The Undying Mystery of Max Schreck—the First Nosferatu

For decades, the unmarked grave of the legendary vampire lay forgotten beneath a stand of trees. In a strange way, this may have contributed to his eternal power.

His name was Max Schreck, the German actor who brought death incarnate to life in the 1922 silent-film classic Nosferatu. Pass through the brick pillars and wrought-iron gates of the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof in Güterfelde, a century-plus-old cemetery on the southwestern edge of Berlin, and the path will lead you beneath the low-hanging limbs of fir trees. (Waldfriedhof literally translates to “woodland cemetery” in German.) Inside the graveyard, blankets of moss and tendrils of ivy reach up around the stone monuments as if trying to pull them back into the earth. Veer left into the surrounding woods, and you will find yourself standing upon the lonely burial site of Herr Schreck—a performer who, for many years, was said never to have existed at all.

The legends and rumors about Schreck have enhanced the allure of his most famous role as Count Orlok, the pointy-toothed, glass-eyed creature who left vermin and disease in his path and whose very shadow struck terror in the hearts of moviegoers. Like the immortal bloodsucker himself, speculation about Schreck stubbornly refuses to die. The claims range from the probable (that he wasn’t the only actor made-up as Count Orlok in the film) to the unlikely (that his name was a pseudonym for a more famous actor disguised by makeup) to the utterly fanciful (that in real life, Schreck was a murderous fiend).

“This legend only spread in English-speaking countries,” says Rolf Giesen, author of The Nosferatu Story, which chronicles the making of the film. Virtually everything true about Schreck’s life had faded into history—at least outside of his homeland—with the language barrier adding just one more layer of mist.

Nosferatu did not have an easy time finding an audience in its time, although it is now considered a masterpiece and milestone of the German expressionist movement. Director F.W. Murnau’s 1927 romantic drama Sunrise would later earn the Oscar for “best unique and artistic picture” at the very first Academy Awards. Murnau’s vampire thriller, however, shamelessly stole the plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and led to a lawsuit from the author’s estate, which hampered the movie’s release. Critics in the United States were harsh when it finally did open.

Nosferatu was made almost a decade before Bela Lugosi’s turn as the vampire in Hollywood’s officially licensed version of Dracula in 1931. But unlike Lugosi’s suave and seductive count, Schreck’s Count Orlok had a bat-like face, the incisors of a rat, and the rigid movements of a corpse. After his film opened, Lugosi became a household name the world over—while doubts arose about whether Schreck was a real person or a fictional creation himself.

His name itself might have been part of the problem. Schreck is a German word for “fright,” and over the years some fans who were unfamiliar with the Munich stage actor came to believe the credit was a kind of in-joke. A horror film with a lead performer called “Max Scare”? It couldn’t be real.

In 1953 the esteemed international critic Ado Kyrou perpetuated that falsehood in his book Le Surréalisme au Cinéma. “Nosferatu is not a simple horror film. Its mystery goes beyond the frames of the screen, emanating from the production and the actors. The credits name the music hall actor Max Schreck as the vampire’s performer, but it is well-known that this information is deliberately untrue. No one has ever been able to reveal the identity of this extraordinary actor whose brilliant face made him forever unrecognizable. We made several assumptions, we talked about Murnau himself…. What is hidden behind the character of Nosferatu? Could it be Nosferatu himself?”

Kyrou, who died in 1985, was ill-informed—although his notion that the screen monster was also an actual monster would popularize the mystery around the film and lay the groundwork for a different Oscar-nominated movie decades later. The theory continued to spread that the man disguised behind Nosferatu’s makeup was actually a more respected actor who wished to avoid being forever linked to what might have seemed at the time like a lowbrow thriller. The reality was far more simple: Schreck was a rarity in his profession—an actor who didn’t crave fame.

“Max Schreck was not a star,” Giesen says. “He was an ensemble player—very quiet; close to nature; a passionate photographer who loved hiking through the Bavarian countryside, as he had been onstage in Munich for many years. Film roles were just a side job. I’m surprised that he even accepted roles that involved only one scene. In The Trunks of Mr. O.F., a 1931 Peter Lorre film, you only see him briefly climbing the stairs of a hotel. In 1932’s Peter Voss, Thief of Millions, he plays a sailor holding a trampoline with others and is only seen for 10 seconds. And even in Nosferatu, his screen time was just under 10 minutes.”

This lack of professional vanity might have been why Schreck was willing to disappear behind such an atrocious-looking character in the first place. History did the rest of the obfuscation, hiding the man behind the mask even further.

Born in 1879, Schreck began his professional performing career around the turn of the last century. His work on the German stage and his forays into early cinema were largely buried beneath the rubble of two world wars, one during his lifetime and the other after his death in 1936. Even his grave is dwarfed by Murnau’s. The man who directed Schreck in Nosferatu died in 1931, five years before the actor, in a car accident in California. His gravesite in the Stahnsdorf South-Western cemetery features a towering monument to his life and work: A larger-than-life sculpted bust of the pioneering director stares down at visitors from his two-story marker’s center.

Murnau’s grave became a pilgrimage site for cinephiles and might have actually been too accessible, as vandals broke into the crypt and stole the filmmaker’s skull in 2015. (It has never been recovered.) Meanwhile, Schreck’s burial site in the woodlands of the Waldfriedhof cemetery became overgrown, overlooked, and eventually lost and forgotten. “His urn, which was brought from Munich, was originally buried in the grave of his mother, who died in 1934,” Giesen says. “The gravestone weathered over the decades, like many others there.”

As whatever marker once stood on his final resting place gradually disappeared, so did most of what the world knew about the real Max Schreck. At the same time, his iconic film performance only became more vivid and enthralling.

The mystique around what was real and what was fantasy in that silent film has served as inspiration for other filmmakers—including Robert Eggers, director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, whose new adaptation of Nosferatu is coming in December. His version of the story, starring Pennywise actor Bill Skarsgård—from the It films—as Count Orlok, features a significantly more expansive plot and a different look for the monster, but it all started with his fascination with Schreck’s performance.

As a kid in the early 1990s, Eggers watched the 1922 film on a low-grade VHS tape that didn’t even feature an accompanying musical score, becoming obsessed with Murnau’s film and Schreck’s performance. Compared to the high-definition versions available to stream now, this transfer felt like a relic from a bygone age. “I think that’s part of the enigma for me,” Eggers tells Vanity Fair. “When you watch the restored versions, you can see all the detail and the grease paint and the bald caps and the fake, fake, fake stuff. And in this version that was made from a degraded 16-millimeter print, you couldn’t see any of that. There were certain frames where Max Schreck’s eyes looked like cat eyes. It’s the version that gave rise to the legends of Max Schreck actually being a vampire.”

The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire played with this fanciful notion, with John Malkovich portraying a heedless Murnau who casts an actual bloodsucking monster as his lead. Willem Dafoe received a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for his devilish performance as Schreck, who imperils the silent film’s production by devouring members of the crew. (Nearly a quarter century later, Dafoe plays an old vampire hunter in Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu.)

It was, obviously, complete make-believe. “Shadow of the Vampire had a nice starting point, that was all,” Giesen says. “In this film, almost nothing was correct in terms of historical details. However, the costumes and the film technology of the time were well researched.” Murnau really was in a mad scramble to complete the film, but that was because financing was scarce—not because his star was an undead predator. Sunlight doesn’t kill vampires in Stoker’s novel; the notion was invented by Nosferatu, added in haste because Murnau ran out of resources to shoot the slaying scene he intended.

Shadow of the Vampire screenwriter Steven Katz always knew it was preposterous to believe that Schreck was a real monster, but also thought Schreck’s unsettling presence made it easy for the viewer’s imagination to run wild. “There’s not an inch of his performance in that movie that evokes the underlying humanity at all,” Katz told me in 2001. “You have the feeling that you’re looking at something you shouldn’t be looking at.”

Dafoe saw his interpretation as a playful tribute to a fellow actor, but felt bittersweet about a man who was so remarkable in his signature role that he became eclipsed completely by it. “It always sends a chill down my spine,” he said after receiving his long-ago Oscar nomination. “There’s a brotherhood of actors, and somehow I feel sorry for the guy. It’s like, it’s just sad.”

The life of Max Schreck actually appears to have been a happy one. He was born on September 6, 1879, the second child of Pauline and Gustav, a topographer. The family resided in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, adjacent to the immense park at the city’s center, which might have accounted for Max’s love of nature. In recent years, the digitization of old documents has shed more light on the actor. Baptismal records from the St. Matthäus church confirm that “Max Schreck” was indeed his real name. “The name ‘Schreck’ naturally fits perfectly in a horror film,” Giesen says. “This was also noticed in Germany: nomen est omen.”

“He secretly took acting lessons. But only after the death of his father, who would have liked him to be a businessman, did he go to the Marie Seebach acting school, with financial support from his mother,” says Giesen. When Schreck began his acting career in 1901, he started out in small town theaters and touring companies that sent him around Germany before working his way back to major metropolitan stages. There’s no available record for what he did during World War I, but since he was almost 35 when it began, he was likely conscripted into some manner of military service.

One of the legends around Nosferatu is that the film’s young producer and production designer, Albin Grau, first came up with the idea of a vampire movie while serving in the war and hearing folktales about the undead from a Serbian farmer. Giesen notes that Count Orlok’s morbid appearance and ability to bring pestilence with him were echoes of the aftermath of the fighting. “His companions come from the trenches of the First World War: the rats,” the author says. “Nosferatu was also a kind of war veteran. Back then, the streets were full of horribly disfigured wounded war veterans. Someone like Orlok was not an isolated case after the war.”

Around the time Murnau and Grau were casting Nosferatu, Schreck was in Munich, starring in The Miser—Molière’s 1668 play about a greedy old man meddling in the love lives of his children to enhance his wealth. Giesen says Murnau originally wanted to cast another actor in the part of the monster: Conrad Veidt, who had worked with Murnau on several previous projects and would later be best known as the villainous Nazi Major Strasser in 1942’s Casablanca. “Conrad Veidt had other commitments and could not take part. Only a tall actor could be considered as a replacement,” Giesen says. Schreck’s rave reviews for The Miser, plus his six-foot-three stature, made him the perfect candidate.

Giesen does give credence to one legend about Nosferatu: that Schreck did not play Count Orlok in every scene. “The first person to point out that Max Schreck was not the only actor was [Austrian filmmaker] Edgar Ulmer, who had been an apprentice to F.W. Murnau. Ulmer often exaggerated, but this time it was true,” Giesen says. “The makeup made it possible to use another actor…We can only speculate who that was. It may have been Hans Rameau, who later worked as a screenwriter in exile in Hollywood for a while.” Rameau had appeared in The Miser with Schreck as the greedy old man’s son, and Giesen believes he likely called Murnau and Albin’s attention to the actor.

The production of Nosferatu–Eine Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror) was hardly cloaked in mystery. Murnau invited reporters to the set, and Schreck gave interviews in full makeup. In October 1921, the German movie pamphlet Film-Kurier featured the movie in a preview, and the newspaper Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger also included a write-up. “The journalists saw lots of rats crawling around and also interviewed Schreck. He told them that he was glad that the role was ‘played out’—that is, that he was nearly finished,” Giesen says.

Nosferatu debuted at the Marmorsaal (or “Marble Hall”) on the grounds of the Berlin Zoological Garden on March 4, 1922, in the same Tiergarten neighborhood where Schreck spent his early childhood. The film was beset with problems almost immediately, after Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, was sent a program from the lavish zoo premiere. She filed a legal claim against Nosferatu’s production company, Prana Film, for lifting the plot of her late husband’s novel Dracula virtually wholesale, changing only the names of the characters and some small details. A judge ruled in her favor, but securing payment was difficult since Prana declared bankruptcy. All prints of Nosferatu were ordered to be destroyed, although obviously a few survived.

These entanglements hampered the global release of the movie. Nosferatu did not cross the sea to North America until several years after its filmmaker made the same journey. On February 10, 1924, almost two years after the film’s release in Germany, the movie-trade newspaper The Film Daily reported that the “newly formed Russian Art Film Co.” would be bringing Nosferatu and several other titles to English-speaking countries as a representative of the Deutsch-Amerikanishe Film Union of Berlin.

There was little clamor for the movie. The only North American newspaper to pick up the Film Daily report was Canada’s Saskatoon Daily Star, which included a mention on its page-19 roundup headlined “Stage and Screen Next Week.” It was hardly a prestigious heralding. Nosferatu was lumped in with a handful of other German films, including “a one-reel airplane trip over the Alps and a surgical film.” It was also mentioned in the last blurb on the page, which wrapped around a small advertisement for prosthetics from the Calgary Artificial Limb Factory.

Even then, the announcement was premature. Nosferatu did not actually begin playing overseas until 1929, seven years after its creation, and after Murnau had celebrated his box office and Oscar victories for Sunrise. Critics were unkind.

“To think that Fred Murnau, who gave us that sweet, simple, tender Sunrise, directed Nosferatu, the Vampire, before Hollywood got him … To think of it!” stated an uncredited two-star review in New York’s Daily News on June 3, 1929. The critic speculated that the film was a bootleg, not in its originally intended form, but did offer praise for its lead actor: “Nosferatu, the Vampire, has been preyed upon by the cutters. It is unreeled at the 8th st. movie house in choppy, ever-shifting scenes without the aid of especially good performances, except that of Max Schreck, title roleist, who is as horrible, spooky, terrible as this ghastly, ghostly part requires.”

The New York Times was also less than impressed in its review on June 4, denouncing the very aspect of Schreck’s performance that is considered its key strength. “Max Schreck’s movements as Nosferatu are too deliberate to be lifelike,” sniffed critic Mordaunt Hall.

Appreciation for Nosferatu only came decades later, with the film continuing to circulate via bootlegs and rough-hewn copies.

Interest in the film was stoked by numerous pop-culture references over the years. Werner Herzog made a 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, that starred volatile actor Klaus Kinski as the monster, made up in the same way as Schreck in the silent film. The feral-faced Orlok also inspired the appearance of lead bloodsucker Kurt Barlow in filmmaker Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s small-town vampire tale, Salem’s Lot, even though the book describes the character as more of a Dracula-like sophisticate; the 2024 Salem’s Lot film adaptation, directed and penned by It screenwriter Gary Dauberman, continues the homage. The 2014 comedy What We Do in the Shadows featured an Orlok-like creature named Petyr among its vampire roommates, portraying him as an 8,000-year-old elderly loner who is out of touch with his younger brethren, who are only hundreds of years old.

Actual scenes of Schreck as Count Orlok were woven into the music video for the 1981 Queen–

David Bowie hit “Under Pressure,” and the long-fingered shadow of Nosferatu’s Orlok was part of the opening montage of the 1991–93 kid-friendly spooky anthology Eerie, Indiana. The 1992 sequel Batman Returns featured its own tribute, with Christopher Walken playing a homicidal Gotham City businessman named Max Shreck, while Danny DeVito’s gruesome Penguin physically resembled a squat version of Count Orlok. Then, in 2000, Shadow of the Vampire sent curiosity about the original Nosferatu into the stratosphere with its playful theory that its German star was an actual supernatural creature.

Esteem for Nosferatu has only increased over the years, as increasingly high-quality releases of the film made their way to DVD. There’s no need to seek out a rare, poorly transferred tape of the movie anymore: A high-resolution version is now available to stream.

“Schreck would never have dreamed of such posthumous fame,” says Giesen.

After Nosferatu, the actor continued to live out his busy but otherwise low-key life. He was married to fellow actor Fanny Schreck, but they had no children. They occasionally worked together, although rumors that she had a bit part in Nosferatu are false, according to Giesen. The couple also appears to have had an unconventional marriage by 1920s standards. “Max Schreck had relationships with other women. Fanny Schreck knew this and seemed to tolerate an open marriage,” Giesen says. “Now and again, he played bit parts in films by his girlfriend Anny Ondra, who was married to the boxer Max Schmeling.”

Schreck did not live long enough to see the full scope of the horrors unleashed by the Nazi Party, but his associations in the bohemian arts scene make it unlikely that he would have been a supporter of Adolf Hitler. “Schreck’s roles suggest that he was not on the right, but on the left, even if he was not at all involved in party politics,” Giesen says. He spoofed the fascist regime in a comedy cabaret called Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill), which was cocreated by dissident Erika Mann, who later fled Germany due to her criticism of the Nazis. Schreck played a chef who drew laughs from absurdly dictating what people could eat. The show began its run in January 1933, about a month before Hitler ascended to the role of chancellor. Within two months, the Nazis forced the show to close.

Mann took her Nazi satire on the road, performing The Peppermill outside of Germany, but Schreck stayed behind and continued to work on the stage and in small film roles. Time was running out for him, however. On February 19, 1936, he filled in for a friend in the role of the Grand Inquisitor in a Munich production of Friedrich von Schiller’s 1787 drama, Don Carlos. That night, he complained of feeling unwell, and he died the next day from an apparent heart attack.

His cremated remains were buried at the gravesite of his mother in the Wilmersdorfer cemetery. The burial ground fell into disrepair after World War II, since it was located in the restricted No Man’s Land behind the Berlin Wall that separated East Germany from West Germany during the Cold War.

Historian Peter Hahn, author of the book Berliner Friedhöfe in Stahnsdorf (Berlin Cemeteries in Stahnsdorf), discovered the site by poring through cemetery records and maps. In 2011, as part of his work preserving the region’s dilapidated burial grounds, he worked with the Förderkreis des Museum für Film und Fernsehen Berlin, a group supporting the city’s film museum, to place a marker at the woodland spot where Schreck’s ashes were interred.

“Schauspieler” is the simple inscription under Schreck’s name, describing him with the German word for “actor.”

The site is now well-known to film fans, some of whom staged a memorial there—complete with a mournful trombone soloist—to mark the 80th anniversary of the actor’s death in 2016. A new edition of Giesen’s Nosferatu Story will be published next year, and a biography of the actor, Max Schreck: Gespenstertheater (Ghost Theater), was published by author Stefan Eickhoff in 2009.

Unlike Giesen’s book, Gespenstertheater isn’t available in English. Hahn did not respond to a request for an interview, and staff at Berlin’s Museum for Film and Television declined to comment about the construction of Schreck’s gravestone, noting that the volunteers who organized it could not be immediately located. Others who were directly involved did not reply to email requests for comment. Many of those working at the organization now weren’t around when the grave was installed, and no one from the group who remembered the effort could be contacted by publication time.

Even now, it seems as though fate is pulling Max Schreck back into the shadows.