When someone invokes Smell-O-Vision, it’s usually a wistful concept, perhaps as a particularly delectable-looking scene plays out on screen: Wow, imagine if Smell-O-Vision were real right now!
The gag is, it’s real. Back in 1960, Scent of Mystery was one of the first films to get the scented cinema treatment. Hans Laube invented the tech and tried to make it a thing, but there were plenty of challenges and complaints—it was too expensive, the scents were too fake, too strong, not strong enough, etc.
For the A24 horror film Heretic this fall, Joya Studio, a fragrance and design brand, took on the challenge of bringing scent into theaters once again, this time with blueberry pie-scented screenings of the film. Joya and A24 have worked together before on a collection of branded candles tied to classic film genres, like sci-fi and noir, and this time, leaning into the artificiality rather than trying to mask it was key to making the scent stunt work, Frederick Bouchardy, founder of Joya Studio, told Marketing Brew.
“I think the artificialness is a bit of an inside baseball or inside joke for us,” Bouchardy said. “It’s not sticking our nose up at this. It’s almost like paying homage to that.”
From screen to nose
To bring Heretic beyond the screen, the scent tech and fragrance development company pumped select screenings at Alamo Drafthouse theaters with the scent of blueberry pie at a pivotal moment in the film: when the protagonists begin to suspect that there isn’t a woman in the other room baking a pie as they have been led to believe, at which point they turn a burning candle around to reveal it is blueberry pie-scented.
Cue: a conspicuously artificial blueberry-scented experience powered by Joya equipment that atomized the smell directly into the theater.
“It was very strategic,” Bouchardy said. “It has to happen at one specific part in the film that’s, like, perversely funny.”
Joya Studio’s atomized-scent approach has been implemented in “thousands of locations in the world,” Bouchardy said, especially in the retail and hospitality space, and the company has more recently developed its own tech, housed in roughly shoebox-sized freestanding devices. But making it work in theaters presented new logistical considerations.
In a hotel or retail store, Bouchardy said they typically connect these machines to an HVAC system to disperse a scent throughout an entire space. When they worked on Heretic, though, Joya placed a theater size-dependent number of the devices in various locations in plain sight.
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Because the scent activation is specifically timed to a scene in the movie, Bouchardy said the Heretic stunt required more coordination and planning than a typical hotel or retail space. Instead of a preprogrammed schedule timed to a store’s hours of operation, Joya, he said, “cranked [the scent] up for something like 14 minutes and paused it very infrequently, and then turned it all off.”
The tech “had to be tested in the various spaces…so it’s not like one of the machines is right in someone’s face,” Bouchardy said, and the company accounted for other possible scenarios, including the chance that the film would start later than scheduled.
An emotional experience
When creating scents, Joya Studio’s main goal is to create something memorable, Bouchardy said, and the scented screenings for Heretic were only offered for one day, as Joya “wanted to put it out there as more of a special experience,” Woo Pailet, head of marketing at Joya Studio, told Marketing Brew.
But employing scent in marketing more broadly is a tactic that can be used to leverage emotional connections, Pailet said.
“It sets a mood. It sets an atmosphere,” Pailet explained. “Whether it’s about your purchasing decisions, or it’s about a memory, or the feeling that you feel in an environment. It could also be part of the performance of the product. There’s so many different ways that it really elevates marketing.”
That’s not to say that Heretic’s blueberry-pie scent didn’t play on emotions, too. Pailet said that it did aim to invoke feelings of nostalgia and surprise, which resulted in viewers being “really into the experience” and “excited in the moment.” And in working with A24 for this project and others, Bouchardy said he was able to tap into a sense of humor, something that he said is not always present in the art and fragrance world.
Pailet is optimistic about the opportunity to continue expanding into more theaters. This time, the company only scented one scene, but next time, Pailet hopes to bring scent throughout an entire film, “so as the story is evolving and changing, that scent is actually going through that evolution as well.”