Before Elvira, before Morticia, there was Vampira—television’s first horror host. 17-time award-winning Fringe veteran Ingrid Garner (Eleanor’s Story) harnesses her signature gift for transformation to resurrect the legend behind Hollywood’s most fascinating forgotten icon. Delivered as an episode of "The Vampira Show", the mercurial life of her creator, Maila Nurmi, unearths in a dazzling multimedia performance.

A true Cinderella-meets-Frankenstein story. After years of languishing as a failed actress and housewife, Maila wins the costume contest at Hollywood’s Bal Caribe masquerade and is offered a TV gig hosting late-night horror films. She concocts a persona stitched from her dark idols, a creature to satirize and terrify 1950s America as the studio system that rejected her collapses and a new era of celebrity emerges.

Though Maila’s fame was short-lived, Vampira endures through each new generation of misfits, from punks to queer youth, who exhume her as their immortal matriarch.