Death of a Unicorn Director Alex Scharfman on Crafting a Timely Dark Comedy

A24 and filmmaker Alex Scharfman are ready to shine a new light on unicorn lore with the arthouse distributor’s latest genre release. In Death of a Unicorn, Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) and Paul Rudd (Avengers: Endgame) play a daughter and father who accidentally run over a baby unicorn on the way to an important meeting—one that could make or break their family’s dealings with the dad’s mega-rich employer. The bizarre sequence of events leads to a discovery that could change the world, if it actually gets out of the realm of a mansion in the secluded magical woods.

io9 recently sat down with Scharfman to discuss the film’s genesis, the decision to cast Ortega alongside some of the funniest actors working today, and why satire in today’s world needs to be fantastical in order to be able to laugh at it.

Sabina Graves, io9: So, I’m not usually a unicorn fan, but I think you finally made me a unicorn girly. So thank you for that.

Alex Scharfman: That’s what Jenna said too. Jenna was not into unicorns. I mean, I wasn’t into unicorns until I started researching the movie. But yeah, I think hopefully people are getting a layer of depth that we didn’t know was there for a while.

io9: I get it now. They can be metal as hell. Let’s start at the beginning. What is the backstory on you taking on this project specifically? Because it’s a wild ride.

Scharfman: The idea just kind of came to me; the opening scene sort of splodged in my head somewhere and I don’t really know where that came from. But sometimes that sort of thing happens, where you imagine a scene and you’re like, “Where does that go?” This very naturally just started pulling the thread of like, “Where does that lead?” and “What if someone hits a unicorn with their car?” “What is a unicorn?” Like, what do we bring to that as a people?

io9: When you imagined this happening to a daughter and her father, did you think, “Oh yeah, Paul Rudd would be that dad”?

Scharfman: At the time, no, it was before actors or characters—it was a scenario. And I didn’t know what was going on or where they were going or what it was; [it was] just something that stuck out in my mind. It took me a couple of years to even start exploring it. 

io9: Definitely. And it also gave me the vibes of a Kurt Vonnegut short story that takes fantastical elements to tell a very real satire tale.

Scharfman: Can I just say I’m a huge Kurt Vonnegut nerd? And he actually has a story about a father and son in the Middle Ages, which is weird.

io9: Oh yeah, his unicorn hunting story.

Scharfman: Unicorn Trap.

io9: Right! 

Scharfman: Yeah, okay. So you know the story.

io9: Did you actually think about that while you were writing this, or was it happenstance?

Scharfman: That was kind of happenstance to be honest. I have read and have the full Vonnegut anthology. I’ve read every short story he’s ever written. But that one was not one that I was actively thinking of, because the unicorns aren’t actually that big of a central figure in that. It’s more about the father and son. 

io9: Definitely with that in mind, obviously you’re a huge fan of satire then. Do you think there are fundamentals to making a satire film like this, especially during a time where literally every day in real life feels like a satire?

Scharfman: It’s funny, when I started writing this, I started outlining it like 2019. And I think fall 2019, Knives Out had just come out and I was like, “Oh, cool, satire.” Obviously, we’ve had a lot of satire lately in a class commentary vein. I think there was something about this that was attractive to me, when I started researching unicorn mythology and unicorn lore, which I think at a certain point I realized was kind of inherently about class and about social structures and strata. But especially the tapestries that we encounter in the movie that are referenced throughout, those are about a lord sending out his court and his minions to go kill a unicorn and bring it back to him so he can possess it forever.

It’s very much about commodifying nature and social hierarchy that allows one person to say, “Go do this for me and bring it back here so I can own something,” which I think is fundamentally about class and satire. I thought the story was kind of naturally asking for that. In terms of the context of 2025, I think when you’re doing a horror satire, the fun of that is being able to do both horror and satire. [They] are genres that live well with metaphors and I think there’s a fun opportunity to align metaphors.

However, I do think that there’s something intentionally unsubtle about the movie that I think is because we live in unsubtle times. And maybe that’s what we do at this moment is, you know, we live in an era when the world’s wealthiest man has an office in the White House; it’s very much like it’s all on the surface. Now I feel like things used to be a lot more veiled and there were certain degrees of decorum or norms that have since been kind of chucked out the window. It felt appropriate to me to make something that was direct and hopefully cathartic, and I certainly thought about the unicorns having a sense of violent restorative justice, which feels appropriate for the moment we live in.

io9: Like the whales versus yachts! Amazing. No, it’s so wild that this just happened to get on that wavelength, because I was dying from Will [Poulter’s] petulant tech bro performance. Because I’m just like, wow, like we’re seeing a person like that all the time now, normalized, but he just nailed that role. 

Scharfman: I couldn’t agree more. I’m so lucky Will is in the movie and delivers the performance that he did because I think it’s funny and it’s wild and over the top and big, but it’s also very grounded in this kind of human psychology that I think speaks to a larger degree of, “How do we get here?” What kind of personality type did we as a society develop and foster into existence? This millennial man-child tech bro, these self-styled masters of the universe who think they have all the answers through a degree of bravado and just bolstering forward.

io9:  He and everyone you surrounded Jenna with are the funniest people. So it’s kind of wild to see her up against the bonkers likes of Richard [E. Grant] and Paul [Rudd] with a straight face. That bit with Anthony [Carrigan] and the damn grandfather clock. I did not catch it on the first view until Jenna pointed it out!

Scharfman: That was one of my favorite jokes; it really kills me. The movie takes inspiration from a lot of creature features from the ’70s to ’90s, but also class satires in the sense of genre, like Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and [Robert Altman’s] Gosford Park. These movies are real ensemble movies, which, I love an ensemble movie where you kind of have all these characters standing in for archetypes for social structures or things bigger than themselves. And because they’re this ensemble in a very contained way, they get to be a little bit larger than life. In this very contained ecosystem [of a film] it affords people the opportunity to be a little big from time to time, and to kind of lead it to that theatricality and that fun dash of camp.

It was just fun populating that and then Jenna was kind of the audience’s surrogate. She’s our eyes and ears. She’s the person whose values we agree with. That was kind of the nature of the story, [it] was always [Jenna’s character] Ridley at the center of this bizarre world and dealing with these crazy people, with the Leopold family and their schemes. Paul’s character really recognizes [they] are crazy, but he wants things from the crazy people, so he’s acting as if they’re not and she’s not down with the game.

io9: Touching back on your inspirations for the creature feature aspect of this, I for sure got John Carpenter and Amblin vibes. What are the mechanics of getting deep into that—obviously creating unicorns where they are a combination of practical and CG, and how you wanted to frame them in the story? I’m so happy you didn’t shy away from hiding them.

Scharfman: I think in a contemporary creature feature, you need to satisfy that for the audience, and especially with a movie that’s intentionally reinventing a creature. Keeping them in shadow, keeping them in fog, obscuring them for a while but by the end of the movie they’re in broad daylight just walking down the stairs, you know, and giving you that pleasure of saying “We’re actually going to get a good clean look at this thing.”

io9: What did the actors have to act against for all those suspenseful scenes?

Scharfman: It was a combination of things we had. At times we had live horses on set, we had puppets on set. We had really large beautiful puppets. I love the puppets; they were so much fun. And whenever possible we use the puppets.  It was really important throughout the whole process to have as much as possible practical elements in place, not just for the actors but for me composing shots, just wanting to see those as much as possible.

There’s certainly VFX, but even when we had VFX, we had our puppet heads that were more of a VFX lighting reference head. We would have puppeteers still walk through the shots so that the actors knew where the creature would be, and knew what the creature would look like in each position, and how it would be moving around. There’s a real tactility to them; there’s some shots that are just puppets, obviously, in the movie. It’s always exciting when you can figure that out it’s part of the puzzle of the filmmaking process for a movie like this.

Death of a Unicorn opens this Friday.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.