Horror fantasy is a genre that subverts real-life oppression into fantasy to reveal hidden desires. The film Perfume embodies the characteristics of horror fantasy by fantasizing the repression of love and existence through the material of smell and expressing it through Grounouille’s tragic life and serial killing.
About horror fantasy
Horror fantasy is a subsystem within the larger genre classification of fantasy. Therefore, in order to understand horror fantasy, it’s important to have a basic understanding of the concept of the fantasy genre.
The genre is based on fantasy. According to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy is “a story or fictional creation that transforms the unreal into reality itself.” In other words, in the realm opposite of realism, which deals with the objective, rational world, we call stories that we have only imagined, fantasy. It can provide the pleasure of escaping from the reality that realism assumes, the dominant reality, or it can present a new reality that shakes up what we believe to be real, and it can blur our judgment of what is real and what is not. Thus, Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as a subversion of repressed reality. Horror fantasy is a genre that adds the conventions of the ‘horror’ genre on top of this basic concept of fantasy.
Horror reveals the secret desires of the members of a society at a certain time. This is why horror movies are often referred to as “the return of the repressed”. This is one of the reasons why we watch horror movies. We watch horror movies because we can feel the catharsis of desires that we cannot fulfill in reality through the monsters, ghosts, and killer ghosts in horror movies.
Therefore, ‘horror fantasy’ is a genre that subverts and exposes real-life oppression through the horror movie device in an unrealistic story, providing the audience with a catharsis of desire.
‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ as a horror fantasy genre?
The movie ‘Perfume’ is currently categorized as a drama & thriller. However, if we take a closer look at the psychoanalytic characteristics of ‘horror films’ mentioned earlier and examine the work as a novel, I believe that ‘Perfume’ can also be classified as a ‘horror’ genre, and this report is a testament to that idea. Here, I will analyze the characters, style, and social thematic aspects of Perfume from the perspective of a horror fantasy film. Of course, since the film is centered around the story of the protagonist, the analysis will focus on the narrative and the main character, Gruenouille.
Jean-Baptiste Gruenouille as a Repressed or Denied Being
Abandoned by his mother at birth in stinking Paris, Gruenouille is congenitally endowed with an extraordinary sense of smell that goes beyond human limits. As he grows up, he judges and remembers things through his sense of smell rather than language, and he wants to remember and own the smells of everything in the world. Ironically, however, Jean-Baptiste Grunouille has no smell. As an odorless being, Gruenouille is constantly abandoned throughout his life: first by his mother at birth, then by the director of an orphanage who pays him a small sum of money, then by a tanner who is rich enough to take care of him, then by a perfume maker. In other words, the social injustice inflicted on Grounouille is constant abandonment, indifference, or coldness.
It is worth noting here that Grounui’s characteristic is that he has no smell. What does ‘smell’ mean in the movie Perfume? The setting of ‘stinking Europe’, the scent of the most beautiful woman in it, and Grounouille, who cannot forget the scent of the woman and eventually tries to lock it away by killing her. Perhaps ‘smell’ can be interpreted as a keyword for human existence and love. Wasn’t it the reason for human existence to find the purity of ‘love’ in Europe at the time, when it was overflowing with ugly desires? In that sense, Gruenui seems to be a thoroughly denied being.
Having chosen ‘survival’ over ‘love’ from birth, Grounouille becomes a being incapable of love because he has no ‘smell’. While visiting the city of Paris with a tanner, Grounouille meets a beautiful girl walking with apricots. The scent of her body is sweeter than anything he’s ever smelled before. But when Grounoux follows her and smells her body odor, she only hands him an apricot and walks away, whether out of pity or fear. This can be seen as the first repression of ‘scent’ imposed on Grunui.
However, Grounui doesn’t give up there and chases the apricot girl for a while longer. He smells her back, hair, and shoulders, and gradually approaches her, but his clumsy expression of emotion only causes her to feel fear and disgust. Finally, she begins to scream, and as people pass by, Grounui covers her mouth to avoid being seen, and Apricot Girl dies. The apricot girl’s death is a secondary oppression of Grounouille’s “scent,” and an event that has a significant impact on Grounouille’s future behavior. Gruenui’s desire to smell the scent of a living girl is repressed by her death, and the psychological repression of fear of having unconsciously committed murder weighs heavily on him. Gruenui then becomes obsessed with ‘possessing the scent’. This is because the death of the apricot girl was the oppression of his unrequited love and existence. The denial of his desire to love, to smell the scent, triggers his past of abandonment, and her death is a prelude to his inability to love in the future, to integrate into society. His obsession with “possessing the scent” is a rebellion against the repression of what he cannot have in the future.
Unable to forget the apricot girl, Grounouille is constantly thinking about how to trap the scent. He thinks of the perfume shop he saw in Paris. Finally, Grounoux is given the opportunity to visit a perfumer by a tanner, and he becomes the perfumer’s assistant. Grounouille constantly creates new perfumes and tries to learn from the perfumer how to trap scents, but he never figures out how to store human scents, and eventually decides to leave for Grasse, just as the perfumer taught him.
In Grasse, Grounouille learns the entire process of creating perfume. This is when Grounouille’s killing spree begins in earnest. He first meets a prostitute to test his methods on, but she is disgusted with him and tries to run away, only to be caught and killed by him. When the experiment with the prostitute is successful, Grounouille chooses thirteen other beautiful women and begins to murder them, knowing from previous experience that he will never be able to obtain their sweet scent alive. This can be seen as a manifestation of the horror of a traumatized human being, similar to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or Brian De Palma’s Carrie. In The Shining, war wounds lead to the murder of a family member, and in Carrie, a young girl who is traumatized by her overly religious mother’s insistence on chastity later murders her friends, teachers, and mother. Similarly, in Perfume, Gruenui’s rejection by society, denial of existence, and suppression of love leads him to commit murder and create perfume to realize his desires.
Grounouille is sentenced to death at his trial, but on the day of his execution, he appears wearing the ultimate perfume, a combination of 13 fragrances. The citizens in the square, the executioner, the archbishop, and everyone else who has gathered to watch the execution are intoxicated by his perfume and worship him, calling him an angel and making love to those around him. Even Count Riches, whose daughter was killed by him, is intoxicated by his perfume and forgives him. While the crowd wakes up from the effects of the perfume, Gruenouille, the creator of the perfume, who is the only one not intoxicated by it, is drawn by an instinctive smell back to the place of his birth. In the center of the marketplace, he pours all the remaining perfume on his head, and the crowds in the marketplace, intoxicated by the scent, rush toward him, consuming him and his scent. Grounouille disappears into thin air.
The scene of the citizens gathered in this square making love and Grounouille being eaten by the people is quite significant. Grounoux’s perfume, which he hated so much, stirred the hearts of the citizens, and it is worth thinking about how Grounoux chose to die with all of his perfume on his body, even though he had worked so hard to create it. The reason for Gruenui’s obsession with scent was already explained earlier. It stems from his desire to be included in the society of people who have ‘smell’, and his desire to share pure love with them, and to have his existence confirmed by them.
The final scene can therefore also be interpreted in this light. In the execution square, Grounouille meets and makes love to the girl of his imagination. Grounouille tries to realize the repression of love that he had suffered because of the death of the apricot girl, right there in the execution square. But it is through this perfume that he experiences the greatest denial of himself. When he sees all the people intoxicated by his perfume making physical love, he is traumatized. He realizes that he has created a perfume that makes love possible, but he himself is unable to feel it. In the end, he is forced to admit that he is incapable of love, so his fantasy of the apricot girl ends with her lying dead. While others would normally make love to a living person, he is rejected by society, and because he is an object of fear, he is unable to make love to the woman he loves while she is still alive, but only by smelling her body odor after she dies.
So why did Gruenui choose death? Grounui dies in the middle of the marketplace with perfume all over his body. It was probably a dramatic expression of nihilism and loss. He believed that people die but scents last forever, and the memory of the execution square taught him that the effects of scent are fleeting. The sadness and horror of realizing that his first love, the apricot girl, will not be brought back to life by creating a perfume, and that he can make love to her while he smells her scent, but will have to lose her again when the scent fades, ultimately led him to choose the path of death.
When we examine the character of Gruenui in the narrative of the work, we can find a number of “oppressions” that are imposed on him. One of the essential elements of the horror and fantasy genres is the act of ‘oppression’ on a character, and Gruenui is oppressed by existence, love, and rejection from society. While this doesn’t create a monster like Godzilla or Alien, it can be considered horrifying enough in the sense that an excessive obsession with ‘scent’ leads to the serial killing of a maternal deficient, affection deficient person.
What about the stylistic aspects of the horror-fantasy genre?
One of the scenes in the novel that really captures the filthy landscape of Europe is the gruesome scene of Gruenouille, who was born in a fish market in Paris, the largest city in Europe. His thin breathing amidst the blood and fish carcasses seems to foreshadow his fate.
A scene of group sex and Grounoux being eaten by humans that turned many moviegoers off. The group sex scene, which could only be seen in pornography, and the cannibalism scene, which is impossible to happen in the civilized world, are the most striking scenes in the perfume.
Given that these scenes are based on the idea of “acts performed while intoxicated by scent,” we can see that the stylistic aspect of film perfume has the characteristic of connecting the horror embodied in the characters to “fantasy. In other words, the film maximizes the fantasy of the film itself by directly screening the temporal and spatial setting of ‘a certain period of European Paris’ that is between real and fantasy space, the fantastical theme of ‘a murderer who kills women to make perfume’, and the scenes of people having group sex while drunk on perfume at the end, and the scene of Gruenui being eaten by people after spraying himself with perfume. All of these styles can be seen as illusionary techniques used to convey a realistic sense of ‘smell’ that cannot be expressed on screen alone. Therefore, the audience feels the unrealistic element of ‘smell’ as real through the screen, which breaks down the boundary between reality and fiction and induces an effective hallucination.
What are the social themes of the horror fantasy genre?
A single perfume powerful enough to capture the soul. The ultimate perfume is so powerful that it can make murderers look like angels, make enemies love, and even rule the world. The perfect perfume that can make people who have never loved someone purely and completely fall in love. In a way, it’s like the salvation of Christ in the Bible. If everyone in this world loved and cared for each other, everyone would be happy and everything would be beautiful. Grounouille’s “perfume” was a perfume that reminds us of perfect, pure, and complete love. The perfume itself is salvation. Until the scent wears off. The problem is that perfume loses its scent over time. When the people who were intoxicated by Grounouille’s perfume wake up from its effects, they don’t understand what they’ve done and soon try to erase it from their memories. Nostalgia is fleeting and cannot last forever. Grounouille asks Baldini, the perfume maker, if there is any way to preserve the smell forever, and Baldini tells him that if he goes to Grasse, he will find a way, but perfume is only a substance that evaporates, diffuses, and disappears with the alcohol. In the end, perfume makes you fall in love for a moment, but it does not promise eternal love. To deceive the eyes and the soul with lies is the ultimate perfume for Grounouille.
It is also connected to religion, which was the mask of the people of the time. If Gruenui’s personal oppression was the oppression of love and existence, the social oppression was the oppression of religion. In the scene where the sexuality of the religiously suppressed people explodes like a burst of water due to Gruenui’s perfume, we can feel that the naked people’s bodies look more like a piece of meat than beautiful. At this point, we hear a solemn piece of music that sounds like it could be played at a mass. The music, which seems to speak of salvation, harmonizes with the gestures of the orgies, expressing a clear paradox. The screen reveals the vulnerability and duplicity of the ‘religious norms’ that were established as absolute norms in society at the time.
The people who shout for the punishment of Grunui under the mask of religion reveal their own ugly desires. After the group sex, they create another innocent victim to cover up their sins and kill to make it seem like nothing happened. In the final scene, Gruenui is eaten by the men. The faces of the people who eat him shout “I love you!” and glow with filthy lust. Gruenu, whose expression does not change even as he is eaten, seems to be feeling the emptiness of his own existence, which is denied by the filthy desires of humans. Wearing the mask of holy religion, he pretends to be a moral society, but in reality, everyone is full of hypocrisy.
Therefore, if we look at the movie in terms of social themes, it can be seen as a movie about a society where everyone is covered with desire. Isn’t it about the horror of people who tie themselves up tightly with religion or law because they are afraid that if they peel back the layers, they will reveal themselves to be full of desire?
Why is nostalgia a horror fantasy?
What are the characteristics of nostalgia as a horror fantasy? Obviously, nostalgia excludes most of the characteristics of the traditional horror fantasy genre. However, Perfume brilliantly depicts the ultimate characteristic of horror fantasy – oppression – through the unique material of smell. In this case, we are referring to the real-life horror of oppression, which is the denial of existence and love in the case of Gruenouille, and the suppression of human ugly desires through religion in the case of society, which comes back to haunt us, giving birth to serial killers and causing innocent victims of society.
Here we can give a new definition of horror fantasy. Horror doesn’t have to be about ghosts or monsters, it doesn’t have to be about moody lighting and a sense of urgent thrill. True horror is created when something that is not scary at all in everyday life is transformed into something new. Kudos to writer Patrik Juszkint and director Tom Tykwer for creating horror in the realm of smell.
