what does horror smell like
exploring how perfumes create fear
I haven’t written for my substack in a while, footnote that the end for if you care about why.1
This post was spurred on by the Nosferatu perfume by Heretic, a scent that is so incredibly up my street that I am tragically unable to get my hands on (because it is both too expensive for me and because they do not ship outside the US). I am sad and bitter about it. It supposedly smells like cold, damp castle walls and purple florals – I love to smell damp and chilly. However, the whole concept of a Nosferatu perfume got me thinking about the idea of fear and scent more generally. There are many perfumes that claim to smell scary or that are inspired by horror films, novels, or characters and I’m sure they’re super interesting. However, I’m more interested in exploring what might cause a scent to feel scary, what the common notes or themes are within these scents that inspire distress or horror.
Smell isn’t necessarily the first sense we think of when we think of horror. We typically think of a horrific sight or sound or even that strange extrasensory perception that something just isn’t right. But there is the common saying that someone can ‘smell your fear’ and whether that is meant literally or not it is interesting to ponder what ‘fear’ might smell like. Thinking literally it could be sweat. That particular tang of nervous sweat cut with adrenaline which can be made legible in perfumery by notes like cumin or particular combinations of animalics. Or the smell of bodily fear could be something even more grotesque as multiple perfumers have attempted to capture the scent of other bodily secretions, such as urine, faeces or vomit. Sombre by Strangers Parfumerie combines all three under a blanket of champagne and floral notes which makes me think of hiding from a killer at a fancy party. Screaming, crying, throwing up, pissing, shitting in fear while guests in tuxedoes get murdered in a grand hall. Nekro Dellamorte by The Fragrance Engineers is another scent in this family that is currently having a moment on Twitter after someone posted the note list (interestingly, it’s also made by the same perfumer as Sombre, Prin Lomros, who I guess just loves a stench). This scent is meant to evoke the goriest 70s, 80s, and 90s horror films, with notes of lymph, blood, urine, dank rooms, mould, and a mysterious ‘vulva accord’. Getting the ouija board out to ask Sigmund Freud for his comments on why a vulva accord might show up in a horror perfume. This scent seems to mingle the scent of the body’s experience of fear with what might cause that fear, the dank rooms, blood and mould evoking an abandoned house of horrors.
Although it is the deviant fantasy accords that draw the eye and nose most in these two perfumes, they do also contain floral notes. This could be to round out the compositions, to give them that slight eerie pleasantness that keeps you coming back for more even as you recoil in disgust. However, many floral notes do very well on their own at creating a sense of unease or revulsion in the smeller. White florals, like jasmine, tuberose, and orange blossom, contain indoles, scent compounds that are also found in faeces and decomposition but which at lower concentrations give that strong floral scent. This means that perfumers can walk the line between indolic and simply floral, creating a floral scent that flirts with the bodily or even the repulsive. A great scent to experience indoles for the first time is Lust by Lush, it’s a nuclear strength jasmine with a light indolic quality that is addictive.
Florals can also invoke the funereal. A white lily centred perfume will conjure funeral parlours or wakes and, while not quite horror or fear, can produce a quite sense of dread or melancholy. Again, Lush has a great offering here with Death and Decay, a perfume that centres lilies and some gentle spices. While its name suggests something more nefarious it actually smells very pleasant, like the multitude of flowers used to distract from the possible scent of death. If you want to lean more into the funereal then L’Artisan Parfumer’s Passage d’Enfer combines lilies with incense to create a beautiful and melancholic scent that I actually love to wear in summer when I’m yearning for gloomier weather. Demeter also literally has a scent called Funeral Home if you want something cheaper and more novelty. And a final slightly controversial funereal scent is Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry, which doesn’t scream funeral in its name or imagery but which has been compared to fluids used in embalming pretty reliably. Apologies if you love it.
While perhaps not directly evocative of fear or death I always find that smokey perfumes fit into this category of fearful fragrances. There is something innate that jolts us to attention at the smell of smoke or burning, a feeling that life being is threatened by fire. Smoke in perfumes can come from a variety of notes and take various forms. It can be a woody campfire, perhaps with the sweetness of marshmallows toasting over it, a more austere snuffed candle, or an aggressive burnt rubber tyre. Smoke is one of my personal favourite fragrance notes, so I love all of it but some particular stand-out smokey scents are: Patchouli 24 by Le Labo, described by many Fragrantica reviewers as smelling like smoked meat (I personally think it smells nothing of the sort, instead rather like delicious burnt wood and vanilla); Bvlgari Black which smells like you are in a car on fire; and multiple of the offerings from UK indie perfume house Rook as smoke seems to be their signature, especially their scents Amber and Suede – the latter I would describe as smelling like an occult orgy at a B&Q after hours.
Fragrances that allow you to smell inhuman is a broad category but one that definitely has a lot of potential for horror. Although, yes, smelling like a cupcake or a rose is not strictly ‘human’ these scents are at least somewhat organic or evocative of common and comforting human experiences. Smelling like industrial glue is likely not. In the novel Perfume by Patrick Suskind people are perturbed by the protagonist Grenouille because he has no scent, no sweat or dirty hair or skin musk, and while that is impossible to achieve in real life I think the closest one can get to it is smelling like something completely removed from the human. That includes the typical ‘pleasant’ smells of soaps, detergents and the more popular perfume categories like fresh, florals or gourmands.
There are many niche perfume houses that do scents like this but a more easily accessible designer house that also dabbles in the inhuman is Comme des Garçons. Their ‘Series 6: Synthetic’ line has scents that smell like a car garage, tar and a dry cleaner’s, perhaps not overtly horrific or fear inducing but I would certainly be unsettled if I walked past a person in an unassuming outfit who smelled strongly of oil and exhaust fumes. I also LOVE their incense series although it’s getting increasingly hard to find. All their incenses are slightly cold and uninviting, I’ve emptied a bottle of Avignon which had the wonderful mustiness of cold stone church floors. Some of Comme des Garçons’ standalone scents are also wonderfully inhuman, like Serpentine with its asphalt and grass notes evoking a field beside a freshly laid motorway. Their signature scent from 2011, just called Comme des Garçons and in a weird bottle that looks melted, is also crazy with big base notes of scotch tape and industrial glue as well as leather and saffron in the top notes. Fragrantica reviewers say that it smells “like a building,” “a cardboard shipping box that was used too many times,” and my personal favourite “a floppy disc drive, the computer is slightly hot”. Completely inhuman and slightly unsettling.
Sidenote, saffron is a note that personally scares me. Any perfume that has a prominent saffron note smells like plasters or bandages to me and I’m reminded of hospitals. I’m not sure why this is but it means that one of the most popular perfumes of the past few years absolutely turns my stomach. To me Baccarat Rouge 540 by Maison Francis Kurkdijan smells like sugared bandages and I when I was having a little sniff session in Newcastle Fenwick’s department store and took a sample from the person working at the counter I was genuinely so shocked by its scent I flinched back from the blotter. I occasionally get wafts of that perfume, or its many dupes, if I’m out in a city centre and it makes my stomach drop every time with that smell of sweet bandages. I’ve since learned it’s the saffron but dear god that is a true scent of horror for me. (Be not afraid of this scent, its extremely popular for a reason and I just have olfactory beef with saffron)
Scents that are really stringent and clean can also sometimes stray too close to a hospital vibe, a scent that technically should be somewhat pleasant in its cleanliness but disturbs as it remind us of what that cleanliness is covering up. The same goes for scents like Gucci Guilty Absolute and Etat Libre D’Orange’s Ghost in the Shell, which also suggest that something is not quite right, that they’re covering up something bodily that has gone wrong. They give me clinical serial killer vibes – Patrick Bateman in his plastic cover-all suit cleaning up after his latest victim and the scoured smell that lingers afterwards. Tom Ford’s Fucking Fabulous is also a good serial killer cleanup scent, it’s like baby wipes on leather. Horrid.
Probably the most talked about scent that conjures fear and this sense of the inhuman, of something gone wrong, is The Smell of Space by Eau de Space. I haven’t smelled it myself as it is very hard to come by, but the reviews of this thing are addictive so I’ve read and watched a lot. So many people say this scent made them feel fear. It’s probably a combination of the industrial plastic and metallic notes with the fire accord which people have said is reminiscent of an electrical fire, again capitalising on that shock that intensely smoky scents can give your system coupled with the absolute wrongness of burnt plastic. One review said there was also a disconcerting meat-like smell, perhaps from the metallic notes, which when combined with everything else gave them the image of a rocket which had crash landed with the paramedic picking through burnt metal to find bodies.
It’s amazing that a scent can create such a vivid, if horrific, image and it’s one of the reasons I love perfume so much regardless of whether it’s the powdery florals that remind me of my grandma or a scent that makes me feel like I’m in a haunted attic. Fear is a universal yet highly personal feeling and so is the evocation of it through scent. A scary perfume reflects your own fears – perhaps it’s not blood and metal but the signature scent of a teacher who terrorised you or the fragrance you wore the day you had a chilling walk home in the dark. Scent’s connection with memories, and therefore emotions, means that it can bypass a lot of our rational reasoning and cut straight to our base reactions – whether that’s going wide-eyed and pale at the scent of Baccarat Rouge in Fenwick’s or retching and flinching at the smell of Sombre.
I wish you all happy sniffing in your quest to find the scent that will jumpstart your adrenal glands.
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This post is part of a new series about scent where I will be exploring perfumes and their place in culture.
Following my first few posts I had very strange experience where I got heaps and heaps of spam subscribers, like twenty an hour for a few days. Some of them had the same profile picture as me which I started to get really freaked out and paranoid and convinced myself that somehow I was going to get my identity stolen through a substack newsletter that doesn’t even have my real face on. So I reported them all and logged out scared lol. I then got completely absorbed by writing my PhD thesis and couldn’t fathom writing anything else. But all the spammers are gone and I’m back baby.