Skull of Nosferatu director stolen
WASHINGTON — Olaf Ihlefeldt lives a life filled with mixed blessings. On the one hand, he’s manager of one of Western Europe’s premier resting places — the idyllic Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery outside Berlin.
“Southwesterly Stahnsdorf belongs beside Venice Toteninsel San Michele, Vienna’s Central Cemetery and Pere Lachaise in Paris (as) undoubtedly one of the grand hotels of international cemeteries,” the website reads.
But Ihlefeldt has a problem. He’s responsible for the body of acclaimed German director F.W. Murnau (1888-1931) — the mastermind behind the horror classic Nosferatu — and somebody keeps messing with it. Murnau’s tomb was first broken into in the 1970s, and his iron coffin damaged; in February, the grave was disturbed again by unknown parties.
And now, someone has stolen Murnau’s head — or, more accurately, his skull. Reached by phone early Wednesday, Ihlefeldt was not pleased.
“I think I know what you mean,” he said when asked of rumours of Murnau’s skulltheft reported in Spiegel Online. “Yes, it’s true.”
Ihlefeldt said he discovered the tomb had been broken into on Monday. A candle left at the scene led to speculation Murnau’s corpse was part of a ceremony staged by “Satanists” or those practising “black magic,” as Ihlefeldt put it.
Though Murnau rests among luminaries — sharing real estate with composer Engelbert Humperdinck (not to be confused with the 1960s pop singer Engelbert Humperdinck) and architect Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school, Ihlefeldt said Murnau’s tomb and his legacy are superlative.
“It was a really special, special thing there,” he said. “It was really important for us.”
It’s not clear whether Murnau, who died after a car accident in California in 1931, was specifically targeted, and the whereabouts of his skull are unknown.
What is known is that Murnau’s legacy as a pioneering German expressionist seems to have grown during the eight decades since his death.
The past century has seen terrifying films but none of them has anything on a silent takeoff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula shot on film and released in 1922.
“Few characters in cinema have proved as indomitably influential as Max Schreck’s Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu,” John Oursler of Pop Matters wrote in 2013.
“Even those who think they haven’t seen (it) have experienced it in homages and parodies, seen its influence on every successive horror film that has made use of the pioneering techniques of German Expressionism, been terrified by the image of a slinking shadow climbing across a wall.”