anything but a knockoff.
However, the women had more similarities than Nurmi may have understood. Not only did both women share a seemingly spiritual bond with Elvis Presley, having both met and shared intimate conversations with the icon nearly a decade apart in Las Vegas, but they have both advocated for the marginalized and have clear connections to the queer community throughout their careers and personal lives. Camp and transgressive sexuality play a central role in their legacies as mistresses of the dark.
Vampira and Elvira’s Impact on the LGBTQ+ Community
Peterson came out publicly as queer in her recent bestselling memoir Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark (2021) after decades of being titillation for male horror fans (of which she lost many after her coming out). Throughout her life, Nurmi interacted with queerness through comics, friendships, and politics. Though we may never know for sure if her queer connections go beyond the platonic and salutatory, we do know that based on her life story, particularly as it is portrayed in Poole’s 2014 book as well as filmmaker R.H. Greene’s 2012 documentary Vampira & Me, she was an ally who inspired countless queer folks to be their authentic, creepy, campy selves. Critics and normals be damned.
From a young age, Maila was unafraid to explore the boundaries of gender expression, particularly in comics and in the theater. Her favorite comic strip, Milton Caniff’s Terry & the Pirates, which debuted in 1934, offered sci-fi adventure mixed with subversion. Her obsession with the villainous character of The Dragon Lady, a Chinese pirate queen, followed her throughout her life and helped to develop her ethos as a performer.
The strip “offered transgressive visions of women and sexuality,” and by 1940, Caniff introduced Sanjak, a villain whose character is named after a Greek island near Lesbos. “Caniff,” explains Poole, “portrayed Sanjak as a French woman who cross-dresses by wearing a men’s uniform and had a monocle…”. Maila would also cross-dress in her high school Rhythm Club performances; one yearbook photo shows her as a vaudevillian “Chaplin-esque looking sailor.”
Vampira’s Bohemian Roots: Greenwich Village and Queer Allies
After graduation, Maila set her sights on New York City’s beatnik enclave of Greenwich Village. There, she associated herself with like-minded dreamers, poets, and activists. One such connection was Harry Hay, the gay communist organizer and founder of the Mattachine Society in 1950. This would not be the only time she associated herself with known queer figureheads and creatives. For instance, Maila debuted the rough draft for Vampira at Lester Horton’s Bal Caribe Halloween extravaganza.
“The Bal Caribe,” Poole states, “represented the most outré gathering in 1950s Hollywood that brought together the city’s gay elite, political radicals, and a hefty portion of campy glamour. Horton had long been part of Hollywood’s gay scene.” Maila would go on to win Best Costume – Vampira found her first audience.
Friends of Vampira, James Dean and Liberace
As her infamy grew with The Vampira Show (1954-1955), she met her “soulmate,” James Dean. Dean, the up-and-coming enigmatic young actor who lit Hollywood ablaze, was the subject of several rumors linking him to queer Hollywood and romantically to Maila, though the infatuation appears to have been one-sided. Dean himself was bisexual, though he never came out publicly. Another closeted Hollywood fixture, Liberace, paled around with Nurmi in Las Vegas in 1956. She joined his flamboyant nightclub act as the “local TV glamour ghoul” though her true role remains unclear. According to Nurmi, at one of Liberace’s performances, an audience member yelled “Liberace is a f**!” Nurmi spat on the heckler.
Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space
As Vampira/Maila’s star power was being extinguished thanks to the sudden cancelation of The Vampira Show, Maila was approached by B-movie director Ed Wood to star in his low-budget sci-fi alien zombie flick Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). At this point in his personal life, Wood was known to be a cross-dresser, as alluded to in his semi-autobiographical gender horror flick Glen or Glenda (1953). While Maila in later interviews lambasted Wood’s ability to write dialogue, she accepted the role in Plan 9 for $200 due to financial troubles, which would follow her until she died in 2008.
Vampira vs Elvira: The Legendary Feud
In 1980, following a long drought in her acting career, executives at the cable network KHJ-TV wanted to revamp the horror hostess for a new generation. They approached Nurmi, though they intended to cast someone much younger. Nurmi initially agreed to the project to help find and train a new Vampira. However, she quickly grew disillusioned by the deal after the network supposedly rejected her idea of having either BIPOC actresses Lola Falana or Martine Beswick as the hostess. After Groundlings alum Cassandra Peterson was signed on, and the producers decided she would dress similarly to Vampira, Nurmi felt cheated.
She would go on to sue both Peterson and the producers, but she couldn’t follow through in part due to a lack of funds. “The inventor is rarely honored for anything,” stated Nurmi in Greene’s documentary (2012). “I pity those people,” meaning, the copycats, most likely referring to Peterson. In her autobiography, Peterson describes the situation as unfortunate. Elvira became the most popular horror hostess of the genre, but Peterson insisted she did not mean to insult Nurmi with her spin on Vampira’s original look. It was in the meetings with KHJ-TV executives that Peterson first heard of Vampira, and until then, thought Vampira was just a generic name for a female vampire.
Lola Falana Martine Beswick
Camp, Queerness, and Cultural Subversion
It is interesting how many closeted (and open) queer people Maila Nurmi attracted during her fame. Whether it be her camp sensibilities; her willingness to openly scoff at and reject social norms and gender roles; or her dedication to her role as Vampira, the spookiest, sexiest woman in town; queers felt comfortable in her presence in the hostile environment of 1950s America. Maila’s entire persona and dedication to performance art inspired countless drag looks for decades, including Peterson’s Elvira, a character beloved by the queer community. One can posit that, under less professional circumstances, Cassandra and Maila might have been friends or at least acquaintances, should the drama between the two creatives and the selfish actions of studio executives never occurred.
A Subversive Burlesque of American Culture
History doesn’t repeat: it rhymes. Peterson’s campy Valley Girl/Goth Royalty Elvira was an ode to Nurmi’s satirical Beat Generation ghoul Vampira. Likewise, Charles Addams’s subversive matriarch, The Ghoul/Morticia, inspired Vampira. Each was a variation of the other, all transgressive in their respective periods. “American culture had become a subversive burlesque,” writes Poole, “a sideshow with a sense that performing cultural identity always means some level of love and theft.”
Maila Nurmi’s Enduring Influence: A Queer Icon
Maila Nurmi personifies the power one can wield when being their own eccentric and kooky self. It is no wonder that queer people felt comfortable around her and continue to be inspired by what Vampira stands for. Vampira, for many, was a barren temptress who cared not about your opinions or classifications. It didn’t matter the social mores or gender roles of the period: when Vampira appeared on screen in the L.A. area, she tore up the rulebook and refused to compromise on her art, even when starving and penniless. Queers were transfixed by her one or two years of fame. They, as well as punks and goths, stood by her as her career took a downturn, bringing her food and gigs in her later years. These groups continue to conjure the ghoul goddess through drag. Maila Nurmi will always be a dark icon of the weirdos; her impact is not lost on us queers.
Check out R.H. Greene’s documentary Vampira & Me (2012) on Tubi!
Scott Poole’s book Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror (2014) is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Soft Skull Press.
Cassandra Peterson’s Yours Curelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark (2021) is available wherever books are sold.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
Canceling ‘Chucky’ Was a Huge Mistake
‘Bring It On: Cheer or Die’ Review: A Blood Free Slasher That Fumbles the Franchise
The Best Horror You Can Stream on Netflix in March
The Best Horror You Can Stream on Shudder in March 2026
Midsummer Scream 2026 Announces This Years Theme and Guests
The Horror Press Podcast Episode 57: Backrooms & Jigglyspot
‘Undertone’ Review: A24’s Scariest Since ‘Hereditary’
‘Silent Warnings’ (2003) Review: An Unknown UFO Gem
Mami Wata and the Untapped Stories of Water Spirits in Horror
Southern Black Gothic Films and Where To Find Them
‘The People Under the Stairs’ Review: A Brilliantly Bizarre Horror Classic
‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ and The Story of William Afton Explained
Slappy Was the Blueprint: How the Dummy from Goosebumps Became A Horror Icon
Glen and Glenda: Don Mancini’s Reverence for Queerness in ‘Seed of Chucky’ (2004)
‘Truth or Dare’: Who Did it Best?
V/H/S Franchise Ranked, Best to Worst
Everything You Need to Know About Jason Voorhees
The 11 Most Disturbing Horror Movies Ever, According to an Actual Horror Fan
[REVIEW] ‘Cherry Falls’ (1999) Brittany Murphy Shines in This Cult Classic Slasher
