Meet Woman Who Underwent Surgery To Become Vampire Lady
opera.comMay 29, 2020 3:33 PM
Maria Jose Cristerna, a 35-year-old former attorney from Guadalajara, Mexico, is best known as the "Mexican vampire woman." thanks to piercings, tattoos and titanium horns embedded in her skull. Over the past months, she has become known for her extreme looks and now the blood curdling look will be captured for future generations to ogle at.


For Cristerna, it was the fulfillment of a longstanding fantasy.

My vampire's dream is to be immortal she told HuffPost Weird News through a translator. I've always loved Ripley's cartoons, and I've admired Ripley's since I was a kid, so it’s a dream came true.

But Cristerna's dream didn't come true without much work from Ripley's sculpture team, led by Bruce Miller.

Her head has been the biggest challenge, he said. She has very long hair, dreadlocks, and we had to lift them over a light fixture to keep them out of the way.

Additionally, casting the horns presented some challenges Miller has not faced in making other celebrity sculptures, including WWE fighters The Undertaker and John Cena and one of the world's smallest men, Alypius, an Egyptian dwarf. But those challenges are nothing compared to what's lies ahead.

The hardest part will be duplicating tattoos, said Miller. They are very intricate. We have many things ahead of us.

Edward Meyer, Ripley's vice president of exhibitions and archives, says the company is making at least five Vampire Woman statues, three of which will be shipped to the Odditoriums in Veracruz, Mexico City and her hometown of Guadalajara.