Citizens of Louisiana only have to look up at their state flag to see an animal doing some pretty wild — and deeply symbolic — stuff out of a medieval bestiary. But the goal of A24’s “Death of a Unicorn” is to craft a fresh creature feature out of a very old understanding of the mythological horned horses.
It might be a surprise to some folks to learn just how often murderous unicorns have been considered in myth. Just because that hasn’t been our cultural understanding of them in the last 50 years or so — instead, we’re used to seeing them in a sparkly, Lisa Frank-esque lighter — director Alex Scharfman reasoned there was a lot of room to surprise audiences with the unicorn’s “true” nature.
“There’s a great Jorge Luis Borges quote from his ‘Book of Imaginary Beings’ where he says the first unicorn story is almost identical to the latest, which is a fascinating thesis for this movie: What if I did an old version in a contemporary context?,” Scharfman told IndieWire.
“Death of a Unicorn” deliberately engages in that mash-up of historical interpretation in a heightened setting of modern luxury. The film prominently features “The Hunt for the Unicorn” tapestries, crafted in the 15th century and now on display at the Met Cloisters in New York, and leans on the progression of those tapestries for how the characters in the film can (and should) handle having a unicorn fall into their lap — metaphorically and eventually quite literally.
These tapestries are certainly not the only major works of European art to riff on unicorn myths — you can see a breathtaking collection of unicorn tapestries at the Cluny Museum in Paris, or recreations of the “Hunt for the Unicorn” tapestries at Stirling Castle in Scotland, among others. But our fascination with unicorns goes back much further than that.
Seals depicting single-horned animals have been found among the material remains of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization. It was Greek and Roman writers who gave them a sleeker, more horse-like appearance in the wider Western cultural consciousness.
Pliny the Elder, who was confidently wrong about most things he describes but was also unfortunately one of the most prolific writers of the early Roman Empire, mentions unicorns in his 37-volume “Natural History” — and not as the heart-meltingly beautiful center of your elementary school Trapper Keeper or the dream of horse girls everywhere, but as the fiercest animal in existence.
Native to India — making it likely that the Indian rhinoceros is the actual animal behind the myth — unicorns are said to resemble a horse in body, but their heads are like stags, their feet are like elephant hooves, their tails are like a boar’s, and their horn is basically a three-foot long black spear projecting from the center of their forehead. They are impossible to capture alive.
Scharfman pulled deliberately from Pliny’s description for both the visual and sound design of his unicorns. “We have the elephantine hooves. [Pliny] described their tail as being like a boar’s tail and we kind of found something between a boar’s tail and a lion’s tail,” Scharfman said. “In some bestiaries, you see a very furry chest, almost like a lion’s mane, that goes down in this V-shape. So we pulled from that and tried to reference real creatures as well — Icelandic horses, Belgian draft horses.”
Animals that are alive today, prehistoric megafauna, and the colorful chimera of animal parts in mythology all contributed to building a unicorn that could be as beautiful and terrible as the dawn, so to speak. Sound designer Damian Volpe blended his own bestiary of animal sounds in order to give each of the monsters of “Death of a Unicorn” a distinctive, terrifying register.
“[All of the unicorns] have their own little distinctions. The mare has a bird-like trill in her; the stallion is a little bit more lion and bear. They all have a touch of horse. That’s something that Damian realized as a rule — if we start with horse or we end with horse, we can kind of do whatever in the middle,” Scharfman said.
Likewise, Scharfman and his team made a lot of adjustments to the visual design of the unicorns in “Death of a Unicorn” in order for them to anchor the A24 film. The fangs were an aspect that took a lot of working out — ultimately the unicorns’ teeth are modeled on mandrill teeth, which are flat in the front but also have more sinister-looking, fang-like incisors, and on wolf teeth as well, given how carnivorous the unicorns end up being.
“We wanted them to just not feel like horses with horns. That was a big thing. So we gave them a certain prowl that feels more like a big cat, which required us to kind of break the skeletal structure of a horse so that the animators could give them this kind of shoulder waggle when they’re moving slowly,” Scharfman said. “ It was a very cool, super fun process.”
That versatility is, in a lot of ways, the true beauty of unicorns. Their violence — in medieval bestiaries, unicorns are regularly said to have beef with elephants and take them down by goring their bellies — is contrasted with their gentleness towards maidens and innate understanding of purity. In the 12th or 15th centuries, that contradiction expressed the prevailing Christian moral framework in vivid and evocative ways. In “Death of a Unicorn,” Scharfman hopes that the contradiction expresses the things that we struggle with and that myth might help us understand.
“[Unicorns] were always these symbols of untamable nature that shame man for our treatment of the natural world and our need to commodify it,” Scharfman said. “When you start going down that avenue, it quickly presents itself as something of a satirical commentary — there’s a social context you can’t ignore.”
An A24 release, “Death of a Unicorn” is now in theaters.
