In this blog post, we take a closer look at whether Grunewald, the main character of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, is a monster or a victim.

 

About horror fantasy

Horror fantasy is a subgenre within the larger genre of fantasy. Therefore, in order to understand horror fantasy, a basic understanding of the concept of the “fantasy” genre must be preceded.
The “fantasy” genre is based on fantasy. According to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy is “a narrative or fictional creation that transforms the unreal into reality itself.” In other words, in the realm opposite to realism, which deals with an objective and rational world, we call the stories we have only imagined fantasies. It can deliver the pleasure of escaping from the reality assumed by realism, present a new reality that shakes up the conventional wisdom that we believe to be reality, and blur the line between reality and unreality. Therefore, Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as the subversion of the suppressed reality. Horror fantasy is the genre of horror that adds the conventions of the genre to the basic concept of fantasy.
Horror reveals the secret desires of the members of society at a certain time. This is why horror films are called the “return of the repressed.” The reason why we watch horror movies is also in this characteristic. Our inner desires, that is, the desire to resist the ideology of domination, are released through the monsters, ghosts, and murderous creatures in horror movies, and we can feel the catharsis of desires that cannot be fulfilled in reality.
Therefore, “horror fantasy” is a genre that provides the audience with catharsis of desire by subverting and exposing the oppression in reality through the devices of horror films in an unrealistic story.

 

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

The film Perfume is currently classified as a drama and thriller. However, if we look closely at the psychoanalytic characteristics of the aforementioned horror film and examine the work as a novel, I believe that Perfume can also be classified as a horror genre, and this report is proof of that idea. Here, I will analyze the characters, style, and social themes of Perfume from the perspective of a horror fantasy film. Of course, since this film is about the protagonist’s story, the analysis will focus on the narrative and the protagonist, Grunewald.

 

“Jean-Baptiste Grunewald” as an oppressed or denied existence

Born in a foul-smelling Paris and abandoned by his mother, Grunewald has an innate sense of smell that is beyond human limits. As he grows up, he judges and remembers things through his sense of smell before his language, and he wants to remember and possess the smells of all things in the world. But ironically, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has no “scent.” As a being without a “scent,” Grenouille is constantly abandoned throughout his life. He is abandoned by his mother when he is born, then by the director of the orphanage who receives a small amount of money, then by the tanner who abuses him, and then by the perfume maker. All of them used Grunewald for their own needs and lost their lives in return. In other words, the social injustice inflicted on Grunewald is constant abandonment and indifference or coldness from people.
Here, we need to pay attention to the characteristics of Grunewald, “being without smell.” What does “smell” mean in the movie Perfume? The background of “Europe, where stench is in the air,” the scent of the most beautiful woman in the world, and the woman’s scent that Grunewald could not forget, and eventually tried to lock away the scent with murder. Perhaps “smell” can be interpreted as the keywords of human existence and love. At a time when Europe was seething with ugly desires, wasn’t the reason for human existence to find the purity of “love”? In that respect, Grunewald seems to be a thoroughly denied existence.
Grouniy, who chose “survival” over “love” from birth, has become an existence that cannot even love because it has no “smell.” When Grouniy visits the city of Paris with the tanner, he meets a beautiful girl walking with an apricot. The scent that comes from her body is sweeter than any other scent that she has ever worn. However, when Grunewi follows her and smells her body, she gives him an apricot, and he disappears into the distance. This can be seen as the first suppression of the “scent” that is applied to Grunewi.
But Grunewald does not give up and continues to pursue the apricot girl. And finally, he finds the girl sitting at the table peeling the apricot. Grunewald smells the scent of her back, her hair, and her shoulders from behind her 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, Gruñui covers her mouth to avoid being discovered. And the apricot girl dies. The death of the apricot girl is the second oppression of “scent” inflicted on Gruñui, and it is an event that has a significant impact on Gruñui’s future path. Grounui’s desire to smell the scent of the living girl is suppressed by her death, and the psychological oppression of the fear of unconsciously committing murder overwhelms him. After that, Grounui becomes obsessed with “possessing the scent.” This is because the death of the apricot girl was Grounui’s first love and the oppression of his existence. The denial of her desire to love and to smell was a trigger for Grunewald’s past, which had been abandoned, and her death was a prelude to the fact that she would not be able to love in the future and to be integrated into society. In other words, her obsession with “possessing fragrance” was Grunewald’s rebellion against the things that she could not have in the future.
Gruñui, who cannot forget the apricot girl, constantly thinks about how to trap the “scent.” And he recalls the perfume shop he saw in Paris. Finally, Gruñui gets the opportunity to visit the perfume maker from the tanner, and he becomes the assistant of the perfume maker. Grounie is constantly creating new perfumes and trying to find out how to trap the scent from the manufacturer, but he never finds out how to store human scent, and eventually decides to leave Gras as instructed by the manufacturer.
In Gras, Grunewald learns the entire process of making perfume step by step. From this point on, Grunewald’s murder begins in earnest. For the first time, he meets a prostitute and tries to test his method on her. However, she shows disgust for Grunewald and tries to run away, and is eventually caught and killed by Grunewald. After the experiment with the prostitute was successfully completed, Grunewald began to kill 13 beautiful women one after another. Grunewald knew from previous experience that keeping them alive would never produce the sweet fragrance. This can be seen as a manifestation of the fear of a traumatized human being. Similar works include Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Brian De Palma’s Carrie. In The Shining, the wounds suffered in the war lead to the murder of the family, and in Carrie, Carrie, who was hurt by her overly devout religious mother’s insistence on chastity, later kills her friends, teacher, and mother. Similarly, in the perfume, Grunewald, who has been driven out of society, denied of existence, and suppressed in love, commits murder and creates perfume to fulfill his desires.
Grounui is sentenced to death in court, but on the day of execution, he appears wearing the ultimate perfume, a combination of 13 different fragrances. The citizens gathered in the square, the executioner, the archbishop, and all the people who have gathered to watch the execution are intoxicated by his perfume, worship him as an angel, and share love with the people around them. Even Earl Riches, who lost his daughter to him, is intoxicated by his perfume and forgives him. While the crowd is waking up from the effects of the perfume, the only one who is not intoxicated by it, the creator of the perfume, Grunewy, is drawn to the instinctive scent and returns to the place where he was born. He sprinkles the remaining perfume on his head in the middle of the market, and the crowd in the market, smelling the perfume, is enchanted by its magic and rushes to him, and consumes him and his scent. Grunny disappears without a trace.
The scene in which the citizens gathered in this square share love and the scene in which Grunny is eaten by people are quite meaningful. The nostalgia for Grunny, which he hated so much, stirred the hearts of all the citizens, and it is necessary to consider the true feelings of Grunny, who chose death by spraying all the perfume on his body despite the fact that he had worked so hard to make the perfume. The reason why Grunewald became obsessed with fragrance has already been explained. It stems from the desire to be incorporated into a society of people with “smell,” the desire to share pure love with them, and the desire to be recognized for one’s existence through this.
Therefore, the last scene can also be interpreted from this perspective. The scene of meeting and falling in love with the girl who appeared in Grunewald’s imagination on the gallows square. Grunewald wants to realize the love he suppressed due to the death of the apricot girl on the very gallows square. However, it is precisely because of this nostalgia that he experiences the greatest denial of himself. He is mentally shocked by the scene of all the people intoxicated by the perfume he created, sharing physical love. He realizes that he is the creator of the perfume that makes love possible, but he himself cannot feel it. He is forced to admit that he is incapable of love. Therefore, his imagination of the apricot girl ends with the girl lying dead. Others make love with a living person, but he is a rejected person in society and an object of fear, so he ends up making love with the woman he loves while she is dead by smelling her body after she dies.
Then why did Grunewald choose death? Grunewald, who died in the middle of the market, spraying perfume all over his body, was probably expressing a sense of futility and loss. The memory of the execution square made him experience that the effect of perfume is only temporary, even though he believed that the fragrance would last forever even after death. The fact that the first love, the apricot girl, makes perfume does not mean that she will come back to life. And the sadness and fear of having to lose her again when the scent fades away is what ultimately led Grunewald to choose the path of “death.”
Looking at the character of Grunoyi in the narrative of the work, we can find various “oppressions” that are inflicted on Grunoyi. One of the essential elements in the horror and fantasy genres is the act of “oppression” inflicted on the characters. Grunoyi is oppressed by existence, love, and being driven out of society. This is not the creation of monsters like Godzilla or Aliens, but it can be considered horror enough in that it causes a serial murder of patients with maternal and affection deficiency due to an excessive obsession with “scent.”

 

What is the style of the horror fantasy genre?

One of the scenes that well portrays the dirty landscape of Europe described in the novel is the gruesome appearance of Grunewald, who was born on a fish stall in Paris, the largest city in Europe. His appearance, breathing a thin breath among the blood and fish carcasses, seems to foreshadow Grunewald’s fate to come.
The group sex scene that excited a large number of movie audiences and the scene where Grunny is eaten by people. The group sex scene that could only be seen in porn and the cannibalism scene that is impossible to occur in the civilized real world are the most impressive scenes in Hyungsoo.
As these scenes are based on the premise that “acts are committed while intoxicated by the scent,” we can see that the stylistic aspect of the movie Perfume has the characteristic of linking the fear embodied by the characters with “fantasy.” In other words, the film maximizes the fantasy of the film itself by directly visualizing the setting of the time and space of “Paris, Europe of a certain era” between the real and fantasy spaces, the fantastical material of “a murderer who kills women to make perfume,” and the scene in which people engage in group sex while intoxicated with the perfume in the ending, as well as the scene of Grunewald being eaten alive by people while spraying perfume on his body. All of these styles can be seen as fantasy techniques used to realistically convey the “smell” that cannot be expressed on the screen alone. Therefore, the audience feels the unrealistic element of “smell” as realistic through the screen, which breaks down the boundary between reality and fiction and induces effective hallucinations.

 

What are the social themes of the horror fantasy genre?

The ultimate perfume, so powerful that it can make a murderer look like an angel, make an enemy fall in love, and have the power to rule the world. The perfect perfume that allows people who have never loved someone with pure hearts to share a perfect love. In a way, it is like the salvation of Christ described in the Bible. If everyone in this world loves and cares for each other, everyone will be happy and everything will be beautiful. Grunewald’s “Perfume” was a perfume that awakened perfect, pure, and complete love. The perfume itself is salvation. That is, until the scent disappears. The problem is that the fragrance disappears over time. People who have been intoxicated by Grunewald’s perfume also do not understand their actions when they wake up from the effects of the perfume, and soon erase or try to erase it from their memory. Perfume is only a moment, and it cannot be eternal. Grouny asked the perfume manufacturer Baldini if there was a way to preserve the scent forever, and Baldini said that there might be a way if he went to Grasse, but perfume is just a substance that evaporates and diffuses with alcohol and disappears soon after. In the end, perfume makes you intoxicated with love for a while, but it cannot promise you eternal love. Deceiving the eyes and soul with falsehood is the ultimate perfume of the Grunui.
And this is connected to religion, which was the mask of the people at the time. If the oppression of the Grunui on the personal level was the oppression of “love and existence,” the oppression on the social level can be seen as the oppression of “religion.” In the scene where the suppressed sexual desire of the religiously oppressed people explodes like a burst of water due to the nostalgia of Grunewald, we can naturally feel that the bodies of the people lying naked look more like a lump of meat than beautiful. At this moment, a majestic piece of music that would be played during a mass is heard. The music, which seems to be about salvation, harmonizes with the gestures of the orgy, expressing a clear paradox. This scene reveals the vulnerability and duality of the “religious norms,” which were established as absolute norms in society at the time.
The people who shout to punish Grunewald under the mask of religion reveal desires that are even more ugly than Grunewald’s. After group sex, they create another innocent victim to cover up their sins and kill him to hide their actions as if nothing had happened. In the final scene, Grunewald is eaten by people. The faces of the people who eat the gruñuy, shouting “I love you!” shine with filthy desires. The gruñuy, which shows no change in expression even as it is eaten by people, seems to feel the futility of human filthy desires and its own existence, which is denied even within them. They put on the mask of a sacred religion and act as if they were moral citizens, but in fact, everyone is full of hypocrisy.
So, if we look at this movie from a social perspective, it can be seen as a film about a society that is covered with desire. If you peel away the surface, you will see that you are covered with desire, and you will be afraid of the fear of humans who are bound by religion or law.

 

Why is nostalgia a horror fantasy?

What are the horror fantasy characteristics of Perfume? Obviously, Perfume is set in a world that excludes most of the characteristics of the existing horror fantasy genre. However, Perfume brilliantly depicts the ultimate characteristic of horror fantasy, namely “repression,” with the unique element of “smell.” The oppression in real society, that is, for Grunewald, is the denial of existence and love, and from a social perspective, it is the return of the suppression of human’s ugly desires through religion, which gives rise to serial killers and innocent victims of society. This is the reality of horror.
Here, we can give a new definition of horror fantasy. Horror is not created by the appearance of ghosts or monsters, or by the use of gloomy lighting and a sense of urgency. Horror is created when something that is not scary at all in everyday life is transformed into something new. I would like to pay tribute to Patrick Jusskint, the original creator of the “smell” horror genre, and director Tom Tuckwell.