What Does a Movie Smell Like?

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Focus Features, Getty Images

In May of 2024, the perfumer Douglas Little received an email that stopped him in his tracks. A consultant for Focus Features had reached out through his publicist to discuss an unconventional new collaboration. “We got on the call, and this woman said, ‘We have this new film coming up that we really feel fits you. It’s Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu,” Little told me. Set in 1830s Germany, Nosferatu is a classic horror about a vampire who terrorizes a young woman, the wife of his estate agent, and ravages their town with a plague. The Eggers remake, starring Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård, was set to release on Christmas. The studio was wondering: Would Little make a perfume for it?

In his decades-long career, Little had never received a proposal like this, but it turns out the 50-year-old was perfect for the project. He is the mastermind behind Heretic Parfum, an artisanal fragrance brand responsible for provocative, unsettling releases like “Poltergeist” and Goop’s “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle, and a lover of the grotesque. One of his earliest film memories as a kid was seeing the original 1922 Nosferatu with his father on Halloween. “The goth teenager in me was freaking out,” he recalled of that initial conversation about the project. Feverish with excitement, Little went down a rabbit hole of early 19th-century German perfumes. He dreamed up ideas in his sleep. The result, Eau de Macabre, conveys a descent from innocence to depravity. It starts with lilac then mutates into moss, wet stone, and other enigmatic notes, the lightness of the young wife Ellen mingling with darkness of her pursuer Count Orlok. After a sign-off from Eggers, Eau de Macabre launched on Heretic’s website last Halloween and sold out its initial 5,000-item run in a day and a half. The fragrance is on its fifth restock, and fans have flooded Heretic’s inbox with pleas to continue it as a part of its permanent collection.

Now more film studios have come knocking on Little’s door: “People want to see if the success can be replicated. We’ve gotten a lot of interest in moving forward from other properties,” he said.

Fragrance is the latest frontier in the film industry’s quest to turn movies into unmissable events. Studios have unveiled themed popcorn boxes, wacky limited-edition merch, and interactive gimmicks to generate buzz for new releases. Theaters galvanize audiences with the promise of a more immersive viewing experience — bigger screens, surround sound, moving seats, and practical effects. (Some multiplexes have even introduced pickleball and zip-lining as between-feature entertainment.) Now innovators in both scent-making and cinema are hoping to invigorate an already-multisensory medium with aroma, appealing to novelty fiends and a growing population of fragrance heads. Last year, A24 and Brooklyn’s Joya Studio revived Smell-O-Vision for one-night-only screenings of the psychological thriller Heretic, piping in a bespoke blueberry fragrance into select Alamo Drafthouse theaters during a key scene. (Those who missed the screenings can buy a Blueberry Pie candle from Joya’s website.) CJ 4DPLEX, the Korean tech company behind 4DX, is in talks to expand its standard smell menu, which includes “gunpowder” and “ocean breeze.” The company has also dabbled in custom scents, like a special chocolate fragrance for 2023’s Wonka, and is considering more. Earlier this year, Sony unveiled plans to bring Smell-O-Vision to PlayStations; it’s only a matter of time before it comes to our TVs, too.

It’s not a mystery why Hollywood would want to harness olfaction. It’s one of our most intimate and visceral senses, a fast-track to emotion. But attempts to odorize movies have historically been short-lived. When 1960’s Scent of Mystery hit theaters with Smell-O-Vision, a system that timed smells to plot moments, it was considered a flop. In 1981, the director John Waters promoted his film Polyester with Odorama, distributing scratch-n-sniff cards with aromas including Flatulence, Model Building Glue, and Skunk. How new scent-cinema collaborations — branded perfumes, smell-synchronized screenings — will go down depends on their execution. Fragrances can be fine art, the outré subject of museum exhibitions, but also thoughtless consumer products. Even their makers, like Little, are wary of such collabs becoming a gimmick: “It has to be the perfect fit. I really don’t want to become the company that’s making film fragrances left and right.”

I’m someone who’s generally open to kooky experiences and takes pleasure in the senses. I also find contemporary moviegoing culture ridiculous. I hate the popcorn boxes. I don’t want to dress up. When I first heard about Eau be Macabre, coming off the heels of the announcement of the $20,000 Nosferatu sarcophagus bed, I groaned. Still, I decided to try it. I smelled grass and stale cucumber, wondering if I had missed something. I couldn’t remember if I had ever smelled a real lilac before. I spritzed it on my co-workers, one of whom intently sniffed then notified me via Slack 15 minutes later: “I can maybe smell some ‘stone.’” Another identified citrus, which I don’t think was included in the notes. My roommate detected rotten leaves. My roommate’s boyfriend’s roommate blurted “crypt.” Bingo! I alternated being amused, bored, and frustrated by the perfume, my attempts at understanding it thwarted by the subjectivity of the human experience. My show-and-tell tour did make me very popular, though.

Eau de Macabre isn’t the only scented Nosferatu product commissioned by Focus Features. The studio also partnered with Mise En Scènt, a Brooklyn studio that specializes in movie-themed candles, on four products: The sweet, powdery Succumb to the Darkness, which, according to the label, “smells like tonka, amyris, musk & eternal life,” and a three-pack of mini-candles, Hunger, Obsession, and Succumb, all available for purchase on NBC Universal’s online shop. Heretic also just announced Nosferatu the Candle, which arrives, per the press release, in a “limited-edition vessel of oxblood glass.” There’s more: Independently, the Austin-based perfume brand Xyrena, which maintains an ongoing collection of officially licensed fragrances based on cult classics called the Cinematic Scent Archive, developed a Nosferatu perfume inspired by F. W. Murnau’s original and timed it to the release of Eggers’s remake. The Eau de Macabre announcement came as a surprise to Killian Wells, Xyrena’s creative director and CEO: “I thought that was funny, because, honestly, I hadn’t seen anybody else doing movie fragrances until then.” He had started building the Cinematic Scent Archive around a year ago; its first release was an American Psycho perfume. He contacts movie-rights-holders and negotiates with them directly.

When I spoke with Wells over the phone, Xyrena had just signed an agreement with “one of the biggest studios in the world,” in his words, to create perfumes tied to their back catalogue. His ambition is to make Xyrena “the Funko of fragrance,” a phrase so disturbing to me I thought I initially heard it wrong. (In fact, as he elaborated over email, his first business as a teenager was reselling Wacky Wobblers, the original incarnation of Funko Pops, that he’d bought wholesale.) “There’s obviously plenty of films out there, so there’s no shortage of material to work with,” Wells pointed out. He’d already whittled a list of 1,000 movies down to 60. Even Piece by Piece, the Lego biopic of the musician-entrepreneur Pharrell Williams I brought up, could be on the table. He wasn’t worried about competitors, he reassured me, because he’d been “working hard behind the scenes cornering the market.” (Both the name Cinematic Scent Archive and Xyrena’s VHS clamshell packaging are trademarked.) “We started it first — it’s like how everyone calls tissues Kleenex,” he asserted.

The emerging movie-fragrance market is already starting to feel oversaturated, even without Wells’s forthcoming heap. Earlier this month, I visited the Joya Studio office in Red Hook and smelled nine of the candles in its A24-sponsored movie-genre series — my favorite is “thriller” — plus a surprisingly tasteful limited-edition Minions candle with only a little bit of banana. Then I went to Mise en Scènt’s storefront in Industry City and whiffed most of its movie-genre collection and its newly launched Pride and Prejudice 20th anniversary Boiled Potatoes candle. I sprayed myself with Xyrena’s Nosferatu, which smelled like musty cinnamon, then American Psycho, which curiously evoked the fresh peanut-butter sauce that goes over vermicelli noodles. (I think it was the herbal mint notes, a nod to Patrick Bateman’s morning face mask. I love it.) I brought Eau de Macabre to a birthday party, then “accidentally” left it at the birthday girl’s house after spraying it on a bunch of guests for entertainment. Then I realized I missed it. It was much more dynamic than I’d initially thought.

I went through the routine adjustment process one inevitably goes through when confronted with new artistic experiences, cycling through hostility and excitement to arrive at a hesitant appreciation for the possibilities of these olfactory experiences. At Mise en Scènt specifically, I became attuned to the close reading that can go into the development of cinema-themed scented goods. Greer Temnick, the studio’s film-geek founder, told me when she first started making Twin Peaks candles in her apartment for friends and family, “My candles were very on the nose. Now I have more knowledge about how to build conversations.” She watches a film several times when she’s designing a new project, isolating scenes and parsing characters. But no matter how well considered her products — or anyone’s — may be, they exist within a larger media marketing industry that feeds on rampant consumption. Thoughtful engagement exists at odds with the imperative of bagging the latest thing. That’s why the promotion for the Nosferatu candle, for all Little’s personal integrity, plays up its scarcity: It’s a “limited-edition release” and “sure be highly collectable.” Under a consumerist mind-set, everything is Funko.

There is one film-industry representative I spoke to who seemed cautious about rushing too far into the movie-fragrance frontier. “We always get these lighthearted questions like, ‘Why don’t you create this or that scent?’ A lot if it is out of the norm — like decaying bodies,” Paul Kim, CJ 4DPLEX’s senior vice-president, said. “We want to be careful.” He seemed taken aback when I asked whether the company would consider partnering with a fragrance house for 4DX: “I’m not sure if that’s what audiences would want, but who knows?” I can see why he would feel skeptical. CJ 4DPLEX’s clients are major studios. The risk of alienating the public might be too great to be worth it. But I like the idea of an avant-garde scent score, a wild and strange orchestration of aromas that, in tandem with a film’s soundtrack, complicates what’s going on in the main frame. (Who might become the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of the fragrance world?) Recently, I went to the IFC to watch David Lynch’s Inland Empire, a borderline impenetrable three-hour fever dream about a Hollywood actress, Nikki Grace (played by Laura Dern), whose life blurs into her role. I wanted to smell it all: surreal backyard barbecues in which a dead-eyed husband has spurted ketchup all over himself, gilded mansions, motel rooms of dancing whores, and on a more abstract level, the sour undercurrent of Hollywood dreams. It would be crazy. Three hours of visual, aural, and olfactory discombobulation is certainly not for everyone. But who wants art for everyone?