Happy Halloween! What better time to release a video teasing your upcoming true crime book than Halloween? I had this plan in mind from the start when working on my book. Ideally I would have released it around this time of year, but life happens and you gotta adapt and I came up with a new plan, start the promotion during spooky season, October and build up the hype from there. Are you hyped for my first book?
Anyway, like I said in my announcement blog post, I had a lot of tricks up my sleeve and creative ideas to get the word out there for my book. I didn’t want this to just be another classic rock book, I wanted this to be a work of art inside and out and from the ground up. I put a lot of care and thought into the promos and announcements and with my background writing about classic rock, I knew the importance of image. Look at music videos. While I’m not a musician, I wanted to do a similar thing with my work and so I got brainstorming and came up with this video:
If you don’t have Instagram, don’t worry, I uploaded this video to YouTube.
I also made a bonus/behind the scenes video of sorts talking about the inspiration, but because of time constraints I couldn’t talk about everything, so you could think of this little clip as the anime and my blog post as the manga:
This video is also on YouTube.
Vampira
The inspiration behind my look is Vampira, a character created by actress Maila Nurmi in the 1950s. This was before Carolyn Jones played Morticia Addams and before Cassandra Peterson played Elvira (whom Maila Nurmi considered to be a ripoff and she went as far as to sue them for ripping off her character and unfortunately she lost and she died poor). Vampira was the blueprint, the moment. She came up with the look by taking inspiration from BDSM/kinky magazines. She made the dress herself on a low budget.
Unfortunately, very little footage of her survived. She had a TV show in LA that aired from 1954-1955 where she would introduce horror films. She was nominated for an Emmy. Unfortunately, the show was broadcast live and wasn’t recorded. She also appeared as Vampira in the Ed Wood film Plan 9 From Outer Space, but she didn’t speak in the film because she found the dialogue to be dumb. She was also a model for Disney’s Maleficent character from Sleeping Beauty. Maila Nurmi hung out with celebrities like James Dean and Elvis Presley. She also met Bela Lugosi. She modelled for the photographer Man Ray. And then all of a sudden, she was blacklisted and it was like she fell off the face of the earth. One of the saddest realities of fame is that it can all be over in a flash and everyone’s forgotten you. She had a shop that Grace Slick and Moon Zappa would go to and she had to work day jobs to pay the bills, installing linoleum flooring and cleaning houses for rich people. Far from the glamorous life she had in the 50s.
This was the clip that was my main inspiration for the video:
Filming the promo
My house is a bit too small and modern to do a Vampira like sketch, but I had a friend with the perfect house for it and he was cool with me filming on the staircase. It’s a house that was built in 1855 and it’s beautiful and has this staircase with red carpet. I’d film there one day when hanging out with friends, but a lot of the hangouts were very spontaneous so I didn’t have a lot of time to plan and put together the outfit. One weekend earlier this month, the plan was to go back to our friend’s house and watch The Last Waltz and do some crafts and I was like this is my chance to film the Crime of the Century Halloween promo and so I grabbed my dress and put it in a tote bag and off we went to my friend’s house. I didn’t even have time to do a full face of makeup, but that didn’t really matter because I was going to put an old film/black and white filter on the video anyway and no one would notice that I didn’t have foundation or contour on. Wasn’t that the great thing about the old days, no 4K cameras so you didn’t have to worry about your acne, flyaway hairs, and flaws showing up in 4K? A potato camera is like a beauty filter! Well, that’s how I feel when I take pictures with my Polaroid. It took a few tries, but I got a take that I was satisfied with.
The song choice
Since Crime of the Century is just as much a classic rock book as it is a true crime book, there’s going to be a lot of music based things around it. I’ve created a Spotify playlist to accompany the book and I’ll drop that when the book’s release date is a bit closer. Since social media is all about the short videos with music in the background, I had to figure out the perfect song and it was not a difficult choice. As a big fan of garage rock, I knew the perfect song: Screaming Lord Sutch’s “Jack The Ripper”. I’m filming in a Victorian house and the book cover is definitely going to be Victorian inspired, so why not a garage rock/shock rock novelty song about one of the most notorious serial killers of the Victorian Era? Simple as.
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