Vampira and Me

Over the course of production, the filmmakers located and restored about ten minutes of previously unknown Vampira footage from network TV kinescopes unseen in over half a century, as well as personal appearance footage and Vampira home movies. The "new" Vampira material in "Vampira and Me" increased the known footage of Maila Nurmi in character as Vampira by approximately 500 percent.

The previously unheard reel-to-reel recordings of Vampira attempting to recite her memoirs in 1966 were found on a badly damaged tape reel among Maila Nurmi's personal effects by her niece Sandra Niemi shortly after Maila Nurmi's death. Niemi gave the tape to filmmaker R. H. Greene, who discovered much of the material the reel contained was completely inaudible. A former professional sound effects editor, Greene was able to access state of the art digital restoration technologies to recover this "lost" material for inclusion in "Vampira and Me." A public demonstration of the audio restoration process he used to recover these recordings was presented by Greene at the Monsterpalooza horror convention on March 28, 2014 in Burbank, CA as part of a larger discussion of the "new" Vampira material uncovered by Greene for the project.

With the exception of a few brief seconds of trailer clips tied to the specific story points they illustrate, virtually every "monster movie" clip featured in "Vampira and Me" is taken from a film that Maila Nurmi screened as Vampira on her 1950s TV shows. The filmmakers did this as part of a strategy to immerse the viewer as completely as possible in Maila Nurmi's world, and in her experience as Vampira.

Though there are multiple interviews in "Vampira and Me" with people from Maila Nurmi's life, Nurmi is the only person who appears in an on camera interview, with the rest of the interviewees represented by their voices alone. The filmmakers did this as part of a strategy to immerse the viewer as completely as possible in Maila Nurmi's world, and in her experience as Vampira.

The "music video" accompanying the Satan's Cheerleaders/Vampira performance of "I'm Damned" in "Vampira and Me" is actually a re-enactment created by the filmmakers, with "Vampira and Me" director Ray Greene operating the main of two cameras. Half the audio is from a previously unheard remastered version of "I'm Damned" provided exclusively to "Vampira and Me" by bandleader Jane Satan, and the other half is live audio of an instrumental version of "I'm Damned" recorded in the room directly onto Greene's camera during shooting. Twenty-five years after the original recording sessions, Satan's Cheerleaders performed "I'm Damned" so flawlessly that it was possible to edit the two pieces of music together seamlessly.