Heretic Parfum partnered with the Edward Gorey Estate on an exclusive collection of room sprays inspired by Gorey’s illustrations and brought the collection to life in a lavish campaign.
There are generally two types of people: Those who eagerly await Halloween all year long, and those who anticipate the end of spooky season so that the holidays can officially kick off. The Edward Gorey x Heretic Parfum collaboration is the rare unifier that both of those groups will enjoy. Inspired by the melancholy whimsy of Gorey, the Heretic Parfum Edward Gorey Holiday Room Sprays transform any space with their haunted holiday scents.
“Growing up, I never enjoyed celebrating Christmas traditionally and I was always mashing things up between multiple holidays,” says Douglas Little, Founder, Creative Director and Perfumer of Heretic. “When I bought my first house in my early 20s, my favorite thing was mashing up Halloween and Christmas together and doing this dark Victorian spin on Christmas. When I discovered Edward Gorey, I hit the jackpot. I was like, this is everything that I’ve been doing. Through my early 20s, I was taking a lot of his artwork and making custom wrapping paper and Christmas stockings and all this stuff out of his drawings. I thought to myself, why not just reach out to them and see what would happen?”
Little cold emailed the Gorey Trust and within 24 hours received a response stating they’d love to have an exploratory conversation. Little shared his vision with them: “My goal with Heretic is to find things like Gorey and to be able to help immerse people further into that world, because Gorey’s world is already so immersive, but the piece that’s missing is scent,” he says. The Gorey Trust had never done a fragrance project and were eager to work with Little.
“I wanted to start this off by creating four room sprays because I felt like the interior was a good place to start with Gorey,” Little says. All four room sprays feature the illustrations of Gorey. Fruit Cake is a sweet and spicy take on the classic holiday dessert, with notes of candied peel and scorched nutmeg. “I’m sure people will have a lot of pause with this one because fruit cake has a bad rap, but this is a really magical fragrance. It’s boozy, spicy and fun.” O Tannenbaum brings a Christmas tree to life with fir needles, clove and melted candle wax. “It is one of the sexiest pine fragrances that you will ever experience in your life,” Little says. “A lot of people have been saying that it smells like sexy lumberjack.” Like a spooky greenhouse, The Evil Garden blends night-blooming flowers, crushed stems and damp moss. The Haunted Tea-Cosy conjures a holiday tea party with black tea, bergamot, tonka and spectral musk.
To celebrate the collection, Heretic created “A Very Gorey Holiday” campaign with a full print newspaper, with a cast portraying Gorey-esque archetypes, including Dita Von Teese as The Femme Fatale. “I took Gorey iconography and turned these into various personality profiles,” Little says. “One of them is called the Undertaker’s Wife and she’s all things gothic and antiquary. We have one character called The Dandy, another called The Spiritualist. Once I came up with the idea of these various personalities, rather than casting models for this, I thought it would be so much more interesting to find influencers who are known for these different things. One of my favorite influencers is Christopher Griffin and they are known for this fantastical world that they’ve created around plants, so we cast Christopher as The Botanist.”
Exploring Heretic in newspaper format is one of Little’s favorite methods of storytelling; he did it last year with Nosferatu. “Print doesn’t happen anymore and there’s something about a newspaper that’s so tactile,” he says. “Still one of my favorite things is The New York Times; I love looking at it, and I love the feel of it and the smell of it. When we did the Nosferatu newspaper, we had such an enormous response. The way we knew it was working was we were flooded daily with hundreds of videos of people receiving the packages and opening up the newspaper, and people showing the newspaper through Instagram or TikTok. For Gorey and these characters, I thought how fun it would be to expand on it.”
Spead over a multi-day photoshoot, bringing the Gorey newspaper to life was an immense undertaking. Creating the newspaper included four costume stylists who spent weeks pulling the wardrobe, which consisted of 19 looks meticulously curated from Edwardian costumes as well as 1920s and 1980s costumes.
Keeping in character, every product description on Heretic’s website is written in the Gorey voice. “The website will be completely rebuilt into this world of Gorey and all the fragrances will be told through this Gorey lens,” Little says. “I wanted to create this intensely immersive experience that brought people into this world. Even our direct-to-consumer packages will be tweaked so that when you receive them, they will have black wax seals and we’re doing gift tags that all are Gorey illustrations. I wanted this whole thing to really take people into this beautiful, strange universe of Gorey.”
