The skull of the German director F.W. Murnau, the mastermind behind the horror film "Nosferatu," was stolen recently from the family graveyard in Stahnsdorf, Germany. The theft was first reported in an online story by Der Spiegel and has since been confirmed by the cemetery, which is situated in Berlin's southwestern border. Olaf Ihlefeldtm, the person responsible for the German director's body, said that the break-in was discovered last Monday, in an interview with the Washington Post. He added that the perpetrator left several paraphernalia, which suggests that an occult ceremony or a Satanic ritual was first performed. The news of the missing skull added to the growing mystery surrounding Murnau's remains. The crypt has been disturbed several times since the 1970s, the most recent being an incident reported last February.
Murnau was born in 1888 in Germany and went on to pioneer the German Expressionist cinema. He came to the United States where he made several of his popular movies including "Sunrise," "Faust" and the wildly successful "The Last laugh." He died in 1931 after sustaining fatal wounds in a car crash in California.
The silent film "Nosferatu" is unarguably the filmmaker's best known creation. It is an adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," which was theatrically shown in 1922. It has inspired succeeding film versions on the Dracula theme such as Werner Herzog's own vampire opus and the more recent comedy "The Shadow of the Vampire" where John Malkovich played Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Count Orlok. The iconic count has terrified even those moviegoers who have been born generations later.
Potsdam police has already been called in to investigate and find the missing skull, the New York Times learned. Documentary film director Ernst Szebedits, who also heads the Murnau Foundation, said, "We have received this news with disbelief... It doesn't make sense," according to an NBC News report.
