2023
Tonight on this 31 Days of Horror edition of Midnight Stinks is Only A Witch Cat, Pearfat Parfums ode to cult classic Japanese horror film Hausu, a kitschy, kaleidoscopic, gloriously demented, dizzying psychedelic fever dream which I chose for a first date with my now husband I am pretty sure he is still reeling from it 12 years later.
If I recall correctly this was a film wherein Toho, attempting to replicate the commercial success of American movies like Jaws, hired a renowned ad-man known for his creativity and aesthetics to make a blockbuster movie…and then this man enlisted his 12 year old daughter to help. I love that story, and it made for one of my all-time favorite films.
With notes of shiso leaf and climbing vines, melon and coriander, and powdered compact, this is a fragrance of melancholic breezes tangling gorgeous powdery citrus shampoo-perfumed hair, fraught with a crisp, crushed oppressive green tension. It’s a scent of loss, lost love, lost youth, and ghosts and spectres shadowed by generations of loss. For all that, it’s not a dense or heavy scent, it’s light and flimmering, but you can feel its presence–like the gaze on the back of your neck, like movement from the corner of your eye, like a past that you can’t escape.
This review was originally posted to my Midnight Stinks TikTok on October 12, 2023.
@midnightstinks Midnight Stinks, episode 407: Only a Witch Cat from Pearfat Parfum.
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