CARNIVAL OF SOULS

Eau de Parfum

Marissa Zappas’s perfumes are a secret love, fragrances that subvert, seduce and enlighten. As a poet with a background in film, performance, funereal practices and cemetery design, Marissa has created a collection of meticulous beauty and imagination.

Carnival of Souls is a revered cult film from 1962, directed by Herk Harvey and starring Candace Hillgloss as Mary Henry who is the sole/soul survivor of a car plunging into a river. Afterwards her life feels off kilter and perturbed as if the normality around her is in fact some sort of construct. Even after a new start in Utah, she feels like an intruder while at the same time realising an abandoned carnival exerts a strange pull on her.

She develops an ability to be invisible and dances with ghosts. An eerie church organ soundtrack and atmospheric Cocteau-inspired cinematography heighten the foreboding atmosphere as Mary is haunted by visions of The Man, a tall ghoulish figure with deathly white features. No spoilers, but the film is saturated in an ever increasing sense of dislocation and pensive view of the veil between life and death.

As always Marissa is ambitious and hyper-stylised in her perfumed storytelling, balancing her abstracted perfumery skills with her ability to create quirky persuasive moods. According to her, Carnival of Souls is ‘…a melancholic celebration of life and death and the radiant psychedelia of survival.’

Melancholic celebration. An extraordinary statement you might not readily associate with the world of perfumery. But Marissa composes as a poetic outlander, making work full of contradictions and the unexpected.

The materials she uses are never less than interesting and often confound expectations. Listed notes are exploded and reassembled, smeared, re-framed and lavished with gaudy desire. Fruit and powder vs incense and violet, a nostalgic dime store scent of dust and stillness.

The use of coconut is fascinating, normally a tropical note, Marissa has used it to suggest opacity and apartness. The perfume embodies a stylised embodiment of lacquer-set, gauzy headscarves and meticulously powered maquillage in a haunted setting where colours are fading and holding on to the proprieties of life which will not delay the afterlife.

Mimosa cream, saffron, vanilla and a syrupy amber hint at classic cordon dessert extravagances, moulded creams, piping, jellies and flamboyant meringues. Starched layered skirts in a perfect kitchen, completely opposite to Mary’s phantom dancing and her realisation that The Man may be the only solution to her predicament.

Carnival of Souls is a sweetly sinister scent, a portrait of haunted femininity; oddly the perfume presents in colour whereas the film is monochrome, such is Marissa’s modish storytelling. The notes smell pretty and barbed, fruity fresh and desiccated, proving once again that Marissa continues to make perfumes that are not only exquisitely wearable but with joyous and phantasmal soul.

Composition:

• Mimosa Cream, Violet
• Saffron, Amber, Patchouli
• Vanilla, Incense and Musk

Perfumer: Marissa Zappas, 2024