Nikolas Schreck

Nikolas Schreck is an American-born writer, musician, philosopher, film-maker, and spiritual teacher whose work focuses on magic, mysticism, mythology and the macabre.
Priest of Seth
In 2002, Schreck was one of the “seven co-founding clergy” of the Sethian Liberation Movement (previously the Storm) which is currently under his wife Zeena Schreck’s spiritual leadership. According to their own introductory literature, this self-described “Gnostic cult” teaches its “Companions of Seth” to “dissolve the illusion of an independent ego through daily meditation, prayer and ritual communion” with the “wrathful deity” they believe to be “the Archon of the Aion”.
According to material sent to prospective applicants in 2008, aspirants to the Sethian Liberation Movement must first prove themselves by volunteering their time to charity work in their local communities. The sect states that it encourages its members to shun the “mind-destroying” use of tobacco, alcohol, the Internet, mass media, and “other addictive behavior that exacerbates discursive thought”.
In an excerpt from an autobiographical text republished in a 2005 edition of the Sethian Liberation Movement’s journal, Schreck wrote that his life-long devotion to the ancient Egyptian Trickster god Set was established during a trip to Egypt in 1983: .
The most extraordinary event in a journey rife with initiatory import occurred when I visited the tomb of the pharaoh Seti I. I descended the long stairway that leads deep into the earth, marveling at the atmosphere and art of that tomb so unlike any other pharaoh burial place. There, in the long abandoned burial chamber, under the painted astronomical star ceiling overhead, all of the previously disconnected strands of my magical and religious existence came together in one electrifying moment of awe inspiring clarity.... The unexpected presence of Set as an independent intelligence, brimming with an overpowering vitality that made the most dynamic human being appear comatose, was truly shocking .... It is no exaggeration to say that the person that exited that tomb was no longer the same person who had entered it.
A biographical note accompanying his film Charles Manson Superstar states that it was during this same “ revelatory pilgrimage to Egypt in 1983” that he began his “career as an agent provocateur.”
Radio Werewolf in California
Returning to the United States in 1984, Schreck founded the influential gothic-industrial band Radio Werewolf. The group’s provocative ritualistic live performances mixed a grande guignol aesthetic with threatening totalitarian imagery and black humor. These midnight events, billed as “Youth Rallies” were held at mainstream Hollywood venues such as The Whisky A Go-Go, The Roxy, and Club Lingerie, and in underground clubs Scream, Krypt and Zombie Zoo. Playing on then-current urban legends of sinister cult manipulation and “backward masking” brainwashing spread by Fundamentali
st Christians, Radio Werewolf often inspired extreme reactions from audiences and the local music press.
Radio Werewolf Indoctrination, a typically incendiary 1987 manifesto released by the group, published in the first edition of the book Apocalypse Culture, claimed that “Radio Werewolf is utilizing the powerful tool of pop culture in which the impressionistic youth of the world are so intertwined” and that they were “the current incarnation” of an entity which “the ancient Egyptians worshipped ... with secret mysterious rites.”
With its strict “no-guitar” policy, bombastic pipe organ dominated style, Radio Werewolf’s eclectic early sound drew on classical and soundtrack music influences. In Schreck’s theatrical songs from this period he takes on the characters of a crucified Christ serenading a stigmatic Catholic nun (“Sister Lucretia”), serial killer John Wayne Gacy (“Pogo the Clown””), an unrepentant Nazi war criminal (“Triumph of the Will”) and a love-sick vampire (“The Night”).
Radio Werewolf surrounded itself with the trappings of a cult. They released an inflammatory newsletter called The Lycanthropic Herald for card-carrying members of its fan community, the Radio Werewolf Youth Party. They maintained a Radio Werewolf Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. Television appearances on right-wing television host Wally George’s Hot Seat program, and Tom Metzger’s Race and Reason added to Radio Werewolf’s notoriety.
Buried Alive, Radio Werewolf’s best-known song from this period, was released on the 1988 compilation album American Gothic on Greg Shaw's Bomp label. In the same year, Schreck appeared as himself with Radio Werewolf in the necrophiliac horror comedy film Mortuary Academy performing the Beach Boys pastiche 1960 Cadillac Hearse.
The Manson Connection
In 1986, Schreck initiated a correspondence with Charles Manson, then incarcerated in San Quentin Prison. Radio Werewolf’s psychedelic song Charlie’s Girl, which appeared to be dedicated to Helter Skelter accomplice Susan Atkins, often riled Southern California audiences still nervous about the Tate-La Bianca slayings. Schreck introduced this song with the claim that all proceeds for Radio Werewolf concerts would be donated to a “Free Charles Manson Fund.”
A scheduled Spring Equinox 1987 Radio Werewolf Rally for Friends of Justice, a pro-Manson organization, was cancelled due to public protest. It was through this event that Schreck began a brief collaboration with industrial noise prankster Boyd Rice, with whom he co-founded the Abraxas Foundation, named after the Gnostic god. In 1989, the Schreck-Rice Pact ended in mutual acrimony and bad blood, as has so often been the case among the esoteric subculture’s feuding factions.
The release of Schreck’s book The Manson File, a sympathetic treatment of Manson’s philosophy, music, and extremist ecological views, led to a series of controversial national television appearances. Schreck maintained in an interview broadcast on Current Affair that “evil was a primitive Christian invention,” and that Manson had not received a fair trial. During The Manson File’s launch in London, Schreck contributed vocals to an album by the British band Death in June.

The Werewolf Order
Schreck’s participation in the 8-8-88 ritual held in San Francisco’s Strand Theatre marked a transition point. This event marked the last of Schreck’s appearances to date with original Radio Werewolf drummer Evil Wilhelm, and his first teaming with 80’s sex symbol and glamour icon Zeena, High Priestess of the Church of Satan from 1985-1990. Clips of this concert and an inflammatory interview with Schreck were broadcast on tabloid TV host Geraldo Rivera’s highly-rated special Exposing Satan’s Underground.
Nikolas and Zeena Schreck formed the magical school and ecological activist group Werewolf Order, serving as the society’s “Alpha Male” and “Alpha Female”. This initiated a long creative and spiritual collaboration between the couple, who married later that year.
In 1989, Schreck released the LP The Fiery Summons, beginning a increasingly martial, ambient and atonal phase of Radio Werewolf’s self-described “sonic magic”.. On August 8, 1989, Schreck’s documentary film Charles Manson Superstar, featuring an extensive and uncensored interview with Manson, was simultaneously premiered in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles. The film was subsequently released on Schreck’s Video Werewolf label and was re-released on DVD in 2002 with extensive liner notes.
According to a September 5, 1991 Rolling Stone article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright, Nikolas Schreck and Zeena publicly renounced Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and his organization on April 30, 1990. Schreck had met LaVey in 1988, while researching an unpublished study of modern Satanism entitled The Demonic Revolution. Schreck has stated in several interviews that he never joined the Church of Satan, but was given an honorary Church of Satan membership card from LaVey, as were several other musicians and writers at that time.
After this 1990 schism, the Schrecks - like others who have broken from or criticized the LaVey group - claim to have been routinely demonized, castigated, and harassed by LaVey’s remaining fans, followers, and family members.
In April, 1990, The Los Angeles Times reported that Schreck waged a lawsuit against Fox Television, concerning that company’s unauthorized use of his copyrighted material. After winning an undisclosed sum from Fox, Schreck and Zeena relocated to Vienna, Austria.
Radio Werewolf in Europe
There, they worked on a series of Radio Werewolf recordings and performances throughout Europe. The instrumental EP The Lightning and the Sun, was followed by the apocalyptic Songs for the End of the World, which drew on the Nordic myth of Ragnarok. Other recordings from this period include Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera! and the celebratory Love Conquers All, which completed the Radio Werewolf Trilogy.
After adopting a policy of granting no further interviews to the media in 1991, as cited in the German music magazine Glasnost Schreck and Zeena communicated their views by issuing a series of open letters.
Responding to attacks mounted on their performances by German leftists, the Schrecks offered this Open Statement on 25.6.1991, after a concert they held in Marl, Germany:
“As there has been so much unfounded and misinformed controversy over Radio Werewolf’s supposed ‘political beliefs’ allow this statement to clearly present our personal opinion. Radio Werewolf is against all forms of politics, left, right, or middle. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with our music! Politics is the concern of the small-minded masses, who cannot see the greater artistic picture we present. Politics of any kind we find boring, monotonous, and totally lacking in importance. We are against all forms of mass control, censorship, mindless conformism, economic and banking exploitation (which is the root of all politics). Our vision of human potential goes much higher than the restrictions of social and political issues can ever hope to contain. Our only social concern is for the welfare of the environment, threatened by capitalist corporations. The world of money, politics, ideology, seems meaningless to us compared to the disastrous environmental situation our planet is in, as well as the endangerment and extinction of millions of animal species by a truly destructive humanity. We consider ourselves artists first and foremost, and refuse the glib name-calling and rumor-mongering sensationalism the so-called ‘media’ has used to sell magazines at our expense.”
Radio Werewolf’s last public release, Witchcraft/These Boots: A Tribute to the Sin-atras, was a deconstructive pop music self-parody of the Radio Werewolf image. It coincided with The Zurich Experiment, the final Radio Werewolf Rally open to the general public, held in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve of 1991/1992. Shortly thereafter, Nikolas and Zeena Schreck passed the directorship of the Werewolf Order to their Austrian student, Dietrich Haunold.
Miscellaneous Macabre
In 1996, Schreck produced the album Christopher Lee Sings Devils, Rogues and Other Villains, which allowed the British actor to showcase his operatic voice on selections from Richard Wagner, Bertolt Brecht, and Stephen Sondheim.
Hellhouse of Hollywood, the chamber of Hollywood horrors wax museum Nikolas and Zeena Schreck operated in Los Angeles, is the subject of the French documentary You May Be Sitting Next to a Satanist, which includes interviews with the couple from this time.
In 1999, Schreck was “cast against type” in the role of a Catholic priest in cult horror director Curtis Harrington’s last film, Usher, based on the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale. Schreck appeared at the European premiere of the film at the Munich Film Festival.
Schreck’s 2001 book The Satanic Screen was the first full-length study of the Devil in cinema. It was followed by its companion anthology Flowers from Hell, which chronicles the development of the Lucifer mythos and the Faustian bargain in world literature.
The Left Hand Path
Schreck collaborated with Zeena on a controversial book on erotic sorcery, Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left Hand Path Sex Magic, in which they state that Left Hand Path magicians strive to overcome the ego and attain non-dual “god-like consciousness ... by embracing that which is despised by conventional morality, deliberately crowning oneself with a disgrace that makes it impossible to return to commonly approved standards.”
Demons of the Flesh surveys the worship of the feminine principle in European Paganism, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Western esotericism. Expanding on remarks Schreck made to Christian televangelist Bob Larson in a 1988 television debate, this book examines evidence that Jesus Christ was a magician whose secret teaching was given to his closest disciple, Mary Magdalene. The Schrecks also approvingly quote Tantric historian Philip Rawson’s statement that “a pride in social identity and virtue is the most insidious and crippling of all the mental blocks on the road to release. The Tantrika has to commit himself to acts which destroy any vestiges of social status and self-esteem.”
According to the Schrecks‘ 2006 essay “The Sinister Current: Everything You Know is Wrong “ this book forms the basic introduction to a private course of initiatory instruction the Schrecks teach at their temple and meditation center in Berlin. More recent interviews granted to a French journalist suggest that Schreck has formally converted from left-hand path Tantra of the Hindu variety to the Tantric Buddhism of Vajrayana.
Among the social causes Schreck has recently lent his public support to are animal rights and environmental conservation, the Free Tibet movement, and women’s rights in Iran.
He has held a series of public readings from his forthcoming trilogy of novels, which he described as “a historical epic of conspiracy set in the 1960s.”
He lives in Berlin.
Bibliography
*Demons of the Flesh; The Complete Guide to Left Hand Path Sex Magic, (2002)
*The Satanic Screen: An illustrated guide to the Devil in cinema, (2001)
*Flowers from Hell: A Satanic Reader, (2001)
*The Manson File, (1988)
Discography
*A Symphony of Terror, (1987)
*Buried Alive, ( Radio Werewolf track on American Gothic compilation album, 1988)
*The Fiery Summons, (1989)
*The Lightning and the Sun, (1989)
*Songs for the End of the World, (1990)
*Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera, (1990)
*Witchcraft Boots: A Tribute to the Sin-Atras, (1991)
*Love Conquers All, (1992)
*Christopher Lee Sings Devils, Rogues and Other Villains, (1996) Producer
Filmography
*Mortuary Academy, (1988) Actor
*Charles Manson Superstar, (1989) Director, Producer
*You May Be Sitting Next To A Satanist, (1998) Documentary about
*Usher, (2001) Actor

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