The Undying Mystery of Max Schreck—the First Nosferatu

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.