Many years ago, I wrote on this blog how I loathed bathing (because I hate being wet! Not because I hate being clean!) But a strange thing occurred toward the end of October. I felt myself longing for the tub. And not even a tub filled with bubbles and bath bombs and all of the frou-frou paraphernalia that I sometimes use to trick myself into the whole moist, soggy production, but just a tub full of clean, clear hot water. I’m not sure what I can attribute this to; it’s so unexpected! I eventually added a scoop or two of the bath flakes I had sitting around, and before I knew it, I had emptied the little bag, so I bought a big bulk container! Anyway, for the past three weeks I have been having a little bath every night and it’s really lovely.
Most of our garden died this summer. The eggplants and peppers got infested, the sunflowers were constantly droopy, none of our zennias or dahlias even bloomed! We are still getting a lot of this fuschia/magenta/scarlet flowering vine, though, so I am just madly clipping it every day and sticking it in every vase I own. The woman who used to live in this house (she still lives in the neighborhood, and her sister lives right across the street from us) told us it was called Love-Lies-Bleeding and that she planted it where she buried her cat. So one, there are pet remains in our backyard somewhere, which is fine I guess, but two, I don’t think she is correct, because none of the images look like this plant when I try to google it. Do you recognize it?
Two little guys that did not perish over the summer are Patty and Selma, my pitcher plant and venus flytrap! I got them from the Lowes garden section and they looked pretty awful when I brought them home. Pale and shriveled and sickly. I read that they like it boggy and sunny, and that you shouldn’t repot them in amended soil or give them tap water. They want soil with no nutrients and water with no minerals or extra stuff, so basically rainwater or distilled water. So I just left them in the vessels the came in, put them in a pie plate and left them out in the garden, let them get rained on, and hoped for the best. And six months later, they are doing great! The Selmas insides turned a nice fleshy pink, and Patty’s pitchers are now threaded with veins, and they both continuously sprout new growth. Finally, a plant I have not failed!
When we moved into this house 3.5 years ago, one of the things we knew we were going to have to tackle was the back screened porch, which was old and leaky and falling apart. Late summer we finally got the contractors in to tear the whole thing down, and the rebuilding has been happening in agoninzingly slow increments. First the concrete slab was poured, then the walls and ceiling went up the next month, and finally yesterday we got the glass windows and door. Whew!
We obviously need to do something for the floor (like what? I don’t know. I just know we do!) and get some furniture, but I am really bad at decorating or even envisioning how a space should look, so I need some help! Any ideas for me? All I know for sure is that Yvan wants to put a rowing machine in there somewhere, and that I desperately want a COSMIC EGG CHAIR. So definitely share some inspiration if you’re good at this kind of thing!
I’ve somehow picked up a nasty cold this week. How?! I don’t go anywhere! So I’ve been taking it easy, listening to music (pictured here: A Blessed Unrest from The Parlour Trick) (not pictured but also and of course I’m madly, incessantly listening to Everybody Scream just like all the rest of you are I bet) and reading and drinking lots and lots of tea.
Not actual tea, if we’re being precise; this particular concoction is a combination of dried lemon and orange slices steeped in boiling water with a dollop of the cranberry compote that my father-in-law made, and strained into this marvelous little tea set that a friend surprised me with.
Sometimes a gal’s gotta get herself some ridiculous treats. Sometimes it’s a cursed toy sold at a Mexican grocery store counter, sometimes it’s jams and syrups and chocolates flavored with lavender and rose.
Sometimes it’s a new phone case with a beaded little wrist strap and a strange mantra that your camera won’t even focus on because it’s so silly. “the btack lulips nothing and the charm charmnight queen cama.” Indeed! Indeed.
Other things of note…
– I finally watched Frankenstein! That malachite dress, gosh! I made a cocktail for the occasion, which I’ve named “Strangely Are Our Souls Constructed.” With a Japanese Whiskey, Lillet, Amaro, Maraschino liqueur, and a dash of absinthe, it was appropriately…pretty monstrous.
– I thought I might be brave and buy a cropped top. But I didn’t take into account that being a short-torsoed person just makes this a regular top.
– I made a good soup! With pork belly, white onion, lotus root, and kobocha squash, flavored with dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and miso.
-Have you been hearing about this “personal curriculum” trend? I love the idea of creating your own little structured study plan for topics you’re curious about…like designing your own course with books, videos, and assignments, instead of just randomly reading or scrolling. I’m already putting some ideas together for my winter and spring semester!
– I love hacks and shortcuts, things like “you won’t believe what this 60-second X thing will do for your body/mental health/finances/whatever!” I like doing things that feel good for me, but I don’t want to spend too much time on them because fuck that! So I am definitely going to give this 60-second jumping routine a try. What are your quickie good things?
-I sold a whopping 20 bottles of perfume from my perfume collection! Many thanks to everyone who reached out and helped me pare down. I am trying not to fill those empty spaces back in too soon, or at all…but…there is a perfume I have my eye on. I sniffed a sample of Nightchild from Epichron, and it smells like a Finnish heavy metal song. Seriously, it’s the olfactory equivalent of these sounds.
Anyhoodle! I am sick and snotty, and I hear the bathtub calling my name, so that’s it for now!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
High Uintas, Utah USA by Sally Underwood, via milkywaychasers on Instagram
From the Midnight Archives: Slumberhouse Norne – a cult favorite that’s nearly impossible to find these days. In this post for paid members, I share alternatives that might scratch the same itch, and why I think some of them actually do it better.
I talk about winter’s chilly dreams of sun-dappled forest paths, tart winter berries and Yuletide cemetery strolls, arboreal crystalline orb visions, witchy speakeasies in midnight woods, even a holodeck simulation shortcut.
This is what paid membership gets you: deep dives into how fragrances connect and evolve, how one scent leads to others, how sometimes the thing that showed you what you wanted isn’t the thing you end up keeping. With a paid membership, you get access to the full Midnight Stinks Archives: years of reviews, musings, and fragrance philosophy spanning rare indies, niche darlings, and mainstream favorites you’ve been sleeping on. Or that I’ve been sleeping on! Monthly marinades where I pull overlooked bottles from my cabinet and find unexpected connections. Perfume reviews that read more like atmospheric prose than product descriptions, because I’m more interested in what a scent evokes than what it’s “supposed” to smell like.
Join me for smoke and silk, resin and ruins, moss and myrrh, vanilla and velvet…olfactory reveries, aromatic meditations, perfumed darkness that feels like coming home (if your home is an abandoned chateau full of glamorous vampires or a lighthouse keeper’s cottage colonized by spores and mutating under the moon, or the cabin in the woods where you definitely will speak aloud the words from the flesh-bound book).
I just wrapped up 31 days of horror writing. Daily movie reviews throughout October —free, written because I genuinely love doing this. That’s not a complaint; nobody asked me to write any of it. I do this because it’s what I’d be doing anyway, thinking about movies and books and perfume and occult art, and the blog is just where I put those thoughts so other people can enjoy them too. Everything here has always been free because that’s how I want it.
This blog and its accompanying newsletter are completely passion projects. I have a day job that pays the bills, and this is what I do with the rest of my time because I love it. But every now and then, I need to gently remind you that if you enjoy the things I write, there are some ways to support that work.
My Perfume destash: I’m selling some bottles from my personal collection over on Facebook. Indie and niche scents, good stuff, much cheaper than buying new. If you’ve been curious about any of the perfumes I’ve reviewed over the years, this might be your chance.
Signed copies of my books: All three titles are back in stock, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy. If you’ve been meaning to pick one up or want to complete your collection, now’s the time.
My Pango bookshop: Fully restocked with lots of new titles. Horror, Gothic fiction, folk horror, art books, occult and esoteric subjects. I’ve been adding books steadily, so if you’re looking for something specific or just want to browse through my extremely specific taste in literature, go take a look.
New! Postcard sets: Over the years, I’ve created and posted silly mashups of words and images on social media that, as they say, “went viral.” People thought they were a hoot and a holler. The public’s pickle was tickled. I teased the idea over the summer. Well, now you can own them as actual physical postcards. Send them to your friends. Confuse your relatives. Stick them on your fridge. Whatever brings you joy. (Pssst…if you purchase one of my books, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, I’ll include all four postcards for free!)
That’s it. Just wanted to remind you these things exist. If you can support the work, I appreciate it. If you can’t, that’s fine too. The blog will still be here either way.
And remember, if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I have had the same all-time, no. one favorite fragrance for 20 years. The one to which all other perfumes must measure up. Six weeks ago, my world was shooketh when I found a new favorite, and I have been processing the echoes of those discombobulations ever since. It smells a bit like this image by Luis Royo, but if you want more details (and I wrote a lot!) head on over to Midnight Stinks today, it’s a free read!
Stora Skuggan Silphium A little burlap sack of herbs, a little spell-bag, green, dry, peppery, sharp, that you tucked in the back of your freezer for safe-keeping. You forgot it entirely and found it freeze-dried and iced over hidden by a bag of peas years later and just in the corner beyond it, you see something strange. A shimmering-glimmering fissure, a glowing rift. What appears to be a portal in the very back of your frigidaire. Sea salt air wafts cleanly from it, cerulean waves dazzling in the far distance (is it ocean or alien horizon? unclear) and most peculiar, sandy pathy lined densely with something very much the shape of pine trees, fragrant boughs heavy with gleaming drifts of snow.
Aysha Hansen Golden Thread is freaking magic. On paper, I should not have cared for it at all. I hate the scent of bananas. I find ylang-ylang’s deeply earthy, floral/weird, rubbery musk to be wildly obnoxious. AND YET! This opens with the floral musk of that ylang-ylang to be sure, but from there it becomes this deep, rich warmth, the warmth of not say, mahogany or wood or amber or those kinds of things, but rather of sweet, sun-warmed skin. My nose has been constantly pressed to my pulse while wearing this, I may have actually rubbed a little dent in my wrist! A honeyed creaminess, an impossibly soft radiance, like the subtle glow radiating from someone sleeping in late summer sun, drowsy salt-kissed and vanilla dream-touched.
Imaginary Authors The Abandoned Mansion Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that whole mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept. The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm. Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose. The kind of abandoned specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back cleanly but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
Heretic Parfume Häxan is, rather than the poison gardens and shadow work that many reviewers experience, is, for me, pure romantasy magic. Not exactly “Häxan”, but rather “en rosglitterkonfekthäxa” (a rosy-glitter-confection-witch). Read my full review over on Patreon.
Slut For October, a candle collaboration between Bill Crisafi and Heretic Parfum Certified autumn freak. Unabashedly obsessed with October. Perpetually chasing autumns that can never be recaptured, eternally planning how to make the fall feeling last forever, wrapping myself in the lingering shroud of the season that never ends. Six years old dressed as Stevie Nicks, shawl shivering in the deep beech shadows and maple chill of an Ohio evening, me at twelve for the first time watching Laurie Strode in her cozy turtleneck and cardigan stroll down the Haddonfield streets with her girlfriends after school as Michael Myers stalks invisible behind the picket fences, me at twenty one deep in the Florida woods in a bitter autumn drizzle while my boyfriend and his shady brother/business partner burn files, ash in the air and on my tongue, the syrupy warmth of apple cider filling the thermos, giving my hands something to hold as everything slips further and further away from me. This candle burns with all of that. Earthy smoke and leathery ash of burning leaves, the sun low on the horizon and amber light slanting through bare branches, a crisp crunch of phantom apple that also tastes a bit like tears that you didn’t even realize you were crying. All the autumns littering your path, all the Octobers still unfolding ahead, each future fall already tinged with nostalgia before it arrives.
Poesie Perfume Cryptid scents
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
BPAL X Haute Macabre Bats & Bonfires The sweetness of apples gone toasty-tender, pastry-wrapped and sugar-sprinkled, a pale citrine glow of a ghostly fire, smoke that’s more shape than scent, minimalist and whimsical. This makes me think of Charley Harper’s “Bat, Bullfrog, and Bonfire” – that 1968 lithograph I wrote about in my book, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre, where nocturnal creatures loiter in midnight glooms rendered in vivid, playful geometry. Harper had this way of distilling nature down to its essential forms, large expanses of color and jaunty shapes that somehow captured the spirit of a thing without getting bogged down in realistic detail. Bats & Bonfires does something similar – it’s not trying to recreate the acrid reality of woodsmoke or the sticky mess of actual toffee, but rather the impression of autumn nights, the gentle wit of bonfire gatherings where bats swoop overhead and apples roast on sticks. Sweet without being cloying, warm without being heavy, the kind of scent that makes eerie nocturnal scenes feel like frolicsome meditation. Harper believed humor made environmental awareness easier to swallow, and maybe this fragrance believes the same about autumn – making the season’s darker edge playful, giddy, a party for the eerie hours and midnight glooms, a celebration in flickering flames and swooping shadows rather than a dirge for dying light.
Pierre Guillaume Volupté Noire Dates soaking in over-brewed black tea, astringent and mouth-coating, that dry tannic bite married to sticky, crystallized sweetness. Dark musky honey, earthy and animalic, refined in the way something becomes after a thousand years of being wild – it evolved, got that shit out of its system. Heavy like a weighted blanket, enveloping, calming rather than crushing or claustrophobic. This is the witch in the woods who turned out to be just a person whose heart was too good, whose reputation for darkness came from living apart, looking strange, choosing solitude. You went seeking magic or answers or maybe just got lost, and she poured you tea in a chipped Limoges cup, offered a shoulder to cry on, pulled out the good French biscuits kept for guests who never come. She wrapped you in a cashmere throw gone soft from years of use, pressed soft woolen slippers into your hands, gestured to the chair by the fire that’s clearly the most cushy, cozy comfortable one. Abundance in unexpected places, richness where you thought there’d only be shadows. It makes you feel powerful and protected simultaneously, wrapped in care that looks forbidding from the outside, but inside is all velvet cushions and warm stones and things worn soft by love. The sweetness and bitterness work together, sticky dates and bitter tea conspiring toward comfort, quiet luxury in weathered textiles and secret stores of good honey, the kind you’d want to find if the world got too sharp, too bright, too much. A dark, warm space that welcomes without questions, that knows what you need before you ask, will hide the bodies in the best places.
..and finally see this separate post for seventeen fragrance reviews from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s 2025 Weenie collection!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Porcelain Bat (warm, unsettling thrum of musky fur and leathery wings smushed against frosted orris root and vanilla plaster dust) The warmth of living fur translated through frost, musky and intimate but held at a distance, like running your hand along a taxidermied ermine in a Victorian curiosity cabinet, soft, oddly tender, and deeply unsettling in its refrigerated stillness. There’s a chalky sweetness clinging to the claws, cream gone cold and dusty, the chilled incense of snowy little footprints preserved in ice.
Interview with the Lovebat (pink strawberries floating in sparkling blood orange and French lime fizz, enveloped in a swooshy cape of black velvet plum) Cartoon-bright citrus fizzing with fruit-punch pandemonium, the unhinged glee of Marge Simpson and Linda Belcher getting day drunk on gin-gimlets sprinkled with pop rocks and Nerds and deciding they’re starting a cult or a band or maybe both, their vision board includes glitter, all the cutest pictures of Gene Wilder, and at least seven different shades of pink highlighter.
Hiss & Hearse (a dribble of Dorian and a squiggle of Snake Oil, delicately stirred with a moss-crusted muddy shovel) Sugar-cubed breakfast tea staining antique lace, a doily dropped and ground into cemetery mud, delicate embroidery work sodden with petrichor and root rot. Something powdery-sweet that should be refined and parlor-proper now caked in wet earth, the smell of a Victorian burial shroud exhumed after a heavy rain, still clinging to its faded elegance even as soil crusts the hems. Graveyard loam sweetened with the ghost of afternoon service, bone china teacups filled with dirt.
Witch Flash (tattoo ink infused with sorcerous roots and heady incense). The blackest black that light refuses to touch, proprietary darkness jealously guarded, Vantablack if it grew roots and got tangled in underground electrical wiring. Dank sour earth threaded with something chemical and adhesive, the smell of vinyl insulation wrapped around ancient woody resins, rubbery and sharp and deliberately strange. A color so black it’s basically a monopoly, a void so deliberately crafted it feels witchy by sheer force of absorbing everything around it, turning incense smoke into something industrially arcane and territorially weird.
Skeleton Flash (polished bone shards, scorched sandalwood and tattoo ink) The other end of that proprietary spectrum, what happens when you develop the negative and all that jealously-guarded darkness flips to stark white light. Bare canvas stretched over scorched wood, primer coat before the ink goes in, the erasure that comes before creation. Bleached cotton, chalk dust, correction fluid painted over mistakes, clinical and clean. The empty space, the blank page, a more fraught and unforgiving reckoning than being lost in the dark, somehow more existentially annihilating than staring down the void.
I’ve Got Out At Last (torn paper revealing scorched plaster embedded with bitter citron, yellow grapefruit, and damp white cedar) Perfect citrus segments arranged on a plate you can only see through iron bars, the breezy morning light cruel in its beauty. Grapefruit pith papery and bitter, dried allium flowers, pale purple pompoms translucent and slightly vegetal and musky-sharp, the detritus of something once fresh now aged into brittleness. That texture of things left to desiccate in captivity, the ghost of brightness viewed through obstruction, just the bitter rind of it pressed against your tongue.
Batty Lace (a leathered up, musky interpretation of Antique Lace) Bela Lugosi’s Dead run through a sticky-syruped tape deck, caramel-amber static, cotton candy spun through patchouli interference, sweet pop frequencies cutting to Motörhead grinding through blown speakers, then Sisters of Mercy cathedral-goth reverb deep and dark. Every time you think you’ve locked onto one signal, the transmission cuts out, and it shifts into something completely contradictory, soft Pink Pony Club sweetness short-circuits into something bass-heavy and shadowed and back again. [EDIT: Ha! I guess I reviewed this in 2023, too. Here is what I said, “The caramel aspect of this blend is what I notice most, a buttery-milky brown sugar caramel that wants to ooze over vanilla ice cream rather than firm up into fudgy squares. Shifting beneath the caramel are those faint, faded attic-trunk florals and creamy cobwebby linens I recall from Antique Lace and a cracked leather buckle so ghostly and elusive I’m not sure if it was actually ever there at all.”]
Dead Leaves and Skin Musk Soap bubbles catching October’s dying light, the way autumn evenings used to stretch infinite even as they ended early, time moving differently when someone else kept track of it for you. Steam rising from water drawn by someone’s hands you’ll never see again in this lifetime, that drowsy warmth after hours spent kicking through leaf piles, the exhaustion of childhood translated through clean suds and amber dusk. Bath time as the day collapses into early darkness, warm and safe and somehow unbearably tender in retrospect.
Interminable Grotesques (narcissus blooms lolling on broken stems, their buttery perfume swelling into a debased crescendo of honeyed heliotrope, toxic lily of the valley, almond blossom, and opium poppy) Honeyed and narcotic, the kind of dizzying pareidolia where you keep almost seeing something recognizable before it dissolves back into confused blooms. Marzipan shaped into wedding cake flowers, perfect and poisonous, the immediate wrongness of food mimicking flora mimicking food. Almond ghost-flickering through a blanket of heavy white petals, there for a second, then gone, sweetness piled on sweetness until it becomes a hypnotic spiraling, beautiful in that specific way that makes you slightly sick.
Dia de los Muertos(dry, crackling leaves, the incense smoke of altars honoring Death and the Dead, funeral bouquets, the candies, chocolates, foods and tobacco of the ofrenda, amaranth, sweet cactus blossom and desert cereus) A dream, a classroom, you hear your name, but it’s coming from both inside the lesson and outside the door. “The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/ Did squeak and gibber…were it not that I have bad dreams,” intones a distant voice, fading. Death wrapped in vinyl, a smear in a shower curtain, a red, red hand pressed against the film. A trail of something slick and sticky, honeyed tobacco, a fruity resin, and sweet, grassy, dried blooms in its wake. A shape beckons through the barrier, a dread, phantom thing in wrapped plastic, calling from beyond the corner, and you’re walking toward it —you can’t stop walking toward it.
Cherry Cola Hearse (fizzy pop and a syrupy slick of motor oil splashed across disintegrating tan leather seat) Waxy cherry candy stretched into ropes, dense chocolate-adjacent chew that’s not quite chocolate, the slick pomade perfection of Kennickie’s hair catching light in the rearview mirror (“A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card, when you only care enough to send the very best!”) Fake-fruit plasticky Twizzler sweetness, Tootsie Roll richness, everything polished with product and oily swagger, neon light shine and candy-slick confidence.
Hearse of Pancakes (black coffee, syrup-drenched buckwheat cakes, and a crusty cruller for the road) One of my brothers-in-law is a bit of a coffee enthusiast (also a bit of a snob, but that’s not important to the story) and he drags us to every cafe and coffeeshop he can find whenever the family is all together. This smells exactly like what he orders, or some version of it: cafe mocha and a pastry, bitter-chocolate darkness meeting sugar-glazed fried dough. He’s Icelandic, so he usually goes for the cream cake option, but this is my rose-tinted glasses recollection of those afternoons I’ve spent at small tables while he evaluates the beans, the roast, the crema, and I just smell this exact combination over and over until it becomes the scent of family obligation turned oddly tender and sweet.
The Woman Behind it (silvered lavender and white iris shuddering like lamplight on stained plaster, ambergris frothing through vanilla husk, and the phantom outline of a rose-touched woman’s silhouette) Sneaking into Deborah Turbeville’s Unseen Versailles, elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence. A sliver of lavender soap worn translucent, the waxy trace of vintage lipstick on forgotten drinking glasses, pale powdery woods exhaling through dust-shrouded chambers. Those fleeting witnesses—hairpins, papers, cosmetics left in neglected storage rooms—so delicate an open window might blow them all away. The specific scent of beauty rituals frozen mid-performance, isolation and romanticism suspended in abandoned gilt, the haunting intimacy and immersion of faded grandeur where pristine splendor once might have kept you behind velvet ropes.
Dead Leaves and a Woolly Jumper. The main character from some isekai anime I’m making, totally making up just for this perfume review, but if someone writes the screenplay, they’d better give me credit! “I Died Choking on Strawberry Milk Pocky and Got Reincarnated as the Autumn Demon Queen.” Dead leaves crushed underfoot, meeting kawaii streetwear: the crunchy vegetation of seasonal decay paired with fuzzy pink cable-knit and cartoon-animal faces. She’s supposed to preside over fall and mortality but shows up to every council meeting in a patchwork sweater with bunnies on it, strawberry milk powder dusting her sleeves, strawberry marshmallow mochi in her pockets, strawberry white choco latte in her baby pink Stanley cup, pastel in a world of russet and rot, autumn trying its best to be taken seriously while its demon queen insists on being adorable. (I’ll be honest, this sweater inspired this entire review.)
Lime Green Hearse(lime rind, citron, petitgrain, white musk, a swish of bay rum and a bit of black pepper)What if the green fairy wasn’t absinthe at all but lime flavoring? That chemical brightness that tastes nothing like actual limes but everything like the Platonic ideal of citrus translated through laboratory genius. An electric emerald conjuring that appears in jelly beans, gummy bears, snow cones, Jello molds, Freezee pops, a green that only exists in artificial form, nature could never! La fée verte viridian visions granted not through wormwood but through whatever makes lime lifesavers taste like that, like chartreuse and shamrock make you feel, impossibly, deliriously green.
Hot Pink Hearse(flashy pink guava, strawberry jam, sugared pink grapefruit, blackberry, bergamot, and pink champagne adorned with a gleaming chrome Landau bar) OMG. This is the absolute, exquisite embodiment of the best Kool-Aid recipe ever, courtesy that one scene in Slumber Party Massacre: one package of Kool-Aid (ultra-pink, berried chaos, fruit-punch-adjacent) and seven heaping cups of sugar dissolved into a scant tablespoon of water. I swear you can even smell the fizzy granules wafting up to tickle your nostrils. Complete and utter perfection.
Committing Every Artistic Sin(turmeric-dusted acrid marigold, linseed oil, bitter orange peel, crumbling plaster, clotted vanilla, and a whiff of sweet mildew) The smell of creative obsession after you’ve been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you’re hungry and aching and haven’t showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it’s intriguing, that particular musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it’s almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we’re like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn’t move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can’t remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You’ve been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever’s been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who’s been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won’t follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable… but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator’s weird funk.
Need more ‘Weenies? Have a peep at my ‘Weenie reviews from the autumns of yesteryear 2024 // 2023 // 2022 // 2021 // 2020 // 2019 // 2018 // 2017 // 2016
And PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? Here you will find 88 pages of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
Are you new to one of our very favorite indie perfumers, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab? See my three-part primer here, here, and here.
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The Dunwich Horror opens with titles so sweeping and swanky and groovy they could’ve come straight out of a James Bond movie, all swirling psychedelic Op Art animation and bewitching theme music that apparently won the film some praise (I looked it up later and discovered it was composed by Les Baxter). We meet Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell with shaggy curly hair and a commitment to playing ’70s occultist creeper), who wants to get his hands on the Necronomicon so he can open a portal and bring back the Old Ones. He meets college student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) at the Miskatonic University library, and she immediately trusts him because of his eyes, which – if you ask me – are exceedingly creepy. I think she’s a very bad judge of character. Oh, Nancy.
Nancy lets Wilbur read from the forbidden book until her professor, Dr. Armitage, interrupts and discovers Wilbur is a Whateley, as in, descended from the Oliver Whateley who was publicly hanged in Dunwich’s town square for unsavory occult goings-on. Somehow, this leads to an awkward dinner where Wilbur charms everyone, then conveniently “misses his bus” home, and Nancy offers to drive him all the way back to Dunwich despite every single creepy-eyed red flag waving in her face.
He invites her back to his colorful gothic mansion for tea. (Don’t drink the tea. The tea is drugged, Nancy!) What’s particularly hard to watch is that, early on, when Nancy is alone with Wilbur, her nervousness and hesitation are palpable, telegraphed in every look and gesture. She doesn’t want to drive him home. She doesn’t want to go inside the house. She doesn’t want to stay for tea. She doesn’t want to freshen up in the bathroom. But she does all of it anyway, out of what all women know too well that ingrained need to be polite, to not make a scene, to override every instinct screaming at you because you don’t want to seem rude or difficult.
And then Wilbur drugs her tea a whole bunch, and she spends the rest of the movie in a hazy stupor, moaning suggestively while lying on a cliffside altar waiting to be sacrificed, plagued by nightmares of orgiastic hippie people who are presumably the Old Ones? Actually, there’s a lot of uncomfortable suggestive moaning in this movie – Lavinia giving birth in the opening, Lavinia gibbering in her padded cell at the asylum, Sandra Dee drugged on the altar. It all felt really creepy, in an extra-gross sort of way.
The film does have atmosphere on its side. The eerie seaside town filmed at night with its whistling wind feels properly unsettling. The jarringly psychedelic film-negative sequences showing the monster’s POV, complete with thudding heartbeat and inhuman breathing, are actually kind of freaky. The whippoorwills catching the souls of the departed is a nice Lovecraftian touch.
But the pacing is glacial, especially once you realize what’s happening, and we’re just waiting for the inevitable sacrifice. By the time we get to the rushed ending where Dr. Armitage shows up and defeats Wilbur, mostly by yelling at him until he bursts into flames, I’d already mostly stopped paying attention.
The whole thing is mired in a sloggy lethargy that mirrors Sandra Dee’s drugged state, and despite the psychedelic visuals and occult aesthetic, the execution just never lands. I found myself mocking Wilbur as he chanted. “SLOG-sothoth!” Hehehehehe.
And that’s 31 Days of Horror! Today is Halloween, and we are headed to my brother-in-law’s tonight. We’re having a little finger-food buffet (I am making these Red Devil Meatballs; my Feet-Loaf suggestion was soundly rejected), and I believe we are watching Love At First Bite. Which isn’t a horror film at all, but aside from me, this isn’t exactly a horror crowd. However! When I was 6 years old, in 1982, staying overnight with my aunt and uncle in their apartments that sat on top of a funeral home, they put a movie on, and it scared the crap out of me. I ran out of room and started crying! That movie was Love At First Bite, and along with the Scooby Doo monsters, it was one of the very first things that scared me. I am looking forward to finally facing it again!
Thanks as always for following along with this annual horror-viewing tradition! And because I always overindulge, I urge you to check back in tomorrow for one last 31 Days Of Horror bonus post…!
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Rest Stop is Nat Cassidy doing something a little different, or at least it felt that way to me. Abe is driving through the night to visit his dying grandmother (whom he resents) and stops at a gas station to use the bathroom. He gets locked in. There’s a masked man outside. There are spiders and snakes crawling down the walls inside. There are notes being slipped under the door. His grandmother’s voice keeps running through his head, all her stories about Jewish trauma and suffering, all the ways she made him feel small. The whole thing is claustrophobic and visceral and moves at a breakneck pace, and Abe talks to himself constantly in a way that some people apparently found annoying but I thought worked perfectly for someone losing their mind in a gas station bathroom at 3am.
People keep calling this “extreme horror” and I don’t know about that. It’s gory, sure. There’s a lot of blood and some genuinely upsetting body horror. But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to punish you the way actual extreme horror does. It felt more like Cassidy was having fun in the playground of his genre, seeing how much weirdness and violence and dark humor he could pack into 160 pages. Some reviewers found it cringe or too existential or didn’t understand the ending, and I get all of that. It’s definitely weird. But I had a blast with it. It’s quick and wacky and unhinged in ways I wasn’t quite expecting from him. This man could write about possessed dental equipment or a haunted Burger King drive-thru or demonic hitchhikers on the Garden State Parkway, and I’d be first in line for it, every single time.
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Welcome to Derry opens with a kid hitchhiking out of town who gets picked up by what seems like a nice family. Except the family is not nice at all. They’re deeply weird and getting weirder by the second, and the tension keeps ratcheting up until the mother gives birth to a CGI demon baby right there in the moving vehicle. It’s disturbing and gross until that baby sprouts wings and starts zooming around the car like a demented bat, at which point the whole thing just becomes corny as hell.
Four months later, we meet a group of kids investigating their missing friend Matty, plus there’s this whole separate storyline about a Black Air Force pilot dealing with racism on a secretive military base in 1962 Derry. The kids have visions, hear voices coming through the pipes in their houses, and end up at a movie theater where the demon baby is back for round two, and it kills three of them (just as we were getting to know them! dang!)
I have no idea what this show is actually about yet. There’s the kids’ story, there’s the military conspiracy thread, there’s Pennywise presumably lurking somewhere (though he’s barely in this episode, if at all?), and none of it connects in any way that makes sense. The demon baby looked ridiculous. The writing overall isn’t great. Masked men attack a soldier on a military base to steal secrets and then just… leave when his buddy shows up with a pipe? And nobody calls security? The guy doesn’t even shut his door? But I liked these kids anyway, maybe because I already have a built-in fondness for King’s kid characters. That ending surprised me – killing off most of the kids we’d just spent an hour with was unexpected and brutal.
I’ll probably stick around to see where this is headed, unless I forget about it entirely and never watch it again, which happens 99% of the time. (For example, I still haven’t watched episode two of Alien Earth, ha!)
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I had grand plans for a folk horror summer that never quite materialized. Suddenly, it was October, and it turns out I’m having a folk horror fall instead, which kinda feels more appropriate anyway. Stories about harvest festivals and pagan rituals and things lurking in the countryside feel right for autumn. (See Wake Wood, Watcher in the Woods, The Vourdalak, Exhuma, etc.)
Rebecca Holland is a newly appointed vicar trying to settle into a small English village with her husband, Henry, and daughter, Grace. The village celebrates an annual harvest festival centered around Gallowgog, an ancient harvest deity who either blesses crops or ruins them depending on how properly he’s been honored. When Grace goes missing during the festival, Rebecca discovers that the entire village knows something she doesn’t, and nobody seems particularly interested in helping her find her daughter. Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson, who is magnificent and ominous as always) reveals that his own child disappeared years ago under similar circumstances, and he’s strangely at peace with it. The police are useless. Her neighbors are evasive. Everyone’s chanting and wearing animal masks and standing menacingly in fields, and Rebecca is running out of time.
A lot of reviewers hated this movie. They found it boring, predictable, full of plot holes. And…they’re not wrong about the plot holes. There are moments where characters behave in ways that make no sense, where motivations feel murky or contradictory, where you can see exactly where things are going from a mile away. But I don’t care. Folk horror doesn’t need to reinvent itself to work. Sometimes you just want atmospheric English countryside, creepy villagers who know too much, ritualistic chanting, and Ralph Ineson’s voice, gravelly and guttural. The film looks gorgeous, all misty fields and ancient stone and firelight, and wonderful cottages full of cozy rugs and pottery, and lots of fun rustic homemade pagan wards and offerings and totems and talismans and whatnot strung up all over the place. Also, Rebecca’s nails. During most of the film, they’re short and squared off, painted a sort of muted purply-greige. By the end? Long, sharp talons in oxblood purple-black. Because she serves the old ways now, you see!
Folk horror is one of my favorite subgenres, and Lord of Misrule understands what makes it work even when the script occasionally stumbles. All those isolated little communities with older allegiances than the ones we recognize, land that remembers things we’ve forgotten, what happens when ancient bargains come due. I really feel like this is where my sweet spot is, and if I could finish out the month with four more of these (even mediocre ones!) I totally would. But I like to mix things up! So I probably won’t!
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