Supernatural Scents Cast a Spell Over the Fragrance Market
Horror topped 20 percent of 2025's biggest theatrical films, and fragrance is following. Independent houses now sell out scents built on ghosts, aliens and witchcraft.
Updated
The takeaway
- Over 20 percent of the 109 top theatrical films of 2025 were horror, the most of any genre, per UCLA's 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report.
- Heretic Parfum's Ghosts collection uses buried eucalyptus for a 'skin prickle' effect and aldehydes for a vapor-like quality.
- Stéle in NoLIta stocks 600-plus scents and will soon carry Planets Perfumery, a line from a real-life coven.
Horror claimed over 20 percent of the 109 top theatrical films of 2025 — the largest share of any single genre — and the fragrance counter has taken note.
At Stéle, the independent fragrance destination in New York City's NoLIta neighborhood, cofounders Jake Levy and Matt Belanger recently laid out dozens of supernatural-themed scents drawn from a stock of more than 600. Most of them, they said, were sold out or awaiting restocks. Soon the shop will stock Planets Perfumery, a line from a real-life coven.
The momentum reads as a rebellion against the long dominance of vanilla, caramel and other candy-like gourmands. These new perfumes — mysterious, unusual, hard to pin to a category — are not seasonal pumpkin-spice novelties. They aim to evoke a feeling in the wearer rather than a time of year.
"It can really give people a sense of escapism, a sense of transportation to other realms, other places," Douglas Little, founder and perfumer of Heretic Parfum, tells Bazaar. "The ability to become a witch or a vampire — how extraordinary to be able to get up in the morning and to make that decision to step into that space and to have this secret that no one else knows?"
Little has built a body of work that skews toward the dark side, including fragrance collaborations for 2024's Nosferatu remake and The Bride!, released earlier this year. "I've never not had an interest in things that go bump in the night," he says.
His creative process starts with temperature, not notes or accords. Counterintuitively, he associates witchy scents with warmth. "A witch smells like the earth to me," he says. "It has nothing to do with the idea of anything that is diaphanous or cold. Dirt, roots, being in the garden."
Heretic's recent Ghosts collection takes the opposite thermal direction. "I buried eucalyptus in almost every one of the fragrances to create this kind of 'skin prickle' effect," Little explains, adding that he incorporated aldehydes for a "kind of weird, vapor-like quality." Byredo's popular Mojade Ghost — actually Mojave Ghost — offers a counterpoint, with warm sandalwood and ambrette evoking an arid floral desert.
At Stéle, the scents Levy and Belanger presented ranged from surprisingly sweet to deeply complex and almost off-putting. Fallen, from New Hampshire–based house Voyde, has notes of fresh green apple, woody amber, and earthy, soil-reminiscent petrichor. "It [symbolizes] the fallen, but it can also be attractive and sexy," says Levy. Abduction by Eyes Are Always There aims to smell like the aftermath of an alien encounter. "Imagine being caught in a field … so you smell the singed grass, the embers," says Levy. Belanger adds: "It's green, but in a very different way than we're used to. It's an electric green."
Little built the Ghosts collection around the feeling of a brush with an apparition. "What makes a ghost experience profound is when there's something very familiar, but there's also something a little off," he says. "It's like you're 25 percent wrong and 75 percent right. So that was my theory with building these fragrances … where a person smells it, and they're like, 'I recognize that,' [followed by] 'I don't know what that is.'"
Psychiatry offers one explanation for the pull. "With modern life being so intangible — where life is happening over Zoom, email, and social media, but not physically, viscerally, concretely, and tangibly in person — I think we are really yearning for things that ground us in that way," says Ellen Vora, a psychiatrist and author of Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist's Case for Magic, out this October. The ritual of scent, she argues, is a form of grounding rooted in the natural world — pine, soil, animals, each other. "It is so visceral, and you can't reproduce it over a screen."
Vora also traces the lineage further back. Historically, she notes, a witch was "the local healer who was part midwife, part confidant," drawing on herbs and plants to support mind, body and spirit. "I think that perfumes are kind of an echo of that: a little bit of this scent, a little bit of this herb. There's an alchemy to that."
Little sees the movement driven by young Gen X fragrance enthusiasts. "I believe that people are looking for experience. They're looking to create their own version of reality because reality has become far too real," he says. Levy frames the appeal as self-invention: "We all want to be the main character; we all want to feel special. … This category gives you the ability to channel that."
Unlike a vanilla, citrus or beach scent that recreates an existing memory, these fragrances interpret what can only be imagined. "It brings reality to a concept," says Levy. Little goes further: "There's a side of it that is scientific, and there's a side of it that is cosmetic. But then there's this other side of it that's basically like a liquid version of witchcraft."
With restocks pending at Stéle and a psychiatrist's book on witchcraft landing in October, the appetite shows little sign of fading. As Little puts it: "People don't want to smell pretty anymore. People want to smell interesting."
Source: Harper's Bazaar Beauty; Source: socialsciences.ucla.edu
Olivia Hart
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Senior reporter covering business strategy at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
