The unicorns in Death of a Unicorn are total movie magic
"Death of a Unicorn" director Alex Scharfman breaks down the historical inspirations and practical effects of his debut feature.
You've never seen unicorns quite like those at the center of Death of a Unicorn.
Not the sparkly, sweet unicorns of modern-day pop culture, these are primal beings with sharp fangs, killer horns, and a bloodthirsty need for revenge. They're movie monsters in the vein of Alien's Xenomorph or Jurassic Park's T. rex: larger than life and utterly captivating, even as they make mincemeat of their victims.
It's no wonder, then, that creature features like Alien and Jurassic Park also served as inspiration for writer/director Alex Scharfman's unexpected monster movie. That inspiration extends to the execution of the monsters themselves, which the film brings to life through a combination of practical puppetry and digital effects.
To learn more about how Death of a Unicorn's enchanting beasts came to life, Mashable spoke with Scharfman about historical and real-world inspirations for the film's unicorns, and why it was necessary for the film to use puppets.
Death of a Unicorn's unicorns are rooted in centuries of history.
Death of a Unicorn centers on lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), who accidentally run over a unicorn on their way to a retreat with Elliot's wealthy employers, the Sackler-like Leopold family. While the Leopolds plan to exploit the dead creature's magical healing properties, art history major Ridley turns to the past — including the Unicorn Tapestries from the Middle Ages — to prove why that path would be a bad idea.
Similarly, Scharfman turned to historical depictions of unicorns to inform their appearance in the film. "I was interested in recontextualizing unicorns and subverting our modern expectations, which are all relatively recent," Scharfman explained. "The idea of the rainbows and white horse, that's only 50, 75 years old. If you go deeper, there were a lot of different associations with them, so that really informed a lot of the creature design."
There are three unicorns in the film: Elliot and Ridley's victim is the foal, while its parents, the mare and the stallion, attack the Leopolds in order to get their child back. Each came with its own set of inspirations.
The foal is the smallest of the bunch, with its white fur and goatee making it the closest unicorn, visually, to that depicted in the Unicorn Tapestries. More goat-like overall, Scharfman described it as being most similar to medieval unicorn descriptions.
"And if you really want to go back deeper, a lot of those accounts were based on animals off the Tibetan steppe, like kiangs and chiru," Scharfman said.
If the foal is the most goat-like of Death of a Unicorn's trio, then the mare is most equine, closer to a contemporary unicorn. Meanwhile, the stallion is the largest and most ancient of the bunch.
At the end of the day, we wanted the creatures to feel real.
"It's this big, bruising brute of a creature that is based on a lot of older accounts of unicorns where they were being conflated with rhinoceroses, since Indian rhinos have one horn," Scharfman said. "That's kind of believed to be what the first written account of a unicorn was, someone describing an Indian rhino to a Greek who'd only understood African rhinos, which have two horns and are slightly different."
Another ancient touchpoint for the stallion? A specific translation of the Old Testament. The King James Bible follows the Latin Vulgate in translating the Hebrew word re'em into unicorn. However, re'em actually refers to wild oxen, including the now-extinct aurochs. Their spinal geometry served as a reference point for the shape of the stallion.
"You take all these references and all these historical accounts, and then at the end of the day, we wanted the creatures to feel real," Scharfman said.
The unicorns in Death of a Unicorn are inspired by nature.
In order to ground the unicorns in reality, Death of a Unicorn's design team pulled inspiration from real horses, including Clydesdales for their shape, Icelandic horses for their shaggy fur, and Belgian Draught horses for their almost "bell bottom"-like hoof shape.
Other animals entered the fray as well. Lion tails inspired the unicorns' tails, adding a predatory edge to their movement. Their vicious teeth, meanwhile, were modeled on those of mandrils and wolves — all the better to snarl with, after all.
"[We were] trying to pull from nature as much as possible so that it didn't feel like we were just creating a monster in a lab, but rather it felt like something you believed could exist," Scharfman said. "A unifying umbrella over all of that was that they're almost like Ice Age creatures in terms of their aesthetic."
Still, this reliance on nature didn't stop Death of a Unicorn from incorporating more fantastical elements into its unicorns, a combination of subverting and satisfying audience expectations.
"A general design principle and rule of mythology of the creatures is that we're playing a game of telephone with the past," Scharfman explained. "Today we might associate unicorns with purple and rainbows, so we made their blood purple, and we gave the meat and the blood a little bit of iridescence."
We're playing a game of telephone with the past.
Wētā Workshop developed early unicorn concepts for the film, then Zoic Studios designed the creatures and completed the film's digital effects. For shooting, Budapest-based special effects studio Filmefex built Death of a Unicorn's many practical puppets.
Death of a Unicorn's practical puppets are total "movie magic."
For Scharfman, practical effects played a large part of his pitch for Death of a Unicorn; that way, it could remain in conversation craft-wise with his original creature-feature inspirations. The film combines practical and digital effects, but even in scenes where the unicorns are rendered entirely digitally, Scharfman kept the puppets on set as a reference point.
"It's invaluable to have the practical element there in terms of giving an actor something to perform against," he told Mashable.
And what practical elements these unicorns are! Massive, fur-covered rigs (with all the longer hairs individually punched in), these unicorns were manned by multiple puppeteers at once. According to Scharfman, it took three to four puppeteers just to control each unicorn head, but rigs of individual elements like hooves or snarling jaws could be operated solo, as hand puppets. The puppeteers were also involved in the actual building of the puppets, giving them an intimate knowledge of how they worked.
Scharfman recalled falling under the spell of the foal puppet during one of the film's first scenes, when Elliot and Ridley approach the dying unicorn.
"That puppet was incredible. It breathed, its neck moved, it had leg twitches," Scharfman said. "One of those things Guillermo del Toro talks about is how early in the movie, you need to sell the illusion. That was something we definitely were conscious of. That opening scene with the unicorn, the first time you see it really needs to do a lot to make you believe it. I was blown away, and I'd been watching [the Filmefex team] construct the things over months."
That illusion held throughout shooting. "You stop looking at the puppeteers, and you just start looking at the creature in the eye as if it's real," Scharfman said.
Even during early cuts of the film, Scharfman and editor Ron Dulin sometimes forgot to remove the puppeteers in frame, as they were so focused on the unicorns. The unicorns' spell persists, it seems.
"It's just movie magic, completely," Scharfman said.
