In the chaos of postwar Germany, the six-foot-four Murnau “realizing there was little call for giants onstage … threw in his lot with motion pictures” working, Shepard tells us, as “a secretary, travel agent, still photographer, publicity writer, film cutter, title writer, handholder, and actor.” “After the war,” Murnau writes, “I bought a battered old view camera and tripod in a Charlottenburg junk shop and began shooting pictures of everything within range.” Within the dozen years from 1919 to 1931, F. W. Murnau would direct more than twenty productions, including Nosferatu, the first and finest of the films based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the justly celebrated and innovative movies Der Letzte Mann, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu. At the age of forty-two he was an international star and widely considered one of the greatest film directors of the twentieth century. And then suddenly, in March 1931, F. W. Murnau freakishly died following a car accident on a winding road south of Santa Barbara.

Jim Shepard’s stunning, sympathetic, fictional biography of F. W. Murnau does not attempt to present the life of the film director in full, but in eight highly selective chapters that glimpse the man in various critical junctures in his development. And so of Murnau’s many films only the difficult projects of Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann, and Tabu are afforded extended treatment by Shepard, for emotional crisis is at the core of fictional narratives, and periods of stability and commitment, while good for the health, do not generate the fodder for plot.

Even for his intimates, Murnau was hard to get to know, for he was a cold, passive, sphinx-like introvert whose sense of humor was undernourished, who insisted his actors and crews call him “Doctor,” and who gave the impression of puritanical discretion and conservative rectitude, and yet hired a succession of houseboys from the South Seas for live-in sex. “Somewhere along the line,” Shepard writes, “he’d evolved into a man of strong opinions and solitary meals.”

Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror made Murnau famous, but as Shepard points out in his convincing, invented journal of the shoot—inspired by the journals of filmmakers as diverse as D. W. Griffiths, Karl Freund, and Jean Cocteau—the character of Nosferatu (a Slavic term for “the undead”) crystallizes Murnau’s own perception of himself as a lurking outsider who feeds on the lifesource of others. Else Lasker-Schüller here notes the similarities: “‘Have you noticed,’ she asked, ‘how many of your films have involved a couple jeopardized by a third figure who’s sinister, ambiguous, and male?’”