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Perfume: The Story of a Murder is a film that fits within the Gothic genre because of the way it introduces horror and terror through the uncanny and sublime.

The uncanny is present throughout the film. Every viewer has experienced the power of scents to evoke powerful feelings and vivid memories. While in real life the strong associations with scents are generally good, in the film, Jean-Baptist’s keen sense of smell drives him to a murderous obsession. I found myself stopping to ask, “Wait, is it creepy that I know what certain people smell like?” The movie makes the viewer uncomfortable by heightening something familiar to a degree that is unfamiliar and deeply unsettling.

The uncanny is also present in the way Jean-Baptist’s strange history is marked by a trail of deaths. His mother, the orphanage woman, the tanner, and the perfumer (Baldini?) all die as soon as his connection with them is severed. Each instance viewed individually is coincidental or predictable, but their combination uncannily suggests a deliberate pattern by an external force.

The sublime is also a driving force in Perfume. The cinematography of the film specifically demonstrates the power of scent to evoke the sublime. Recall how perfume evokes shots of beautiful gardens caressed by warm, light breezes and crowned with laughter, and how we follow Jean-Baptist into envisioning a forest stream and “warm stones” solely from the smell of cut wood. Even more importantly, the driving plot point is that Jean-Baptist is trying to preserve the glorious, intoxicating power of woman’s scent. He is trying to bottle the sublime. There seems to be something inherently wrong about this goal and his cool detachment and methods are both horrible and terrifying.

The uncanny and the sublime in the film come crashing together in the final scenes, in which Jean-Baptist uses his masterpiece perfume to prevent his execution and start a town-wide orgy. Watching the citizens be swept away into sublime ecstasy by a scent is deeply unsettling.

Even more disturbing is the way Jean-Baptist remains detached from the perfume’s power; he has the power to create something human on a fundamental level, but he cannot experience it himself. He enjoys the scents, but in the manner of a scientist, not a connoisseur. Back in Paris after escaping his execution, he douses himself in the perfume, but is still outside its influence. When he cannot join the crowd in their rapture, their fervor kills him.

Jean-Baptist is set uncannily apart – the orphan children automatically see him as different, and there are even suggestions that he does not exist, at least not in any usual way. He possesses no scent of his own, lacking the characteristic the film calls a person’s “essence,” synonymous for a soul. He kills again and again with impunity, walking into private homes and past sleeping animals like a ghost.

Perfume continuously evokes the trademark Gothic emotions of horror and terror through the uncanny and sublime.

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