The opening scene in A24’s upcoming creature feature, Death of a Unicorn, just came to the writer and director, Alex Scharfman, one day. It involved a father, a daughter and a unicorn – which is not really a spoiler because it’s in the film’s title. Confused, Scharfman sat on the scene for a couple of years before exploring it. “I didn’t have a relationship to unicorns, but the idea of something fantastical happening in a banal context was intriguing to me,” he says. Eventually, his passing thought about a unicorn became a fully fleshed-out satirical comedic horror production, with Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd playing the father-daughter duo, Elliott and Ridley, and Richard E. Grant as Elliot’s billionaire boss.
The unicorns in Death of a Unicorn share little resemblance to Lisa Frank’s rainbow unicorns or the plush prancer sticks you’d jump around on as a child (except for, of course, the horn). Instead, they are buff, blood-thirsty and vengeful. This depiction of the unicorn came to Scharfman through scouring ancient unicorn mythology from around the world. Where modern unicorns are associated with pretty rainbows, there’s a consistent thread for how unicorns were thought of before that: untamed symbols of moral purity, revealing the flawed nature of human greed. It seems that somewhere along the way, they lost their edge.
When I spoke to Scharfman, he insisted he wasn’t “into unicorns” in a big way before creating this film. “Those people are definitely out there,” he says. “When you tell someone, ‘I’m doing a unicorn movie,’ you get people who are like, ‘So, you’re into them too?’” Scharfman does, however, have a way of portraying and talking about unicorns that could convert many into being “unicorn people”. Death of a Unicorn is as scary as it is funny and as heartwarming as it is ridiculous. It’s not the first film to explore the wealth divide, but it is the first I’ve seen that uses unicorns to do so – bringing them back to their more radical glory.
Ahead of the release – March 28 in the US and April 4 in the UK – we spoke with Scharfman about conducting “unicorn research” and what the mythological creatures can teach us about morality and class consciousness today.
What made you want to write and direct a unicorn comedic horror film?
Alex Scharfman: I sat on the opening scene for a couple of years and would just occasionally pull that thread of, what is going on? Does it have to be a unicorn? That led me into unicorn research and a deeper exploration of what unicorns used to be. Eventually, it led me to the notion of a unicorn creature feature, bringing me to a lot of my favourite movies of the late 70s and 90s. These were some of the movies that made me want to get into film, and that all coalesced into one big crockpot stew. What emerged out of that was an opportunity to make my version of those kinds of movies, and I ran with it.
What are some of the movies that inspired you?
Scharfman: I mean, Alien, Jaws, Close Encounters, The Abyss, lots of good ones. They have something to say; they are really powerful and fun story machines. It’s inherently absurd to do a unicorn monster movie, so that informed a certain tone and sense of playfulness or theatricality that spoke to me as well.
Unicorns are always symbolic of untamed nature: the kind of thing that men destroy because we’re fundamentally corrupt. It’s our great shame that we destroy these types of things, and that’s where it became a Christ metaphor as well
Now, tell me more about the unicorn research! What journey did that take you on?
Scharfman: When you get into medieval unicorn mythology, there’s a certain level of class commentary that comes with it. The unicorn tapestries referenced in the movie are about a lord and his hunters going after a unicorn. Immediately, I went to: what’s the modern lord? Unicorns are always symbolic of untamed nature: the kind of thing that men destroy because we’re fundamentally corrupt. It’s our great shame that we destroy these types of things, and that’s where it became a Christ metaphor as well.
Was there anything that surprised you about your unicorns during your research?
Scharfman: The cosmic connection to unicorns in the movie is not something I would expect anyone to latch on to, but in Asian cultures, there’s also unicorn mythology. Chinese unicorn mythology tends to have more celestial associations. For me, personally, it goes so much to space and the cosmic – a sense of something greater than ourselves that we can’t understand.
It sounds like you grounded the film in research from all over the world. How did this translate to the unicorns in the film themselves?
Scharfman: There are three creatures in the movie, and each unicorn is meant to feel like a species. They definitely pull from slightly different influences in terms of the feeling and the vibe they give off. The mare is more of a contemporary equine creature, the foal is more goat-like with qualities which comports with more medieval mythology. Then the stallion goes back to even more ancient depictions of unicorns that are more muscular, more brute.
Those were extremely buff. What about the sharp teeth?
Scharfman: If you go back into historical accounts of unicorns, they are said to fight with their hornes, hooves and teeth. There are a lot of older accounts that talk about them having teeth to defend themselves. When we were designing the creatures, we looked at those references but tried to ground things with real creatures like mandrills and wolves, so the anatomy felt like it wasn’t just created to be as scary as possible. I love Alien, but when you watch the xenomorph with the mouth that comes out of the mouth, it’s like, why would the animal have evolved to do that? The pleasure of that movie is the uncanniness, but we were definitely trying to say these are real creatures because it was important to say they’re not fantasy. They’ve just been in hiding, but they existed.
The thing that unicorns can hopefully teach us is that we can convince ourselves of a lot of things like, ‘the ends justify the means,’ but no, the means matter a lot.
I know you weren’t exactly a ‘unicorn person’ before this. Did you have ‘unicorn people’ in mind when making it?
Scharfman: I hope this movie works for them because I tried to really be conscious of what they would want out of this kind of movie. But what’s interesting about unicorns is that you don’t need to be into unicorns to have passively absorbed a lot of unicorn mythology because they’ve been with us for about 500 years, and in that time, they barely changed at all. The mythology has been incredibly consistent in an almost uncanny way. We don’t really have any other mythological creatures that have been around for that long and been that consistent. But our modern conceptions of unicorns – the rainbows and Lisa Frank white ponies prancing in a field – have only been around for like 50 years.
It seems as if unicorns, once an untamable symbol of vengeance, have now been commodified. What do you think unicorns can teach us about class consciousness?
Scharfman: About class, but also like our ability to stand apart from society and say, you maybe we’re supposed to exist outside of these structures that we built for ourselves. The thing that unicorns can hopefully teach us is that we can convince ourselves of a lot of things like, ‘the ends justify the means,’ but no, the means matter a lot. There’s a certain unforgivingness about the unicorns in this movie where they don’t really care a ton for context or extenuating circumstances because sometimes morality boils down to a zero. At the end of the day, we all know what’s right and wrong. Maybe that’s a little simplistic; I don’t think the movie is subtle because I don’t think we live in subtle times.
