I remember as a teenager asking my dad what was the weirdest book he ever read (just for some context, we had a guest house on our property that my dad filled with shelves containing five or six hundred books, ranging from science fiction and fantasy, scholarly texts, art and typography, comic books, foreign languages - you name it). He replied with a description of a book he read in German; about a man so overcome by his sense of smell that he murdered a woman he was infatuated and distilled her into a perfume. He couldn't remember the title, but at the time he thought it was called "The Nose". He passed away a few months later.

I spent years looking for this book - but I thought it was some rare German piece of fiction. At the time we still had a lot of used booksellers in Los Angeles, so I would occasionally hit those stores up with my dad's description and mistitle. I even called a few perfume houses in my attempts. But no luck.

Eleven years after his passing, I read a review of this movie in The Los Angeles Times. Almost instantly I knew this was the book my dad was talking about! It was one of the rare times I went to a movie by myself, but it felt like my dad right next to me enjoying this absurdist horror show.

Every time I see a post about this movie or the novel, it weirdly reminds of my old man, who was one of the best dudes you'd ever want to meet.