Scent Dialekt

Director: Dan Curtis I love anything Dan Curtis, end of discussion. This is one of the movies where I became obsessed with Karen Black. She is the perfect horror actress, a fellow Cancer, and she had this look that could do eerie like no one else. Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, the whole cast is incredible, and the house, the real Dunsmuir House in Oakland, still stands! The chauffeur scene disturbed m...

Director: David Lynch. The first time I saw Wild at Heart I was still trying to figure out if it was Wizard of Oz, and it is. Marietta is the witch. This scene of Diane Ladd in the bathroom is so uncanny, the way she covers her whole face in lipstick. I can smell the violent undertone of it, old and waxy and obsessive. Lynch's sound design around this scene is so unsettling it makes you grateful n...

Director: David Lynch. Unfortunately I never got to see this in the theater, but when I watched it on VHS, I really feel David Lynch kept the sound low on purpose, so you crank it all the way up, and that is when the next-level sound design hits you right in the face. This scene in particular feels like a dream within a dream when the man describes his nightmare. When he walks out of the restauran...

Director: David Lynch. This scene scared the shit out of me. Where are Robert Blake's eyebrows? It's so eerie and uncanny that I still think about it from time to time. I can smell the white foundation on his face, I can smell the hair gel, and he never blinks once during the entire monologue with Fred. I am freaked out. the smell of white greasepaint. Hair gel. Phone-case plastic. Cold carpet. Sc...

Director Paul Wendkos. Another made-for-TV movie from that summer with my grandma in Kansas, this one an ABC Movie of the Week. No specimen was produced for this film. It did not feel right to me. I ended up developing a phobia of patent leather tap shoes for several years after watching the character Rachel chase Mark onto a pier. I am very certain I watched her step on his hands while he held on...

Director: Jeffrey Bloom. Another movie from that summer of horror with my grandma, watched on TV on some channel like TBS. Later in junior high I read the V.C. Andrews book, which was darker and so sad. I love Louise Fletcher as an actress, but I developed a real fright around her character, Olivia Foxworth. Being around someone so cold and so devoid of warmth was upsetting to me as a child, becau...

Director: Buzz Kulik. This is from a summer I spent with my grandmother in Kansas, where we watched a bunch of horror movies, and this one was next level to see at such a young age. Knowing a teenager could be capable of these acts, of having that tendency in him, really freaked me out. When Ronald's mom gives him supplies to survive inside the wall, I became obsessed with powdered milk. The secon...

Director: Dario Argento. This is the scene that started Scent Dialekt. Suzy and Sara swimming in the pool and you are seeing it from the POV of one of the witches, watching from above. I could smell all of it. The pool stone, the pool water, the shampoo in their hair. I thought one day I have to make a perfume of this scene. I did it back in 2016 and this is what started it all. The apple shampoo...

Director: William Peter Blatty. This opening has had a chokehold on me for the longest time. People view Blatty's Exorcist III as half horror, half slapstick but this opening is something else. That church scene has this THX sound design and when the damn doors fly open it is so loud. I saw this movie so young and when I rewatched it older I think it is neck and neck with Friedkin's Exorcist. The...

Director: Alan Parker. First movie in the series and one I watched alone too young. This is where the synesthesia started. That armoire opens inside the Kingdom Mission and I could smell it. The glass eyeball. The taxidermied animal. The candle wax. The fear. Scent Dialekt is an independent art and film-criticism project. Fragrances are original transformative works inspired by cinema; no affiliat...

A brief introduction to Scent Dialekt. Full episodes coming soon.