This blog post explores whether Grenouille in the film ‘Perfume’ is an innate monster or a victim shaped by society and love.

On Horror Fantasy

Horror fantasy occupies a subgenre within the broader classification system of ‘fantasy’. Therefore, to understand horror fantasy, a basic grasp of the concept of the ‘fantasy’ genre is necessary.
The ‘fantasy’ genre is based on the fantastical. Rosemary Jackson defines fantasy as “a story or fictional creation that transforms the unreal into reality itself.” That is, in the realm opposite to realism, which deals with an objective and rational world, we call the stories we have only imagined ‘fantasy’. This can convey the pleasure of escaping from the reality assumed by realism, or it can present a new reality that shakes the common beliefs we hold as reality, or it can obscure our judgment between reality and unreality. Thus Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as the subversion of repressed reality. Horror fantasy is precisely the genre of horror that layers the conventions of the horror genre onto this fundamental concept of fantasy.
Horror reveals the secret desires of society’s members during a specific period. This is why horror films are often called ‘the return of the repressed.’ The reason we watch horror films lies precisely in this characteristic. The desires secretly hidden within us—desires to resist the dominant ideology—explode through the monsters, ghosts, and killers of horror films, allowing us to experience a catharsis for desires that cannot be fulfilled in reality.
Therefore, ‘horror fantasy’ can be defined as a genre that provides audiences with catharsis for their desires by subverting and exposing the repression of reality within unrealistic narratives through the devices of horror films.

What are the characteristics of ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ as a horror fantasy genre?

The film ‘Perfume’ is currently categorized as Drama & Thriller. However, upon closer examination of the psychoanalytic characteristics of ‘horror films’ mentioned earlier, and reviewing the work as a novel, I believe ‘Perfume’ can also be classified as belonging to the ‘horror’ genre. This report serves as evidence for that belief. Here, I will analyze ‘Perfume’s’ characters, style, and social themes from the perspective of horror fantasy cinema. Naturally, since the film centers on the protagonist’s story, the analysis will focus on the narrative and the protagonist, Grenouille.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille as a Repressed or Denied Existence

Born in a Paris filled with foul odors and immediately abandoned by his mother, Grenouille possesses an extraordinary sense of smell that transcends human limits. Growing up, he judges and remembers things primarily through smell rather than language, desiring to remember and possess the scent of every object in the world. Ironically, however, ‘Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’ has no scent. As a scentless being, Grenouille is constantly abandoned throughout his life. He is abandoned by his mother at birth, then by the orphanage director who received a small sum of money, next by the tanner who exploited him to the fullest, and then by the perfumer. Each exploited him for their own desires, ultimately paying with their lives. Thus, the social injustice inflicted upon Grenouille manifests as relentless abandonment and people’s indifference or coldness.
Here, we must note Grenouille’s defining trait: being a ‘scentless being’. What does ‘scent’ signify in the film ‘Perfume’? Set against the backdrop of ‘Europe reeking of foul odors,’ within that environment, the scent of the most beautiful woman. Unable to forget that woman’s scent, Grenouille ultimately turned to murder to capture it. Perhaps ‘scent’ can be interpreted through the keywords of human existence and love. In a Europe seething with ugly desires, finding the purity of ‘love’ – wasn’t that the very reason for human existence? From this perspective, Grenouille appears as a thoroughly rejected being.
From birth, Grenouille chose ‘survival’ over ‘love’. Because he possessed no ‘scent’ of his own, he became a being incapable even of loving. Following the tanner through the streets of Paris, Grenouille encounters a beautiful girl walking with apricots. The fragrance emanating from her body is sweeter than any scent he had ever encountered before. Yet, as he follows her to catch her scent, she hands him a single apricot and vanishes into the distance—whether out of pity or fear, he cannot tell. This can be seen as the first suppression of ‘scent’ inflicted upon Grenouille.
But Grenouille does not give up there. He pursues the apricot girl further. And finally, he finds her sitting at a table, peeling apricots. Grenouille stands behind her, inhaling the scent of her back, her hair, and her shoulders, gradually drawing nearer. Yet his clumsy expression of emotion only instills fear and disgust in her. When she begins to scream and passersby happen to approach, Grenouille covers her mouth to avoid being discovered. The apricot girl dies. Her death represents a secondary repression of ‘scent’ imposed upon Grenouille and becomes a pivotal event significantly influencing his future actions. Grenouille’s desire to smell the living girl’s scent is suppressed by her death, and the psychological oppression of fear over the unintentional murder weighs heavily upon him. After this, Grenouille becomes obsessed with ‘possessing scent’. This is because the death of the Apricot Girl was itself a suppression of Grenouille’s budding love and very existence. The denial of his desire to love, to smell fragrance, served as a trigger that stirred up Grenouille’s abandoned past. Her death was a prelude foretelling that Grenouille would never be able to love again, that he could never integrate into society. In other words, his obsession with ‘possessing fragrance’ was Grenouille’s rebellion against the suppressed things he could never possess.
Unable to forget the Apricot Girl, Grenouille constantly pondered how to capture ‘scent’. He recalled the perfume shop he had seen in Paris. Finally, having secured an opportunity to visit a perfumer through the tanner, Grenouille immediately became the perfumer’s assistant. Grenouille ceaselessly creates new perfumes, trying to learn the perfumer’s methods for capturing scent. Yet he never discovers how to preserve human scent. Ultimately, he decides to leave for Grasse, as the perfumer instructed.
In Grasse, Grenouille meticulously learns the entire process of perfume-making. From this point, his murders begin in earnest. First, he encounters a prostitute and attempts to test his method on her. However, she shows disgust toward Grenouille and tries to flee, only to be caught and killed by him. After successfully completing the experiment on the prostitute, Grenouille begins selecting and murdering thirteen beautiful women in succession. Grenouille already knew from previous experience that he could never extract the sweet scent from these women if he spared them. This can be seen as the manifestation of fear in a traumatized human being. Similar works include Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or Brian De Palma’s Carrie. In The Shining, wounds from war later lead to the murder of his family. In Carrie, Carrie, scarred by her overly devout mother’s insistence on purity, later kills her friends, teacher, and mother. Similarly, in Perfume, Grenouille, having experienced rejection by society, denial of his existence, and suppression of love, commits murder to realize his desire and create perfume.
Grenouille is sentenced to death at his trial, but on the day of his execution, he appears anointed with the ultimate perfume, a blend of thirteen scents. The citizens gathered in the square, the executioner, the archbishop, and all who came to witness the execution become intoxicated by his perfume. They hail him as an angel, worship him, and share love with those around them. Even the Count of Richis, who had lost his daughter to him, becomes intoxicated by the scent and forgives him. As the crowd begins to awaken from the perfume’s influence, the only one unaffected—its creator, Grenouille—is drawn by instinctive scent back to the village of his birth. When he pours the remaining perfume over his head in the middle of the market square, the crowd, intoxicated by its magic, rushes toward him, consuming him and his scent. Grenouille vanishes without a trace.
The scene of citizens gathered in the square sharing love and the scene of Grenouille being torn apart by people are profoundly meaningful. It is worth considering the inner thoughts of Grenouille, whose perfume—so despised—stirred the hearts of all citizens, and who, despite all his suffering to create it, chose death by dousing his own body with it. The reason Grenouille became obsessed with scent has already been explained. It stemmed from his desire to be accepted into a society of people who possessed ‘smell,’ his desire to share pure love with them, and furthermore, his desire to have his own existence validated through this.
Therefore, the final scene can also be interpreted from this perspective. The scene of meeting and loving the girl who appeared in Grenouille’s imagination at the execution square. Grenouille seeks to realize, right there at the execution square, the love he had been denied due to the death of the Apricot Girl. Yet, it is precisely that perfume that leads him to experience the greatest negation of himself. Witnessing the scene where all those intoxicated by the perfume he created engage in physical love, he suffers a profound psychological shock. He realizes that although he is the creator of the perfume that makes love possible, he himself cannot feel it. Ultimately, he must acknowledge that he is incapable of love. Therefore, his fantasy of the Apricot Girl ends with her lying dead. While others share love with living people, he is an outcast rejected by society, an object of fear. Consequently, he cannot share love with the woman he loves while alive. Instead, he must share love by smelling her scent after her death.
So why did Grenouille choose death? Grenouille, who doused his entire body in perfume and met his end in the heart of the market square. It was likely a dramatic expression of emptiness and loss. For him, who believed that even after death, scent would be eternal, the memory of the execution square revealed that the effect of scent is fleeting. The realization that the girl with the apricot scent, his first love, would not come back to life simply because he created perfume, and the sorrow and terror that while he could share love with her when he smelled the scent, he would lose her again once the scent faded—this ultimately led Grenouille to choose the path of ‘death’.
Examining Grenouille within the work’s narrative reveals multiple ‘oppressions’ imposed upon him. A fundamental element in horror and fantasy genres is the act of ‘oppression’ inflicted upon characters. Grenouille experiences oppression in the form of rejection from existence, love, and society. While this didn’t create a monster like Godzilla or an Alien, his excessive obsession with ‘scent’ led to serial killings by a patient suffering from maternal deprivation and affection deprivation, making it sufficiently terrifying.

What about the stylistic aspects as a horror fantasy genre?

One scene that effectively captures the filthy European landscape depicted in the novel is Grenouille’s wretched birth amidst the fish stalls of Paris, Europe’s largest city. His frail, gasping form amidst blood and fish carcasses seems to foreshadow the fate awaiting Grenouille.
The group sex scene that excited many moviegoers and the scene where Grenouille is torn apart and eaten by people. The group sex scene, reminiscent of something seen in pornography, and the cannibalism scene, impossible in the civilized real world, are the most striking scenes in Perfume.
Given that these scenes are grounded in the premise of ‘acts driven by intoxication from scent,’ we can see that the stylistic aspect of the film Perfume possesses the characteristic of linking the horror embodied in the characters to ‘fantasy.’ Specifically, the film maximizes its own fantastical quality by directly visualizing the temporal and spatial setting of ‘Paris in some era of Europe’—positioned between real and fantasy spaces—alongside the fantastical subject matter of ‘a murderer who kills women to make perfume.’ This includes the climactic scene of people intoxicated by perfume engaging in group sex, and the scene where Grenouille, after spraying perfume on his body, is eaten alive by people. All these stylistic choices can be seen as fantastical techniques employed to realistically convey the ‘scent’ – an element impossible to express through visuals alone. Consequently, audiences perceive the unrealistic element of ‘scent’ as tangible through the screen, effectively breaking down the boundary between reality and fiction and inducing powerful hallucinations.

What are the social themes within the horror fantasy genre?

A single perfume so potent it captures the soul. This ultimate fragrance possesses such overwhelming power that it can make a murderer appear angelic, turn enemies into lovers, and even grant dominion over the entire world. A perfect perfume that enables people who have never truly loved anyone to share complete love. In a way, it resembles the salvation of Christ spoken of in the Bible. Just as if all people in this world loved and cherished each other, everyone would be happy and everything would be beautiful. Grenouille’s “perfume” was a scent that awakened perfect, pure, and complete love. The perfume itself was salvation. But only until its scent faded. The problem was that the perfume’s scent inevitably vanished over time. Those intoxicated by Grenouille’s perfume, once they awoke from its effects, couldn’t comprehend their own actions and soon erased them from memory, or tried to. Perfume is only a moment; it cannot be eternal. Grenouille asked Baldini, the perfume maker, if there was no way to preserve a scent forever. Baldini said there might be a way in Grasse, but perfume was ultimately just a substance that evaporated and dispersed with the alcohol, soon vanishing. Ultimately, perfume intoxicates with love for a moment but cannot promise eternal love. Deceiving the eyes and the soul with falsehood is Grenouille’s ultimate perfume.
This connects to religion, which served as a mask for people at the time. If Grenouille’s personal oppression was the suppression of ‘love and existence,’ then his social oppression can be seen as the suppression of ‘religion.’ In the scene where the hidden sexual desire of religiously oppressed people explodes like a burst dam due to Grenouille’s perfume, we naturally perceive the naked bodies rolling about not as beautiful, but rather as mere chunks of meat. At this moment, a solemn piece of music, the kind one might expect during Mass, begins to play. The music, seemingly speaking of salvation, harmonizing with the movements of the people in orgy, clearly expresses a paradox. This scene reveals the inherent vulnerability and duality within the ‘religious norms’ that were established as absolute standards in society at the time.
The crowd, wearing the mask of religion and shouting for Grenouille’s punishment, reveals desires even more grotesque than his. After the orgy, they create another innocent victim to conceal their actions, as if nothing had happened, pinning their guilt on this new scapegoat and killing him. In the final scene, Grenouille is eaten alive by the people. The faces of those eating him while shouting “I love you!” glow with filthy desire. Even as he is consumed, Grenouille shows no change in expression, seemingly feeling a profound emptiness at humanity’s filthy desires and his own existence being denied even within them. They wear the sacred mask of religion and act as if they are a moral society, but in truth, everyone is filled with hypocrisy.
Therefore, examining this film from a social thematic perspective, it can be seen as depicting a society entirely covered in desire. Might it not be about the fear of people who bind themselves tightly with religion or law, terrified that if they peel back just one layer of their exterior, their own selves, smeared with that desire, will be exposed?

Why is Perfume a horror fantasy?

What defines Perfume’s horror fantasy characteristics? Clearly, Perfume proceeds largely without the typical traits of established horror fantasy genres. Yet it masterfully portrays the ultimate characteristic of horror fantasy—‘repression’—using the unique medium of ‘scent’. The oppression inflicted in real society—for Grenouille, a denial of existence and love; socially, the suppression of humanity’s ugly desires through religion—returns to create a serial killer and produces innocent victims sacrificed by society. This speaks to the terror of reality.
Here, we can propose a new definition of horror fantasy. Horror does not require ghosts or monsters to appear; it does not demand eerie lighting or a sense of imminent thrill. True horror is created when something utterly ordinary and non-threatening in daily life is transformed into something new. We applaud the original author Patrick Süskind and director Tom Tykwer for creating horror within the realm of ‘smell’.