The bald, emaciated form of “Nosferatu’s” vampire, Graf Orlok, is among the most iconic images in the history of the horror genre. However, the man behind the grotesque makeup remains largely a mystery. Although volumes have been written about Max Schreck’s contemporaries in silent horror cinema such as Lon Chaney and Conrad Veidt, as well as later figures of the genre’s golden age like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the life of the man who played cinema’s first real vampire has little in the way of documentation. Even Schreck’s true identity has been called into question with some sources suggesting that he was actually actor Alfred Abel, best known for his roles in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and “Doctor Mabuse,” working under an appropriately spooky stage name.

Max Schreck was born in Berlin in 1879.  Despite speculation that Schreck — a German word meaning “fear” or “fright” — was a pseudonym, it was indeed the actor’s given surname. The son of a civil servant, Max Schreck trained to be an actor at the Berlin Royal Theater and worked extensively on the stage before entering film. As revealed in a 2008 Reuters interview with biographer Stefan Eickhoff, Schreck was remembered by those who knew him as “a loyal, conscientious loner with an offbeat sense of humor and a talent for playing the grotesque.” He was given to taking long walks through the forest, and one contemporary stated that the actor lived in “a remote and strange world.”

Schreck died in 1936 at the age of 57, having never achieved much notoriety beyond “Nosferatu.”

Like director F.W. Murnau, actor Gustav von Wangenheim, who portrayed Thomas Hutter, “Nosferatu’s” German analog to “Dracula’s” heroic Jonathan Harker, was a protégé of theatrical innovator Max Reinhardt and a veteran of World War I. Born into a family of actors, Von Wangenheim’s career on the stage began early in life. He made his film debut in 1914’s “Passionels Tagebuch” and went on to star in many silent features for such German filmmaking luminaries as Fritz Lang.

Von Wangenheim was also a political firebrand who endeavored to use his art as an actor, writer, and director to spur social change. According to Classic Monsters, von Wangenheim was a dedicated member of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1931, he founded Die Truppe ’31, a Communist theater group that soon ran afoul of the Nazi government and was forced to disband. Von Wangenheim fled Germany for Paris in 1933, and eventually settled in Moscow, where he continued to work in film and theater with other German expatriates until 1935. During World War II, von Wangenheim became a Soviet citizen and wrote scripts for Radio Free Germany as a member of the National Committee for Free Germany. Following the war, he moved to East Germany, where he remained active in the arts until the end of his life. He died in Berlin in 1975

Although “Nosferatu” has long been assumed to be a Romanian word synonymous with “vampire,” the term’s origins present a complicated linguistic mystery. The word entered Western literature with the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” According to horror historian David J. Skal, author of “Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula,” Stoker encountered the word in writer Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay “Transylvanian Superstitions,” which was later included in her book “The Land Beyond the Forests: Facts, Figures and Fancies from Transylvania.” “More decidedly evil is the nosferatu or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell,” Gerard wrote. “Every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death.”

Despite Gerard’s assertions, “nosferatu” is seemingly unknown in Romanian folklore and all attempts to trace the word dead end with Gerard’s writing. Attempts to find a etymological source for “nosferatu,” also remain inconclusive with the Romanian “necurat” (“unclean”) and “nesuferit” (“insufferable”) as well as the Greek word “nosophoros” (“plague carrier”) offered by various researchers as likely candidates.

In 2011, writer Anthony Hogg discovered an earlier source containing “nosferatu.” Predating “Transylvanian Superstitions” by 20 years, “Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Rumänen Siebenbürgens” (“The Year and its Days in the Opinion and Custom of the Romanians of Transylvania “) by Wilhelm Schmidt contains the mysterious word much as defined by Gerard. However, “nosferatu’s” true origins remain murky.

As an unabashed and wholly unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula,” “Nosferatu” famously drew the ire of Bram Stoker’s widow. With “Dracula” her only source of income, Florence Stoker was notoriously protective of her late husband’s copyright. Although Prana-Film’s bankruptcy precluded a monetary settlement, Stoker, who had never seen so much as a single frame of “Nosferatu,” successfully sued to have all prints of the film destroyed. Consequently, the film was very nearly lost.

“Most ‘lost’ films have vanished through neglect,” author David J. Skal writes in “Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen.” “But in the case of ‘Nosferatu’ we have one of the few instances in film history, and perhaps the only one, in which an obliterating capital punishment is sought for a work of cinematic art, strictly on legalistic grounds, by a person with no knowledge of the work’s specific contents or artistic merit.”

Yet, “Nosferatu” survived. In 1925, a livid Florence Stoker discovered that a British film club called the Film Society was planning a private showing of “Nosferatu.” Stoker immediately attempted to seize the film, but the Film Society’s co-founder Ivor Montagu was able to keep her legal agents at bay with evasion and stonewalling. By the time Montagu’s source for the film was discovered, the print had disappeared. Eventually “Nosferatu” turned up in the United States where, through a loophole in copyright law, “Dracula” had always been in the public domain and out of Stoker’s reach.

As documented by Turner Classic Movies, F.W. Murnau emigrated to the United States in 1926. Brought to Hollywood at the behest of producer William Fox, Murnau was afforded unprecedented creative control for his first American film, “Sunrise.” An artistic triumph noted for Murnau’s revolutionary camera work, “Sunrise” won the first Academy Award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture (a category that no longer exists). After 1930’s “City Girl,” the director left Fox to make “Tabu” with documentarian Robert Flaherty. Set in Tahiti, “Tabu” was Murnau’s only box office hit after leaving Germany.

F.W. Murnau’s life came to an end on March 11, 1931, when his car, driven by 14-year-old Garcia Stevenson, collided with an electric pole at high speed on California’s winding Pacific Coast Highway. Murnau’s body was returned to Germany, where it was interred at Stahnsdorf Southwestern Cemetery, near Berlin.

In July 2015, graverobbers broke into Murnua’s tomb and removed the director’s skull from his iron coffin. Candle wax left at the scene led to speculation that Murnau’s corpse had been used in an occult ceremony. Murnau’s skull remains missing.