The Powerful Never Change in Death of a Unicorn

Death of a Unicorn (Courtesy of A24)

The unicorn. The elegant symbol of purity and beauty to some. For others, the rainbow-pooping, Lisa Frankified epitome of childhood pizzazz. Yet they weren’t always that way. “Unicorns in antiquity used to be terrifying,” explained Alex Scharfman, and he’s bringing those deadly qualities back as writer/director of Death of a Unicorn.

Receiving its world premiere at South by Southwest ahead of a wide release on March 28, the A24 horror-comedy is Scharfman’s take on a creature feature. His biggest influence was what he called “the science expedition feature” like The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman: “Scientists go into a place where the locals know something and are like, 'Hey, I don’t think you should be fucking with this thing.’ We don’t have locals in our film, but there’s something about that. About going to an exotic place where our characters are out of their everyday environment [and] they encounter something they shouldn’t mess with.”

Forget all those cutesy romanticized unicorns. If you see a thousand pounds of mystical beast with a razor-sharp lance sticking out of its head, run for the hills. And definitely don’t do what widowed business executive Elliott (Paul Rudd, Ant-Man) does on a trip with his estranged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega, Wednesday) to meet his new bosses: run one over, then try to hide the body in the back of your car.

When Scharfman started researching unicorn stories, he found there’d been myths about the beast for two and a half millennia before Misty Brightdawn went trotting through Ponyville. The first known description of a unicorn dates back to 398 BC, when Ctesias, the Greek physician to King Artaxerxes II of the Achaemenid Empire, described a horned ass in his travel journal Indica. He claimed that drinking from a mug made from the horn would cure diseases. Throughout history, the rich and powerful have sought unicorn horns as a panacea, Scharfman noted. “And if you’re updating the medieval unicorn story, then what is a lord and nobleman other than an oligarchic family with an industrial fiefdom that happens to be pharmaceuticals?”

Enter Elliott's bosses: Richard E. Grant as cancer-riddled industrialist Dell Leopold, Téa Leoni as his trophy wife, and Will Poulter as their bro-y son who founds dodgy startups and name-drops billionaires. Their interest in the mythical creature is driven by greed, not awe. Making them the physical embodiment of Big Pharma allowed Scharfman to probe our ethically murky relationship with drug companies. “Coming out of the pandemic,” he said, “we owe a great debt to the pharmaceutical industry for creating a vaccine in a matter of months for a brand-new virus, but at the same time they did it for profit. Helping people was the means, not the end.”

In the writing, Scharfman increasingly found that with the power dynamics between the Leopolds and between Elliott and Ridley, the film became about generational divides, and he cast the film accordingly – “with Richard being in the baby boomer zone, and Paul being more in the Gen-X world, and Will being this millennial who’s standing to inherit the world from the boomers,” he explained. “As a millennial myself, it’s a fascinating thing of all the homeownership rates being in the toilet, but also this great wealth transfer that people are anticipating. Well, the boomers are going to die, and all these man-children and immature people are going to soon inherit this wealth. What have they been doing, and how are they going to handle all of that?”

In Death of a Unicorn, the beast begins to represent something older and more primal than the mere concerns of share prices and inheritance taxes. So, in resurrecting the ancient versions, “we give you that magical, pure unicorn, but it’s also not the thing you expect it to be. ... Not monsters but old-world gods, like in Princess Mononoke, deer gods and giant wolves, untamed and representing something.” It’s how creature features would often turn their monsters into gods, with both the Creature from the Black Lagoon and King Kong worshipped as deities to be placated and avoided.

That wariness is something that was a constant in early mythologies. For cultures like the ancient Greeks, Scharfman said, “The gods live right there. They’re on a mountain and you can see it. They’re not floating above us who knows where. They walk among us from time to time.’ ... It gives you a certain sense of consequences, and a certain sense that, 'These rules are pretty strict. We better pay attention to that.’”

Death of a Unicorn

Headliners, World Premiere

Saturday 8, 5:30pm, Paramount Theatre

Sunday 9, 11am, Hyatt Regency