Decay, vampires and Ethel Cain’s Perverts: What does the Gothic smell like?

I’ve always been drawn to the macabre, so naturally when I saw Nosferatu I was completely enraptured. The film opens with Ellen – played by Lily-Rose Depp – sobbing in bed, hands clasped in prayer, pleading for a celestial entity to cure her loneliness. Her breath turns to moans of pleasure, succumbing to the darkness she has summoned, but then shatters into a full-blown scream as she is confronted by the face of her desires: the terrifying, long-undead vampire Count Orlock.

Heretic Parfum’s Nosferatu is an ‘eau de macabre’ created to capture our undying love for vampires. The perfume is earthy, damp and cold. Designed to emulate a thunder and lightning-laden night at Count Orlock’s castle, the scent evokes the loamy wetness of mushrooms growing on a sodden sepulchre, infused with hints of pressed lilacs and labdanum falling out of the back of a dust-covered book. 

But what is the gothic? “It’s a mode, it’s a sensibility. The Gothic is pervasive with us,” Dr Maisha Wester, professor and leading scholar in Gothic Literature and Horror Film Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, explains. “When we talk about the Gothic, we have this sense of being unsettled, being disturbed, by a story that we know. To be successful it has to build on what disturbs us which means it has to know us.” 

The elements that make up a Gothic tale are like the notes of a perfume; crumbling haunted castles, dark secret passages, deeply buried secrets, windswept moors and possessed brooding characters. It is the monster outside of us as well as the monster within. But what does it smell like? 

As the author of How To Be A Goth: Notes On Undead Style, Tish Weinstock is the first gloomy glamazon I turn to for her olfactory hauntings. “I think it’s dark and rich and smells almost antique,” Weinstock tells me. “Lots of musk, sandalwood, tuberose. Possibly a note of leather.” This dark, antique gothic plays out in Nassamoto’s Black Afgano: the leathery, sweet ambery ouds draw you into its seductive darkness. However, Weinstock herself wears something lighter, the now-discontinued Helmut Lang. “I actually tend to gravitate towards lighter, fresher fragrances, probably to counteract all the darkness elsewhere.” Penhaligon’s ethereal Luna emulates a similar lightness, with its citrusy floral muskyness that feels like silver moonlight on a stone wall.

“Gothic literature is wrought with mystery, intrigue, eroticism and the taboo,” Rosewood, one of TikTok’s reigning gothic queens, tells me. “In terms of fragrance notes I think of stone fruits, white florals – think tuberose not neroli, animalics, as well as earthy notes like vetiver and patchouli.” To feel darkly feminine and sensual, Rosewood recommends Heretic’s Dirty Violet, “an incredible blend of florals and deep resinous notes.” Another scent for the sexy, dark and damp is LVNEA’s Pêche Obscène. “It’s a mesmerising mix of ripe peach, jasmine, and oakmoss. An actual gothic fever dream.”

So far, it’s all been a bit too romantic for me. On a nightwalk, Ethel Cain’s muffled voice susurrates into my ears. Damp stormy darkness whips around me as my feet break the puddles shimmering on the wet cement of a bone-chillingly cold winter night. Cain’s “Pulldrone” goes on to whisper of shimmering bells through the mist, beauty that is so overwhelming she wants to dislocate her jaw to consume it, angels, annihilation and suffocation, an aural claustrophobic intensity that feels ambiently disturbing and comfortingly creepy. I imagine Clue’s Warm Bulb would match the creepy confinement of the humming madness. Another option could be DS & Durga’s Mississippi Medicine, a sexy, smokey, slightly medicinal scent inspired by what little is known about a death cult that emerged in the 1200s in southern America. 

Dr Wester tells me that Gothic literature smells like blood and petrichor. Symbolising the renewal and cyclical nature of life, petrichor is one of the formative notes in Heretic’s Nosferatu. Thinking of blood reminds me of Toskovat’s Inexcusable Evil, and I ask the nose of the brand David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi what his Gothic scent would be. “My suggestion, by far, would be Empty Wishing Well,” he says. “It was built to smell cold, earthy, decaying, somewhat after-storm-like. The idea of falling through a damp wishing well down to the soily core beneath, and my own memory of cleaning the leaves and the dust off of a tombstone during winter.”

Walking through my local cemetery, I want to find a perfume that emulates that strange otherworldliness that the gothic hinges on, the moment that makes it both so unsettling yet strangely mesmerising. St John Perfume is inspired by a moss-covered cemetery, mist and the past and the present combined, and the spicy edge of fir and star anise falling into a musky resin that makes me remember gnarled overgrown decaying trees growing through crumbling walls. Nature chews me – another line from “Pulldrone” – reminds me of something else Dr Wester said. “The Gothic arises at moments in which we like to proclaim ourselves having achieved some moment of profound breakthrough. The Gothic reminds us that the body is permeable. We cannot escape from the animalistic or the monsters – both from outside and from within. At heart, we are still primitives.”