SPOOKY SCENTS

What makes a smell spooky? In this special class before Halloween, join us for a scented cultural discussion of how personal experience, memory, cultural associations, and historical contexts can make certain smells feel eerie, creepy, frightening, or even horrific.

Together, we’ll explore the uneasy relationships between beauty and disgust, attraction and repulsion, and pleasure and danger. Topics include the historical uses of aromatics in funerary and mourning practices, magical rites, alchemical experiments, and sorcery. Witchcraft in particular carries longstanding associations with fragrant concoctions as tools of feminine deception and seduction. We’ll also consider the campier side of scary smells, including how scent has become part of the exaggerated, darkly comic, and grotesque atmosphere of horror movies and popular culture.

Fragrances and raw materials that evoke skin, bodily fluids, illness, decay, and mortality challenge our ideas about what a good perfume can or should smell like. Notions about what smells “clean” or “unclean” introduce other forms of olfactory body horror, including fears of contamination, sickness, and disease. And, of course, no discussion of spooky scents would be complete without Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in which the main character’s disturbing absence of body odor may be the most horrific “smell” of all.