collisionwork | Entries tagged with the damned

My friend Sean Rockoff sent me a link to a recent performance by The Damned on the Craig Ferguson show that I hadn't seen.

He remarked on lead singer Dave Vanian, who once "looked like what all the current crop of vampire-kiddies don't even know they're aspiring to -- an undead Elvis. The coolest thing to ever walk the earth, again."

And if you don't know what that look was, here's The Damned lip-syncing to their classic track "Video Nasty" on The Young Ones in 1984:

Sean remarked that Vanian is now a dead ringer for classic Hollywood character actor Lionel Atwill.

Well, damned if he isn't!

I have to say, if you're getting too old to be a young, cool, undead-Elvis punker, and want to keep your Gothic-horror image going, I'm not sure you could do better than the path Dave Vanian's decided to take. Here's the still-great Damned from a few months ago:

In a sad bit of news for horror kids who have grown up to be horror geeks, especially ones like me who are fascinated by horror movie hosts who entertained my parents' generation in the decade before I was born (Ghoulardi, Zacherle, etc.), word has come of the death of Maila Nurmi at the age of 86.

Who was Maila Nurmi? Well, she was better known to the world as . . .

Vampira

Her own personal website has the dates and a lovely headshot of a non-Vampira-ed Nurmi HERE.

I found out about it from Tim Lucas' lovely post at Video WatchBlog, HERE. He pretty much covers everything important about Vampira (and especially her influence on several generations of "vampire girls," as Jonathan Richman would call them), and what he doesn't cover, he links to.

He doesn't mention her fine work in the Bert I. Gordon film The Magic Sword, not such a great movie (except by Bert I. Gordon standards, by which it's exceptional), but she keeps her end up, and it made for one of the best episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Of course, she will always be best known for her appearance as "The Dead Wife" in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space.

She, as a result of her Plan 9 appearance, also in no small part inspired my favorite song by The Damned, "Plan 9 Channel 7," which you can see here in a music video that directly pays homage:

R.I.P.