“It was only natural that Edison’s idea to combine films and sound would lead to someone deciding to combine films and odors,” writes James L. Limbacher in his 1969 book Four Aspects of the Film, leading into a discussion of what is, without a doubt, the most notorious of all motion picture gimmicks.
Thank you for reading this post, don’t forget to subscribe!
Of course, the movies aren’t really where it got its start. “Variety lists ‘smellies’ as early as 1868,” Limbacher writes, “in the London production of The Fairy Acorn Tree at the Alhambra Theatre. The scents were dispensed by vaporizers.”
Limbacher goes on to cite several other acts of legitimate theater which incorporated smells, from plays to operas to songs. “Oscar Wilde’s original stage directions for Salome indicated ‘braziers of perfume should take the place of an orchestra – a new perfume for each emotion.’”
By 1906, movie theaters were getting in on the action. “At his silent film theatre in Forest City, Pennsylvania, [S. L. ‘Roxy’] Rothafel dipped cotton in a rose essence and put it in front of an electric fan, allowing the smell of roses to drift out into the audience during the newsreel showing the Pasadena Rose Bowl Game.”
Several other variously low- and high-rent attempts followed, but it was not until December of 1959 that the first of two nearly-simultaneous processes to bring smells to the screen at large scale saw its debut.
In a 1959 appearance on the television program To Tell the Truth, AromaRama creator Charles Weiss said that he had “invented a process to make movies smell […] in addition to seeing the action and hearing the dialogue, our audiences will be able to smell the scenes.” He promised more than 100 different aromas, including grass, dirt, firecrackers, incense, horses, food, and more.
The actual process, which accompanied Behind the Great Wall, a two-hour documentary about China, only produced 72 smells, according to Limbacher, which were triggered at specific points throughout the film’s running time by a mechanism within the theater and then “fed to the audience through the regular air circulating system.”
United Press International called it “the first motion picture that really smells,” while the Detroit Free Press labeled the gimmick “a real stinker.” Despite this, the “battle of the smellies” had already begun. Opposing AromaRama was the somewhat more famous Smell-O-Vision, developed for producer Mike Todd Jr.
Smell-O-Vision sounds a little more complicated than its competitor. “The smells are pumped to each individual seat in the theatre by means of an invention by Hans Laube in which each scent is contained in a vial on a rotating drum, then projected to each member of the audience when a signal is triggered from the ‘smell track’ of the film,” writes Limbacher. Given that it cost as much as a million dollars to outfit a theater in Smell-O-Vision, isn’t difficult to see why such a process might not have caught on.
In spite of claims that John Blackburn’s apocalyptic novel A Scent of New-mown Hay was going to be adapted using AromaRama, both of these odorous gimmicks were ultimately attached only to a single film. Behind the Great Wall in AromaRama’s case, and the “tongue-in-cheek murder mystery” Scent of Mystery for Smell-O-Vision. Retitled Holiday in Spain, Scent of Mystery was also shown without the Smell-O-Vision innovation.
In his 1969 book, Limbacher writes, “Like other ideas to give the motion picture new dimensions, however, the sense of smell may again be attempted in future years.” And he’s absolutely right. Though no subsequent effort has ever been nearly as ambitious as Smell-O-Vision or AromaRama, the legacy of the “battle of the smellies” has survived in numerous tongue-in-cheek efforts.
By far the most famous of these is John Waters’s Polyester (1981), which accompanied showings with a scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” card featuring scents such as flatulence, pizza, model building glue, and dirty shoes.
Unlike most theatrical gimmicks, the Odorama process also followed Polyester home in a variety of forms, with scratch-and-sniff cards accompanying the flick onto VHS, laserdisc, and DVD. In 2019, when the Criterion Collection welcomed Waters’s opus onto Blu-ray, they set out to recreate the process once again, though this time they had a bit more trouble.
It seems that scratch-and-sniff wasn’t as ubiquitous as it had been in the 1980s, and finding a supplier who stocked the ripe odors they were after proved challenging. “Finally, we located a company, Tennessee’s Print-A-Scent, that maintained a library of smells large and varied enough to meet our needs,” they write on their website.
Polyester may have been the first scratch-and-sniff film, but it wasn’t the last. An MTV screening of Scent of Mystery was accompanied by scratch-and-sniff cards as part of a promotional gimmick with the 7-Eleven convenience store chain. As near as I can determine, this broadcast took place in either 1985 or ’86, making their claim of “the world’s first scratch-and-sniff movie” a little misleading, if not altogether spurious.
The 2003 film Rugrats Go Wild also included scratch-and-sniff elements as “an homage to Waters,” according to the Baltimore Sun. They even initially used the name “Odorama,” though, after some threats of litigation (apparently New Line, the studio that released Polyester, may not have renewed the copyright on the gimmick) they changed the name.
Several other movies, TV shows, and even video games tried the scratch-and-sniff approach over the years. The 1994 TV premiere of Revenge of the Nerds 4 saw another collaboration with 7-Eleven, while the notorious video game series Leisure Suit Larry got in on the action.
Like Waters, director Robert Rodriguez is clearly a lover of gimmicks, and his fourth Spy Kids movie was released in AromaRama, complete with scratch-and-sniff cards – the previous installment had already been in 3D.
More recently, Grace Glowicki’s 2025 riff on the Frankenstein story, Dead Lover, included scratch-and-sniff cards at screenings. Alas, I missed the ones at my local theaters, though I probably wouldn’t have been able to properly enjoy the “smellie” experience had I gone, as I had a cold at the time.
Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama are among the gimmicks parodied in the 1991 film Popcorn – the only gimmick not based on one pioneered by William Castle, in fact. Popcorn follows a group of film students who put on a marathon of gimmick movies to raise funds for their university’s film department. Among the (fictional) flicks shown is a Japanese picture called The Stench, which is released in “Odorama” – borrowing Waters’s name, either by accident or again as “homage.”
The Odorama of the film involves gas cannisters pumped into the theater’s ventilation system and, like the other gimmicks showcased in Popcorn, it is repurposed by the film’s killer in a more deadly format.
The idea of “smellies” also lives on in the modern “4D film.” A name that encompasses a number of different patented presentation systems, 4D films aim to incorporate other senses – sometimes including the sense of smell – into the moviegoing experience. 4D systems include seats that vibrate or move, as well as pumping gusts of wind, fog, sprays of water, and, yes, sometimes scents into the auditorium.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 4D film got its start at Six Flags in 1984, and is still heavily associated with theme parks. Dedicated 4D films include Michael Jackson’s Captain EO, Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, Terminator 2 3D: Battle Across Time directed by James Cameron, Joe Dante’s Haunted Lighthouse, Shrek 4-D, and others.
Several standard blockbusters and children’s movies have also been shown in “4D” versions in theaters around the world. If you live near one of more than fifty Regal theaters with 4DX presentation technology, you might be able to get water sprayed in your face when you go see James Cameron’s next Avatar picture.
Besides his work as Monster Ambassador here at Signal Horizon, Orrin Grey is the author of several books about monsters, ghosts, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters, and a film writer with bylines at Unwinnable and others. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and he is the author of two collections of essays on vintage horror film.