Death of a Unicorn (2025).

A while back I had the opportunity to take stock of the then recent output of what was a relatively new looking film company.  I say that the whole enterprise only looked new, because it turns out that A24 is a studio that seems to have been around longer than even its most devoted fans might realize.  The company got its start sometime way back in 2012, and right away, there's one or two features about it that makes this movie workshop stand out from the rest of the current crop.  To start with, A24 is (so far as I can tell) an entity which seems able to live up the label of being a genuine Indie production.  I've seen nothing that indicates it has the kind of business structure that telegraphs all the ways in which its beholden to the corporate bottom line.  It's got financial backing, yet none of it is on the level of Sony owning Paramount Studios.  Instead, A24 has been able to accomplish a minor miracle for itself.  In an era where all of the major Hollywood studios are teetering on the edge of an industry wide collapse due to an ongoing narrative thread of production mismanagement and poor business decisions, the brainchild of founders Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges has been able to keep itself afloat.  What makes this such an achievement is the way that they've managed to compete with the Big Names.  I don't recall A24 ever focusing all its attention and resources on any major tentpole franchise, like Disney does with Marvel, or DC over at Warner Bros.  Instead, they just make the kind of pictures that the other two used to do all the time.

Pretty much the whole output of A24 consists of these small, simple, standalone titles whose entire ethos and general narrative thrust seems focused on nothing more than the simple art of telling the best stories possible.  That's all; no fuss, no muss.  Just good, old fashioned once upon a time, and/or "This is what happened".  Since it's a company that doesn't have to worry about how to follow up on such a runaway success like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the Little Indie that Could has less of a hassle to deal with if one of their pictures doesn't do quite as well at the box office.  In fact, that's kind of almost one of their main selling points.  In choosing to devote their time and energy to mostly standalone narratives with clear beginnings, middles, and ends, A24 has pretty much wedded itself to the idea of belonging to a niche market.  It's products, and production costs seem geared to relying less on major box office revenue, and more the kind of old fashioned word of mouth that used to be all that studios like Paramount and Universal needed for films like The Graduate and The French Connection to become (for however short a time) household words.  All that has since been relegated to the realms of pop culture obscurity, yet it's within that exact same niche that A24 seem able not only to survive, but also thrive.  That's what makes it one of the strangest, yet most fascinating paradoxes of modern film.

By all rights, any movie company that decides to go ahead and take that kind of a risk puts itself in danger of being swallowed up by the current reigning sea of conglomeration.  The fact that this still hasn't happened to Fenkel and Hodges' production house is almost a wonder unto itself.  If there's any message to be gleaned from that, then it might just be a positive one.  It suggests that contrary to whatever the common assumption is, most of the faces in the aisles are still hungry for the kind of theater-going experience that can only be provided by a well told story.  In other words, it tells me that there's still a greater hunger for the less flashy, and individualistic forms of storytelling that used to be the norm of both filmmaking and movie-going before the advent of the Era of the Cape and Cowl.  I'm serious, even the runaway successes of films like Jaws and Star Wars was never enough to do away with that original zeitgeist.  I'm no longer sure what it took to change all that.  Yet at some point, the Tentpole film took over all of Hollywood as we currently know it.  I think the fact you really can't seem to fit ideas like Star Wars into this paradigm is a sign of just how incompatible it is with whatever the Big Studios think they're doing.  It's just another thing that makes A24 stand out from all the rest.

They seem to have remembered what others forgot.  They still seem to carry on that original realization that your film doesn't have to maintain this indeterminant connection to some greater franchise saga, like they do with the Marvel movies (and even this idea seems to be wearing the audience patience thin, these days) you just need to make sure you have a good plot that can draw the viewers in, and that's enough so far as they're concerned.  All of these traits coming together time and again is what makes this little indie studio so admirable in an atmosphere where all the others seem to be merging into one another.  A24 is shaping up to be the kind of place that remembers the kind of maverick spirit that gave birth to films like Star Wars in the first place, while also making sure to prioritize that ethos of independence first and foremost.  Everyone has their own idea, and each idea is unique, and worth preserving as its own creative vision.  That was pretty much the same dream that guys like Coppola and Scorsese shared in common with their fellow Movie Brats like Lucas and Spielberg.  A24 just seems to have been the one production company that's proved capable (so far, anyway) of picking up where they are all now slowly leaving off.  It paints a potentially somewhat rosy picture for the future of filmmaking.  It suggests that if there is some future fallout for the kind of corporate studio model of making films, then with any luck, it's little indie film houses like A24 that will be able to survive.

One of the ways that A24 seems to have been able to keep its head afloat is that it looks like they've taken a bit of the logic of their approach to making movies from guys like Roger Corman.  I suppose there's a certain amount of sense in basing their approach a similar strategy as that employed by one of Tinseltown's original rebel mavericks.  Corman is the kind of personality who would go out of his way to hold true to the idea of the director as both an industry outsider, and a self-made man.  He grew tired of the official studio system and broke away with others of a similar bent.  Together with the help of film producer-distributors Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson (no, not that guy, but close, in a way) Corman was able to be become one of the founding and then guiding lights of American International Pictures.  I don't know how many out there are even familiar with the brand anymore, yet there was a time when it was the Country's most profitable independent motion picture distributor.  It's the place where Corman cut his teeth as a filmmaker.  In time, he was making so much bank, that he was able to take his share of the profits and (true to his own lifelong independent streak) was able to make a go of it with his own company, New World Pictures.  As of this writing, the most remarkable discovery I've made is that the first company started by Corman, Arkoff, and Nicholson is still in operation to this day, and still producing and distributing indie titles.  That, friends, is an achievement to be proud of.

I bring all this past trivia up because it seems as if A24 is taking a lot of leaves out of Corman and Arkoff's book.  Just like American International, they're a small company run by and for the indie film scene.  Also like the house that Roger and Jack built, A24 seems to have found a particular market that is able to deliver on a number of services for the company.  They've found a specific niche market for certain types of films that turn in just enough of a profit to keep the studio afloat.  This in turn keeps the company's name in the spotlight, and allows them to generate both product and revenue at the same time.  Also like Corman's New World Pictures, A24 is able to use the profits from their niche productions to finance whatever films they want to, or believe in, regardless of having no Tentpole or star power to fall back on.  What matters is the story, first, last, and always.  If you can make that work, then all the rest falls into place, and that's what seems to matter most the this studio.  Like I've said, all of this paints the company as admirable, at worst.  It's also this niche market that 24 has been able to tap into that provides the closest spiritual link between what Corman and his partners were able to do with American International.  In essence, A24 has stumbled upon the perfect type of film that can help give it both the best possible publicity, as well as a constant profit margin.  For Corman and Arkoff, back in the day, this niche were films in the genres of Horror, Science Fiction, and pictures of Teenage Rebellion.

For A24, the niche is best described as Arthouse Weirdness.  Don't ask me how they do it, because that's the part I'm clueless about.  By all rights, everything I know about this Industry tells there's no way it should ever work, yet it does.  A24 seems to have found a way of making these works of artsy surrealism (often tinged with either Humor, Horror, or an admixture of the two) with just enough crossover appeal to allow them a substantial amount of mainstream success.  If I had to find a good way to summarize the kind of films that have given the studio it's biggest successes, then I would have to point to two previous examples from decades past.  Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up is a film from the 1960s that starts out telling what sounds like a simple day-in-the-life story of a London photographer that soon takes a U-turn into the off-kilter the minute he spots what looks like a dead body in one of his photos once the image is magnified.  From there, it looks like we might be headed into potential thriller territory, only for the final moments to give the audience one final head trip down the rabbit hole for a closer.  Basically, what films like Antonioni's gave its initial audiences was a foretaste of the kind of cinema that would be pioneered and placed on the map by the likes of David Lynch.  Put another way, if Lynch was an up and coming Zoomer maverick, A24 is the kind of place where he'd have to go to now if he ever wanted to get his start.  Twin Peaks could have been a 24 series, then.

That's the kind of picture that put the studio on the map.  In the pop culture mindset, at least, A24 has distinguished itself through breakout hits like Ex Machina, The Witch, Moonlight, and in particular, Ari Aster's twin breakout efforts for the studio, Hereditary and Midsommar.  It has been the success of films like the two just mentioned, and David Lowery's The Green Knight which has garnered a reputation for A24 as the slight brainier and artistic sibling to the likes of Blumhouse Productions.  There is a sense in which this understanding of the company will never be the whole picture.  In addition to works of the avant-garde fantastic, A24 has also made perfectly mainstream dramas like Uncut Gems, and even a few genuine comedies.  However, for better or worse, the fact the studio's breakout successes came from the likes of Aster's modern day Gothic stories, and Lowery's Arthurian surrealist drama means that the company will probably always find its biggest financial and cultural profitability within the realm of the Arthouse Abstract.  The curious thing about this fate is how, rather than being a handicap, it's almost like it was kind of the very turn the studio needed in order to maintain its sense of independence.  This is because no matter what genre the filmmaker chooses to set their story in, one of the key tenets of the type of Art oriented Magical Realism that A24 has come to specialize in is that it actively encourages the sui generis.  The company is looking for films that, for various reasons, can never be replicable.

Films such as The Whale and The Lighthouse are these insular narratives that, more or less by design, are meant to be one-offs that can't ever lend themselves easily to the kind of Tentpole franchises that other studios rely on to stay afloat.  As such, this places A24 in an ironically enviable position.  Even when their films are clearly set in the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction, or Horror, they are told in such a way that allows them to stand on their own, without needing to shoulder the burden that the rest of modern Hollywood finds itself under.  I don't say that this is the inherently right way to make movies, nor that one type of film is better than the other.  I merely note that so far as the popular genres are concerned, A24 has turned out to be the studio that found a way to return them to something like, not their original roots, in the strictest sense.  It's more that they were the ones to remind the audience of the other kinds of stories that can be told in these respective fields.  This blend of the mainstream, the Fantastic, and the quirkish is on full display in a slightly ridiculous, yet also somehow fascinating piece that I happened to catch not too long ago.  It's a clash of man and myth called Death of a Unicorn.

The Story. 

Hello, my name is Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd).  I guess I'm what you'd call...I don't know.  Maybe I should back up a bit.  Here's is what I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty.  To start with, people confuse me.  They make me nervous.  Just in general.  This was a discovery I soon made for myself not long after I was born.  I was born into the sort household that's often described as having a nervous disposition.  My parents saw to my schooling at an early age in that regard.  My mother always seems to be high strung and shrewish in my memory.  While my father often comes away looking brow-beaten and tepid.  When I was six going seven years old, a ghost got into our house.  At least, that's what I thought had happened.  I'd just gotten out of the tub for the night and was making my way downstairs.  The contraction of the wood made it sound like a man who wasn't there was making his (it's) way up to the second floor.  I was still very much just a young child at the time.  So I made one of, if not the biggest mistake of my life, and ran to my mother for comfort.  That's what normal little kids do as well when something frightens them.  What you have to understand, however, is this.  Those guys can count on a normal mother and father.  My mother is the type of girl whose reaction will escalate to the point where police are called in, false accusations begin to fly, and just as me, my brother, and mom are all about to be hauled in for questioning, my grandfather comes barging in and frightens the cops off with his shotgun.  I only wish that I could say I made all of that up.  It's just the way I was raised, you see.

I can't say how much good that sort of an upbringing has done me in this world.  All I know is that I tend to try and keep my distance from others as much as possible.  It also meant that discovering I was still able to fall in love with a beautiful woman came as the greatest shock I've ever known.  At least it did until just recently.  I'll get to that in a minute.  Before then I feel I need to explain just a bit more of my previous situation.  You must understand, I'm the last person anyone should ask about what it means to be either a husband or a father.  I've never known the first thing about raising kids, anymore than I ever expected to be the kind of guy lucky enough to fall in love.  Each of these things happened to me, though.  They seemed to have worked out both times, strangely enough.  The time with Jackie was really the best, looking back on it.  That's one thing I can be certain of.  For one thing, we had Ridley (Jenna Ortega) together, and somehow just being with the both of them made my mind a bit more...clear-headed, I guess you'd call it.  I'd surprise myself by knowing what to do in a lot of situations where previously I'd found myself at loose ends, more often than I expected.  I could even look waiters in restaurants, and convenience store clerks behind the counter in the eye, if you can believe it.  For a while there, it even looked like I might get a chance not just to know what normal was like, but also experience it first hand.  I've always wondered what that might be like, for what it's worth.

However, that proved to be something of a missed chance, as things turned out.  Jackie took sick and died.  That's about as much as I ever care to talk about it.  Ridley and I both got through the whole ordeal; or at least I think so.  However, she became withdrawn and sulky where she used to be this bright and outgoing kiddo before.  She spends most of her time in her room with her headphones blaring in her ears non-stop.  Her iPhone seems to have become her new companion more than anyone else these days.  As for me, I've sort of gone home again, you might say.  After coming within shouting distance of normalcy, it's back to the old, familiar grind of being puzzled and put out by just about everything we as humans do.  I've never been able to fully explain half of it, even to myself.  That sort of includes my own daughter, if I'm being honest.  I can recall when that didn't use to be the case.  Anyway, while I don't know if we can be said to have each other anymore, at least I've got my ledger books.  I've found it's turning pages filled with facts and figures easier than doing the same with other people, even if most of them are like me.  It was this same head for figures that got me a cushy job working for Mr. Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant).  I've never found out the full extent of what Mr. Leopold does for a living.  I know he's rich, so he must have done something to earn a private estate for himself way up in the mountains of the Canadian hinterlands...Right?...Well, this is what happened.

I got a call from Odell not too long ago.  It's the kind of phone meeting that guys in my type of situation spend their whole lives waiting for.  He wanted me to head up to his estate for a weekend business consultation.  He was laid up with the same disease that took Jackie, and it made him eager about what sort of legacy he might leave behind.  The reason Odell wanted me there was because he thought I might have the potential necessary to take over as the ruling stockholder of a number of his major companies.  Most of them were pharmaceutical in nature, I soon learned.  That came as no surprise.  What did was discovering Odell was impressed enough with my portfolio in both Law and Accounting to make him think I might be good successor material.  I don't quite know what Leo's son, Shepard (Will Poulter), or his wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) thought about that.  However the fact none of them ever glared daggers at me (so far as I was able to notice) leads me to believe no one is worried about being cheated out of their rightful inheritance.  From what I can tell, Shepard gets to be the new CEO of a number of his dad's companies, while I'm just brought on to by the official family advisor and accountant.  I don't know how much of a nest egg that is to others.  So far as I was concerned, it was one of those job offers that you just can't refuse.  So I packed up my bags, and made my way North.

There've been...one or two hassles along the way.  To start with, I never really could find any sitters for Rid.  She's just about going on 17, and she's at the point in her life where she'll insist she's old enough to take care of herself.  And, "Anyway, leave me alone"!  You...know how it is...kids.  Anyway, aside from me not daring for a moment to leave a girl that young all by herself, Odell and the family told me they wanted to get a chance to meet her.  For whatever reason, the fact that I'm a father and a widower has made me a personal favorite for them all, I guess you could say.  If I had to reason why, it's because Odell claims to see a lot of his own situation reflected back at him through what me and my daughter have been through...Are going through?  So as if having to navigate through mountainous , unfamiliar, Canadian terrain isn't bad enough, my daughter keeps informing me in no uncertain terms that she doesn't want to be there.  She's never said she hates me yet, though something tells me that state of mind is lurking somewhere close by.  To top it all off, we were late for the meeting because we ran into a bit of the local wildlife on the way to the estate.  At least I think that's the best term for what we ran into.  I might have taken my eye off the road to try and reconnect with Rid when the accident happened.

She saw the thing in the road before I did, and by the time I slammed on the breaks it was too late.  When the car came to an actual stop, the...animal in question was laying a few feet in the road behind us, with its sides half caved in.  We got out to look at what we'd hit...and...I'm still not sure I've ever seen a creature quite like this.  Even now, I'm still not quite sure why we decided it was a good idea to take the carcass and load it up into the trunk of our ride.  I think it might have been over a concern about getting into trouble with the authorities over endangering a possibly protected species...having to pay a fine...something like that.  All I know is I ended up driving to Odell's compound with what looked like a very weird dead horse in the trunk of my car.  This could have been a problem, though not an immediate one.  We got to our meeting late, yet the only real issue was explaining where the fresh drops of red had gotten on our shirts.  Some of it even got in my eye.  That last bit was my fault.  I...suppose you could say I was trying to put the animal out of its misery...and because it looked like it was weirding Ridley out.  I had to use a tire iron for that job.  The best I could do on short notice, and all.  Even this wasn't enough to put a damper on the proceedings at first.  Things went south when we heard noises from the car.  Turns out the roadkill we ran across earlier still wasn't quite dead.  Which is strange because I saw that thing's brains exist it's skull.  Nothing comes back from that sort of injury, except this one did.

We might have arrived late for our meeting, yet at first everything seemed fine.  It wasn't more than 30 minutes into the ice breaking before everyone present began to hear a loud "Thump!" coming from somewhere outside.  It might have been one of Leopold's service staff, Griff (Anthony Carrigan) I think his name might have been, who was first to pinpoint the racket as coming from the back of my car.  I was just hoping no one would ever have to find out about all that, if I'm being honest.  If I had any plans about what to do with the thing in the road, then it might have been to find some time to sneak away, drive somewhere to a nice secluded spot in the countryside, leave the remains there, then hustle back to the Odell's compound and do a reasonably good job of putting it all behind me.  The thing in the trunk had other plans, I suppose.  We all of us rushed outside to see what the commotion was about.  Even Odell managed to make his way there with the rest of us.  I know he got their just in time to catch the real sideshow.  At first it was as if someone was playing an invisible boom inside the vehicle.  The whole damn thing looked and even sounded like a whole bunch of circus clowns trying to throw a rave.  Until that moment, I never knew it was possible for an average station wagon to do the old hustle and jive to a beat none of us could hear.  The car's occupant seemed determined to prove me wrong on that score, however.  Just as Odell joined us, something hit the back window from the inside, real hard.

A brief blot of stars appeared in what was once a smooth plexiglass surface.  Then whatever was inside hit the window again.  This time the stars disappeared.  What replaced them had the unmistakable shape of a horse's hoof.  It even sounded like one, except for all the other times when it didn't.  The owner of the hoof withdrew it's foot from the window, then it came back again, and once more withdrew.  Then the thing poked itself through the hole it had made in the car.  Everything about it looked familiar and off at the same time.  The head that was set upon an already long neck writhed back and forth.  It's shrieks and squeals where like those of a roan in one breath, and more like that of a minotaur with the next.  In the middle of its forehead was a growth.  I knew two things at once the minute I got a good look at that part of the creature.  The first is that I was looking at a piece of its skull.  It was built much in the same style of a Triceratops, except a better term in this case was to call it a Monoceros.  The second thought that followed on the heels of this realization of was as profound as it was simple.  "It's just a baby", I thought.  It's the one thing about that event that still stands out clearest in my memory.  I suppose even a pure fool like Shepard could have found that out on his own...if you gave him time, that is.  Yet this realization was like a strange sock to the gut.  I guess that's what made it real to me.  

The kid that I ran over trying to break its way out of our car was the first major shock of the day.  The second was when Leopold's personal assistant Shaw (Jessica Hynes) put a bullet in it's brain.  All of this happened at once.  Yet even as it was all going down, some weirdly stubborn part of my mind insisted on catching sequences of the whole affair, as if my own gray cells were doing their damnedest to try and find some sense of order in the unbelievable.  I guess everyone else must have been on the same wavelength, because when Shaw and Griff dragged the remains of that it was just a kid thing from the wreckage, all any of us could think to do for a long while was to just gawk and stare.  This was no ordinary roadkill, some unextraordinary piece of asphalt meat.  It was so much something else that when some of us began to struggle for words, the best Griff could come up with was: "What I can say with total confidence is Elliot here has hit a...a horse-like mammalian with some sort of protrusion or growth".  I was willing to let that be my working theory, "a feral horse".  Then Rid had the guts to state flat out what we had on our hands.  "It's a fucking unicorn"!  So, that's sort of how it all started, and why I'm facing the sort of jam I'm currently in.  You see, it almost looked as if things could still be, no longer simple, by any means.  I think proving that a bunch of fairy tales have at least some level of truth to them is enough to cancel out the idea of things being simple.  It could have at least been manageable.

The short version goes like this.  I run over a myth.  We discover that the child's creature's blood is capable is curing diseases, and maybe even reversing age to some extent.  We find ways to patent and market this literal fantastic discovery.  Everybody profits, and we all go home happy.  What do you ya say, huh?  I suppose I would have liked for that to happen.  I would still have had a chance at believing this whole thing was just a misunderstanding of some sort then.  So, of course, instead, here I am.  I'm holed up in a sprawling mansion which is really the 21st century equivalent of a rich baron's castle fortress, and the reason I'm stuck having to do that is because in addition needing to find a way to transport the remarkable remains to a lab where experts can figure it out, I'm also having to deal with cries and shrieks coming from the woods.  The real kicker about those noises is how familiar they all are.  I first heard them emerging from the back seat of my car.  The difference is those were just a child's cry the sounds of some young a baby's cry offspring, I guess you'd call it.  These other sounds belonged to mommy and daddy something bigger.  Tell me something, have you ever been a parent?  If so, do you have any tips?  No matter how much effort I put into it, it's like I can never get my daughter to see reason.  Ridley keeps insisting we should leave when it's obvious that they've got us surrounded there's no good reason to do so.  I'd like to say that the wisest course of action would be to just bed down for the night, and leave in the morning.  However, it's starting to look a lot less simple right about now.

For one thing mommy and daddy have teeth, those strange noises in the woods seem to be getting closer.  I don't see how it's possible to get much sleep with all that racket.  For another, mommy and daddy can rip, tear, and sting, Shaw and Griff report that they have seen movement in and around the compound.  Something tells me mommy and daddy are as old as the Moon, older than the hills it's best to keep an eye on stuff like that.  Not that there's anything wrong, you understand, it's just mommy and daddy are VERY angry! that sometimes it helps to be cautious.  So, that's my story and my situation.  I'm miles from any place I've ever called home.  I've got my baby girl on my hands, who needs looking after.  She keeps locking me out of her life, anyway.  Earlier in the day I ran over an extra from the Brothers Grimm.  The system of this walking hallmark greeting card has medicinal properties which function like the stuff of a book of spells more than it does regular medicine.  It's sent Odell into some kind of space out, because the man looks like he's gearing up for war.  Going on about the great hunters of the world.  And still those noises keep getting closer.  This is my world...and welcome to it.

Conclusion: A Welcome Piece of Schlock Theater.

Lets us now sing the praises of a certain type of film.  It's something I've talked about on and off in this space as the situation allows it.  If what I'm about to say makes me sound like a broken record, then it's no more than what most of us do when it comes to defending our favorite Rock songs, or genres of music.  With that sort of frame in mind, no matter what anyone else ever says, I'm always going to have a soft spot in my heart for the B-Pictures and Drive-in Schlock films of my parents generation.  I think a lot it is down to the fact that I cut my teeth on the work of artists like Vincent Price and Edgar Allan Poe at an impressionable age as a young, developing Horror fan.  For better or worse, it was films like The Pit and the Pendulum and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that have shaped how I view the genre.  For however long I've got, I'll maintain to the last that films like Robert Wise's The Haunting, Black Sunday, and even pictures with such cheesy production values and a title to match, such as Planet of the Vampires can nonetheless introduce modern audiences to a greater sense of the wider vistas to be had and explored in the landscape of Gothic fiction.  In a day and age when most films bearing the Horror label still seem content to go with an unconvincing mix of quiet subtlety that gets undercut (sometimes literally) with the usual kitchen sink hack-and-slash approach, a movie like Fiend without a Face, The Quatermass Experiment, or The Night Stalker can show us lost and forgotten levels of creativity.

A good example of what I mean can be found in a somewhat obscure Schlock offering with the nifty title of The Last Man on Earth.  It's a Vincent Price vehicle, and the vast majority of it features Uncle Vince as he's holed up in an old, Gothic manor, trying to ward off hoards of ravenous vampire zombies.  It might take a beat for modern viewers to realize what they're looking at.  However, if you give it a minutes thought, you'll discover that what Price and screenwriter Richard Matheson have given us with this obscure little popcorn flick is nothing less than the blueprint for future efforts such as 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead.  The whole subgenre of the Zompocalypse seems to have had its big screen debut thanks to the efforts of the inventor from Edward Scissorhands, and one of the future writers for The Twilight Zone.  Let this be just one lesson that the old school Schlock flick still has to teach us kids today.  I bring all of this up because as I was watching the flick under discussion here today, it didn't take me long to realize that what I was watching amounted to nothing less than a modern day ancestor of those Drive-in B Pictures churned out by the likes of Roger Corman once upon a time.  It's even possible to argue that the technical proficiency on display is also something of a throwback to the sometimes genuinely endearing budget constraints that are a hallmark of those poverty row offerings.

In doing so, however, and whether intentional or not, all that director Alex Scharfman has done with this film is to telegraph his own efforts as the work of an Individual Talent working within a long established Tradition of the B-Movie Gothic.  To give an idea of how he does this, I'm going to posit that the first thing Scharfman does is to follow two formulas in one.  The first belongs to the likes of old Grade Z studios like American International.  It's the second formula that Scharfman bakes into the plot which comes as the real jaw drop surprise (or at least it does for me), and this is something we'll talk about further on in this review.  For now, let's focus on how the story of giant, killer, horse-like things shares a lineage with the legacy of Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson.  In Danse Macabre, Stephen King defines the crucial elements of the B-Picture as follows: "They were simple, shot in a hurry, and so amateurish that one can sometimes see the shadow of a boom mike in the shot or catch the gleam of an air tank inside the monster suit of an underwater creature (as in The Attack of the Giant Leeches). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment; often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as Terror from the Year 5000 or The Brain Eaters, something that would make an eye-catching poster. Whatever the elements were, they worked (32)".  I doubt that Scharfman worked the same way.

Something tells me he took a bit more time in crafting his own schlocky narrative, however there is enough resemblance between his final product and a movie like Fiend Without a Face, that I do have to wonder if he has a healthy liking for those kinds of titles, which in turn might have acted as an influence in the script for Death of a Unicorn.  The basic setup of the film is one that would have held a certain appeal for producers like Nicholson and Arkoff.  If the setup and staging meant everything could be made on the cheap, then they might have given such an idea the greenlight.  I doubt they would have been able to do the same for Scharfman's project.  Even with all the action confined to just a single location, the script still has all the sorts of budget demands that would have required bigger finances than what AIP could have either provided or tolerated.  It's also an inverted example of Scharfman's film showing its age.  This is the kind of idea that could only have been entertained in a post-digital revolution era of filmmaking.  Back then, not even someone like Walt Disney could have helped get a picture like this off the ground.  Despite the film being an undeniable product of latter days, it still somehow manages to contain plot beats and creative choices that help it resonate with the spirit of companies like Corman's New World. Productions.  To start with, it's obvious that most of the money went into the special effects budget.  This doesn't mean the film is lacking the rest of the way.

Far from it!  The acting is solid, and there's one performance we need to highlight later as a standout.  The cinematography is well done, being even better than in similar indie works such as Walt Before Mickey, and even if he had to work with a lighter vault than the regular studios can give him, it's clear overall that Scharfman was able to give an essentially B-Grade plot the A-list treatment in the production department.  This marks the total visual style out as the film's single departure from the regular aesthetics of Schlock.  I might think there's a bit of a shame to be had in that, yet it's no big thing.  We're not talking about any kind of deal breaker for me, here.  The final result is still fine, as it is.  I just can't help wondering how someone like Joe Dante would have handled this material?  Especially if he decided to go full homage, and shoot everything in black and white; that kind of thing.  Still, the cinematography is never the real point of any film.  That might sound blasphemous, yet I speak from experience.  All the greatest shots  in a movie combined won't amount to anything if there's no good narrative through line to hold the viewer's attention.  It's precisely at the level of the writing that Scharfman's script holds its greatest number of surprises in store for the attentive viewer.  It turns out we might be dealing with a greater deal of sophistication than belies the film's Schlock surface.

In order to give the reader of what I think might be going on with Scharfman's picture, it kind of helps to set the parameters of the type of Gothic Fantasy that he's telling here.  To do that, I'll have to start with something else King said in Danse Macabre.  "Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst’s couch, about one thing while it means another. I am not saying that horror is consciously allegorical or symbolic; that is to suggest an artfulness that few writers of horror fiction or directors of horror films aspire to...To suggest that Roger Corman was unconsciously creating art while on a four-day shooting schedule and a budget of $10,000 is to suggest the absurd (22)".  I think King gets one thing wrong there.  His belief that guys like Corman didn't know what they were up to on the symbolic level of Art can be easily disproven by the director's own words.  In an interview, Corman went on the record as saying, "My theory was that if (Edgar Allan) Poe was working with the Unconscious Mind, (then) the unconscious is not really aware of the outside world.  The outside world gives a stimuli through our eyes, our ears, our nose; even taste.  And transmits this stimuli to the Unconscious Mind, which is only aware of the information given to it.  It's not aware of the outside world.  So I felt I wanted to create a dreamlike, interior world (web)".  It's a statement that corrects at least one aspect of King's thinking, while still leaving his basic thesis statement more or less intact.

Corman might have been making Schlock, yet he knew going in that he wanted to have at least some kind of intelligence to it.  The good news is that this doesn't contradict what King has to say next.  "The element of allegory is there only because it is built-in, a given, impossible to escape. Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight, with the bark still on; it offers us a chance to" exorcise "emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand (33)".  Near the very end of his valuable study, King provides the capper to this line of though of thought stated above.  And it's with this quote in particular that I'd argue he grants viewers the necessary key to unlock the secrets of Scharfman's B-Picture fable.  King holds that, "Modem horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it (422)".  The reason for highlighting this bit of peculiarity on King's part is because I think it is just possible to argue that what Scharfman has given his audience is a picture that amounts to the exact same type of Everyman drama that was still popular during the days of Shakespeare and the Globe Theater.  If that sounds like a tall order to ask for just a simple Drive-in flick, then recall what Corman said above as well.  It's possible to go into a Schlock project with at least some intention of elevating such material to the level of genuine Art.  Or at least as close to the concept as you can get with a little bit of effort, no matter how crummy the final production budget end up.

This appears to be what Scharfman was able to achieve under his own steam.  The funny thing is that in doing so, he sort of had to go back to the work of the Renaissance dramatists in order to pull it off.  To be specific, it very much looks as if Death of a Unicorn fits in well with a distinct subgenre of early modern literature known as the Satirical Drama.  This is a type of play that could be either comic or tragic depending on the writer.  The main point, however, was that (much like today) it's major goal was to skewer a target of attack.  In Shakespeare's time, this was done through any number of means; a lot of which are still with us today in repackaged form.  Then as now, these sorts of dramas relied on an extensive use of Irony, Hyperbole, Wordplay, the Contrast Between Social Classes (i.e. Haves and Have Nots), and various forms of Social Commentary.  None of this is new so far as we're concerned, and that's because all of it stretches back to a time well before the Bard of Avon ever learned to write his own name for the first time.  If there was ever anyone like a reigning monarch of Renaissance Satires, then Shakespeare aside, the crown would probably have to go to a man named Ben Jonson.  There's an irony to that, of course, and one the writer in question might have been able to appreciate, and it's best stated in the form of a question.  Who the hell is Ben Jonson, anyway?  What the fuck makes him so important?  Well, for one thing, he wrote one play that has a great deal of resonance with Scharfman's film.  It's called The Alchemist, and like the Unicorn flick, it satirizes the folly of greed and power.

If I had to point to any play that typifies the sort of drama that Jonson was known for, then this one about the exploits of roguery among the English rulings class would have to be it.  Much like Scharfman's script, Jonson's play is concerned with the fate that befalls a collection of greedy, selfish, and avaricious nobles as they fall victim to their own desires.  There's a lot more to talk about with a play like The Alchemist, yet it's the idea of how a group of wealthy snobs meets a fitting end that is able to make an effective transition all the way from the Renaissance stage to the modern movie screen.  Much like the Jonson play, Scharfman's script details what happens to a bunch of rich Yuppies when one of their employees pays a mandatory visit, and they learn that, for what ever reason, he's run over a unicorn on the way to his appointment.  When they bring the animal carcass inside, everyone discovers that, yup, apparently they've got the exact same creation straight out of the Cloister Tapestries and the Medieval Bestiaries lying on an operating table in the custom made hospital wing of an otherwise normal 1 percent McMansion somewhere in the middle of the Canadian Rockies.  A bit of further exploration reveals not only is the myth a reality, but so are some of the common attributes that were assigned to it in what Griff calls "the original, Medieval discourse" (and like you, I'm just surprised the little dullard could even put those words together in a sentence, much less figure out what they mean).

It seems that the folklore about unicorn's blood being able to heal someone on the brink of death is true.  It's something that Richard Grant's character discovers at first hand, when a simple I.V. drip rigged up with the pulmonary fluid from the mythical piece of roadkill manages to cure him of an inoperable disease.  From there, things begin to escalate as Grant's family patriarch goes from corporate entrepreneur ready to place nature's very own Elixir of Life on the market, to a great white hunter wannabe obsessed with tracking down more of this elusive quarry.  This is a goal that soon shifts from decisions such as which  of the animals should be kept alive for further research, and those that can have their head mounted on a wall, to an increasingly desperate and wild search for ways to protect his home and property from being overrun when the foal's parents arrive.  All of these moments are brought to life by a performance on Grant's part that, it has to be said, pretty much steals the show.  From the moment the script allows him to throw away his cane, Grant delivers what I can only describe as a Gonzo interpretation of the typical Jonsonian villain.  In many ways, he's the one with the standout performance in the film.  Once he's allowed to drop the act, the former Hudson Hawk star wastes no time in turning not just the scenery, but also the whole damn screen into his personal snack bar.

I can say with all honesty that I did not go into the film expecting this level of entertainment.  What Richard Grant gives the audience is something just a bit more than a character.  Instead, it's more that he's able to embody the idea of Joy in the Performance.  In his hands, Leopold Odell goes from this decrepit, Gothic patriarch into something very much resembling an inspired cartoon character.  If my use of these terms makes some viewers nervous, trust me when I say there's no need for that.  We're not talking about Johnny Depp phoning it in like with Tim Burton's Alice adaptation.  Instead, what we're given is something on par with some of the great Villain Thespians of cinematic and/or broadcast history.  Throughout the ages, there's always been a certain type of character actor who somehow always know the best ways to bring the bad guys (and sometimes even the gals) to life.  The earliest known examples of this performance would have to be Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, and Lucille La Verne as the Wicked Queen in the original 1937 Snow White.  Most audiences today, however, tend to point to at least four names when it comes to discussing the great movie villains.  They are Christopher Lee, Tim Curry, Vincent Price, and maybe Christopher Lloyd.  Trust me when I say all you have to do is ask any movie fan what they think of these guys, and you'll get the kind of smile and excited anecdotes that most of us reserve for well liked friends or family members.  That's the effect of talent and good performance at work.  It's something that each of the actors just listed have always been great at.

Everytime one of them is given the chance to play the ne're-do-well, nine times out of ten, they'll tend to give the sort of performance that can make an otherwise forgettable script memorable.  It's clear Richard Grant is up to the same thing in Scharfman's film, and it is a sight to behold.  He's got a very clear idea of what kind of story he's in, and he plays the part to the hilt.  In doing so, Grant is able to steal so much of the scenery away from others that it's almost a shame to see him go.  The good news is that the rest of the main cast is very good to.  A first it might seem as if Will Poulter and Jenna Ortega are going to be eclipsed by Grant's performance.  Yet it doesn't take long for the former to prove he's got what it takes to hold his own against a veteran character actor, and you begin to see why he could have at one point been cast as Pennywise the Clown.  Ortega, meanwhile, is faced with the daunting task of playing the main hero.  The good news for her seems to be that this is a role that doesn't leave her hanging in the lurch.  Scharfman is able to uncover an appropriately left field denouement that sees her more or less becoming a figure straight out of Medieval folklore.  It's just as goofy as it sounds, and that turns out to be not just a good, but even a necessary thing for a film that lives or dies by the commitment it gives to its inherently bonkers premise.  This is a story where over the top is the general rule of thumb.

It means all the cast and crew have to be willing to find their inner cartoon alter egos, and then let that dictate how things turn out.  The good news is that I'm able to report that the final product is of such a quality that even the side characters are able to get a memorable line or scene for themselves.  Stand outs in this category include an old family retainer who is always hedging his bets on whether to remain loyal or save his own skin, and a dedicated medical professional who meets a fittingly gruesome end.  With all that said, what really makes everything work so well is the surprising level of thematic richness that Scharfman is able to bake and layer into his script.  I have spoken before about how the story contains resonances with the tropes found in the satire of Renaissance Comedy, and how the basic setup is eerily like the work of Ben Jonson.  To be more specific, the script for Death of a Unicorn reads almost like an affectionate inversion of a play like The Alchemist.  Like Jonson's work, Scharfman's narrative centers around what happens when a bunch of rich snobs get the chance to make a marketplace killing on what they believe to be a magical substance.  The major difference that Scharfman introduces into Jonson's setup is to invert one of its core ideas, and let the magic be real.

I've described this creative choice on the director's part as something of an inversion.  However, I am not so certain that this is the same as calling it a subversion.  The reason I think this is because in the case of either narrative, what matters to both Jonson and Scharfman is that a price is paid.  A strange, yet genuine kind of ethical balance is restored when a great deal of the cast meets their comeuppance at the hands of what they all take to be a magical McGuffin.  In both the play and the film, this outcome is centered on the attempts of the villains to get their hands on a perceived Elixir of Life.  All that Scharfman does with his Jonsonian setup is to make the stakes a bit more interesting by letting the magic in his story turn out to be all too real.  It's the way he lets the titular magic beasts of his film restore that sense of moral balance that gives the film some of its most wonderfully demented moments (one particular highlight is when Poulter has the chance to destroy his four-footed attackers with a flame-tipped arrow, only to have a better idea; it's in moments like this that Scharfman seems to go a further step beyond Jonson by bringing in the grand guignol theatrics of the Satirist's fellow playwright, John Webster).  Yet no matter how ridiculous the proceedings get, the through line that hold the entire film together is one that would have been familiar to a lot of the great Elizabethan authors, and artists.

One way to describe it is that Scharfman's dramaturgy presents his audience with the picture of a number of lives out of joint, and the correlative question of whether they can ever be righted again.  Another way to put it is to borrow a familiar pair of Renaissance terms from Stephen King.  According to Danse Macabre. all Horror fiction comes down to a struggle between what his calls Apollonian and Dionysian forces (422).  On one side of the equation, you have what might be termed to forces of Order and Harmony.  On the other side, you've got nothing much except chaos and Old Night.  For King, every good work of Horror that manages to be worthy of the title concerns itself with the struggle between these two polar opposites, and whether the main cast has it in them to resist the one, and take a stand for the other.  It's an obtuse concept nowadays, yet it was not just a familiar one to guys like Shakespeare, it also seems to have been a notion that guys like Jonson held very dear.  The latter writer even going so far as to make it something of the primary concern of The Alchemist.  For all his skill at ribaldry, Jonson considered himself something of a moralist at heart.  For him, the struggle between chaos and order was an almost primal concern that in his mind centered on the "Humour" or Character of any given human being.  A man could raise himself to the very roof rafter of the stars, in Jonson's equation, or else he could turn himself into something worse than a beast.  Think of him as a slightly sunnier version of Mark Twain.  However you want to phrase or look at it, that was the primary concern with Jonson's artistry, and it seems to be a theme he shares in common with Scharfman's script.  

This sense of a deeper sophistication lying beneath the film's Schlocky surface can be further seen in how Scharfman handles his title characters.  This is the one element of the script that the director seemed eager to telegraph to his audience.  It can be found in the choice of names he gives to both the film's main villain and his son.  Rich Grant's character is named Odell, while Poulter's is called Shepard.  What the attentive viewer will realize is that neither of these creative choices were made at random.  Instead, it's a case of the director taking a leaf out of The Simpsons, and choosing to reward those viewers who are paying attention.  Odell Shepard is the name of a by now obscure literary scholar with at least one notable book to his career.  The title of that book is The Lore of the Unicorn.  If there's anything that stands out as remarkable about this source material, then it has to stem from the fact this seems to have been the only full-length scholarly text devoted to this particular iconological image.  I'm not sure there are any other studies out there on this particular myth.  The fact that Scharfman name drops the book's author not once, but twice, seems to be his way of indicating to his audience not just that he did his homework on the subject, but also that he seems to be pointing to which breadcrumb trail to follow for those who would like to gain a better understanding of the themes he's working with.

In way I guess that's one of the most interesting things about Scharfman's work in this picture.  Turns out Death of a Unicorn is a very allusive work.  It's the kind of story that comes with this built-in awareness of the Lore its working with, and then somehow manages to find all the best possible ways of breathing this interesting sort of life into what is otherwise one of the most cliche of poetic images in the pantheon of world mythology.  To my knowledge, I have only ever seen this done twice before.  The first was in a short story by James Thurber, and later on, in a novel and/or film adaptation by Peter S. Beagle.  What unites each of these disparate efforts is the fact that the artists have found ways of taking an idea that can sink into the realm of cavity poisoning at the drop of a hat, and not just avoid this perennial pitfall, but somehow find all the best ways to make the concept work.  I think the fact that you can count on the fingers of one hand just how many times this has been done well is a pointer to just how difficult of a challenge working with material like this can be.  It forces the artist into what has to be one of the most thankless of balancing acts.  The reason this for this is because the unicorn, just as an imaginative concept, has always carried the wrong sort of vulnerability around with it for too long a time.  It doesn't take long for an image like that to fall off the highwire from a state of poetry to the worst sort of saccharine insincerity, the sort of sentimentalism that even Hallmark wouldn't go near.

What Scharfman's work seems to have in common with those of Beagle and Thurber is that it's able to find all the right (a more correct word is to say the director was lucky enough to stumble upon the proper) mythic resonances that would imbue the image with something as close to poetry as the script can manage.  In doing so, I suppose it's just possible to claim that Scharfman has found a way of imbuing the concept with something like a dignity that it normally doesn't have.  A lot of it seems down to the literary erudition the director is able to place into the narrative, and hence on to the screen.  One final part of those ingredients has already just been mentioned, yet it's worth going into a bit more.  I've already mentioned how James Thurber once created a brief, humorous vignette around the idea of an encounter with a Unicorn in the Garden.  What's notable about his work for Scharfman's film is how the filmmaker seems to have taken the main human lead from this Fable for our Time, and transplanted him into the secondary world of his own picture.  This seems plausible to me when you consider the narrative arc of the father in the movie, played by Paul Rudd.  In many ways, he's something of the typical Thurber protagonist.  What I mean is the former in-house humorist for The New Yorker is the one responsible for creating the type of neurotic modern Everyman figure that would later become a staple of the cinema of Charlie Kaufman and (for better or worse) Woody Allen.  These are the confused figures who always seem to get lost easily in the rat race of modern life.  They're often at loose ends, always unsure of themselves, and can never find it in themselves to take charge of their lives.

That's a very apt description of Elliot Kintner, the wayward father figure at the heart of Scharfman's story.  Along with Ortega as his daughter, Rudd's character comes off as this bundle of uneasy self-contradictions.  He's not the most confident of fellows, whether the subject he's faced with is learning how to stand up for himself in what is nothing less than the most toxic of work environments, or else just trying to figure out what it takes to become a good father for a daughter who clearly needs someone to be there for her during what looks like a difficult time.  The major struggle of Rudd's father figure is to see whether or not he has it in him to take a sand for his family, or is he going to let his neurosis doom them all?  In other words, Elliot is the just the type of character that Thurber would be right at home spinning a comic scenario around.  All Scharfman has to do is take these shopworn concepts and toss them into a blender with the usual tropes associated with the likes of Roger Corman, Steven Spielberg, and George A. Romero to get his desired results.  That allusion to the wunderkind behind Night of the Living Dead is no throwaway reference, either.  He's perhaps the final contributing ingredient of the story as a whole.  Because all Scharfman has done is to take the scenario of a group of people trapped in a confined space with an external danger waiting outside, and threatening to breach the barriers erected to keep them out.

It's one of those most basic of scenarios in the history of the Horror genre.  One that first Romero, and later John Carpenter would go on to make into something iconic.  At least that's the best explanation I've got for why so many artists (both among the amateurs and the pros) have found such a wealth of ongoing material to mine from a simple premise.  That's no different for Scharfman's film, and while I don't think it will ever get the same acclaim as Night of the Living Dead, or The Thing, it's still possible that what we've got here is the makings of a future cult movie.  At least I hope that's what happens here.  If this should ever prove to be the case, then I hope fans of this movie realize that a great deal of what makes it work, aside from a number of great performances from the likes of Grant, Poulter, and Rudd, is the way Scharfman has managed to pull off a remarkable artistic feat with his script.  In choosing to let the Horror of his story center around one of the most benign and docile of creatures from Medieval folklore, the director has chosen to place his story in a tricksy sort of situation.  The challenge comes from figuring out how do you make a unicorn scary?  Of all the creatures you could choose to set a Fright Flick around, the Monoceros has got to be so far down on the list of options it's a wonder Scharfman even considered it.  While there's never been any hard and fast rules about the artistic use of Fear as such, there does seem to have been this unspoken assumption that unicorns can't be scary.

There's just something about the very idea of the poetic image.  It doesn't lend itself well to going bump in the night.  A better candidate for that sort of thing might be the Pooka of Irish folklore.  The same can't be said for the more familiar equine themed wonder.  In choosing to go the route that he has, Scharfman seems to be taking a calculated risk.  He's set a unique sort of challenge for himself.  The problem he has to solve is whether or not the enchanting can also be the terrifying?  This seems to be the question that Scharfman posed going into production on his script, and the final results are fascinating in what it ends up telling us about such an idea.  First off, it should be made clear that, in the strictest sense, the puzzle that the director poses for himself is not only nothing new, it's also possible to claim this is a question that was answered and solved a long time ago.  It's already been done as far back as the Shakespearean Age.  Even when an early modern Fantasist like Spenser was busy composing The Faerie Queene, there was already a rich lore full of the darker sides of the enchanted glade for him to draw on.  In fact, there are several episodes in the now often obscure narrative poetic cycle that can stand on their own as nascent examples of the emerging Gothic genre.  Figures like the multi-headed Orgoglio, the snake-like Error, and the Blatant Beast all have early features of Horror in their nature.

Even long before this, the anonymous Beowulf Poet was able to give English literature its first great boogeyman in the figure of Grendel.  None other than J.R.R. Tolkien has written an essay detailing the thematic significance that the creatures of the night held for artists and audiences in the Middle Ages.  Hell, there's even been a full length study devoted to how Spenser's use of monsters and the monstrous functions in a similar manner to that described by Stephen King, as an allegorical cipher for the fears and ruling anxieties of the current zeitgeist.  This is something that the Horror genre has been able to do throughout all times, whether the writer is Spenser, the Bard, or the author of Beowulf.  The importance of all this for Death of a Unicorn boils down to two things.  The first is that in terms of originality, a whole lot of other creative types beat Scharfman to the punch a long damn time ago.  The idea of turning the enchanted inside out, so that it becomes the horrific, was trailblazed perhaps as far back as the idea of Theseus entering a dark maze, with nothing but a guttering torch, and a spool of thread to guide his way.  Horror and wonder have been shifting into one another for years long before the first English settlers ever arrived in a valley off the Pacific Coast that would later be christened Hollywood.

It was during the advent of the Renaissance, during Shakespeare's time, that an established line of generic separation (however artificial) began to be carved into the public Imagination.  Critics like Paul Elmer More have described the nature of this literary paradigm shift well.  "In the earlier days the superstitions of England were concerned chiefly with the fairy folk of hearth and field, a quaint people commonly, and kindly disposed, if mischievous. But with the advent of Puritanism came a change; the fair and frolicsome play of the fancy was discredited and the starved imagination had its revenge. In place of the elves and goblins of a freer age, instead of ‘‘Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the hellwain, the firedrake, the puckle’’ and all that antic crew, the imagination now evoked the terrific spectre of the devil and attributed to his personal agency all the mishaps of life (112-13)".  More goes on to demonstrate the difference between the monsters of the Classical Age versus the Modern one by paying attention to the way each era has handled the archetype of the Witch.  To modernize the point he makes in contemporary terms, a character like the sorceress Circe is often an ambiguous personality, occupying a state that is not always outright immoral, while always operating just outside the bounds of social norms.  In contrast, a figure like the Blair Witch is really nothing else except a straightforward personification of the Fear of the Dark, and of what things might be lurking within the shadows (113).

It's the settling in of this sort of crowbar separation between Terror and Enchantment that has defined the nature of both the Fantasy and Horror genres for the longest time now.  It's here that we arrive at the second point of this generic setup, and what it means for Scharfman's flick.  It all boils down to one observation.  There seems to be a growing movement afoot in both of the aforementioned genres.  A lot of writers and filmmakers out there are becoming curious about whether or not it's possible to break down the boundaries that have heretofore delineated what does and doesn't count as frighting in the Fantastic genres.  Without ever leaving any of the classic Terror Tropes behind, there does seem to be this growing sense of wanting to see how far the boundaries can be pushed in terms of what counts as scary.  This is a phenomenon I've encountered once before when it came time to review a short novella by Joe Hill entitled "Faun", and again when I had the chance to review an entire Dark Fantasy novel by Hill's father, Stephen King.  In each of those texts, we find the same situation.  The artist is curious, and thus consumed with the question of whether the enchanted can also be horrifying.  So they set pen to paper in order to find out.  Each example can be counted as a success.  King is able to create the slightly better narrative than his son, in this instance, and a lot of that is down to the latter dropping the ball near the end of his respective artistic excursion.  The point, however, is that they've proven it can be done.

It's now possible to enter an age where artists seem to be in the midst of rediscovering that older unity between the Fearsome and the Wonderous that guys like Spenser and Arthur Machen knew like the lines in the palm of their hands.  What was once an instinctive artistic to choice such writers is now in the process of becoming a rediscovered skill for today's practitioners.  In finding a way of making one of the most mawkish and sugar-coated entries in the Medieval Bestiary into a fearsome creature of the night, one that is able to present a wonderfully goofy yet genuine sense of threat, Scharfman has carried this ongoing exploration further up and further in.  Whereas writers like C.S. Lewis kept a clear boundary line between the dark and the light aspects of Enchantment, Scharfman's film poses the question of what happens when those boundaries are broken down, or violated, and it becomes difficult to tell Enchantment from Fear?  It's an intriguing question, and I while I can't offer any one-size-fits all solution to a brainteaser like that, I think Scharfman (like King and Hill) has given audiences a good example of what it can be like when it's done well.  All this praise shouldn't be considered an endorsement of out with the old, in with the new.  In the first place, history has proven that the future of storytelling can never exist without an artistic narrative past to draw on.  In the second, it's still possible for the boundaries seen in secondary worlds like Narnia or Middle Earth still have their place.

A final reason for why it's impossible to claim that Scharfman's film acts as a call to jettison the older practices is precisely because his film functions as part of a rediscovery of a poetic practice that is older than the work of Spenser, not some new bit of totally novel Inspiration.  Even the Beowulf Poet kept the same contrast between light and dark.  Whoever he was, the guy also just happened to know that it's fun to blur the lines every now and then.  Something tells me that such literary descendants like Tolkien might have known this as well, and maybe even Lewis too, if you go by the contents of an oft-forgotten Sci-Fi short story.  I'd argue all of this counts as just one more example of the layers of sophistication embedded within the narrative of Scharfman's film.  It's also what makes me able to admit how surprised I was by the final result.  I was not expecting this picture to be as enjoyable as it was.  This is a film that is way more entertaining than it needed to be, and I'm thankful for that.  It's a demonstration of what happens when the director, the screenwriter, and the crew are willing to go the extra mile and see if he can excavate just a few more bits and pieces of inspiration out of the ground.  It marks out this film as somewhat unique, in that it's a showcase of a lot the best possible creative decisions.

There can be times when the artist is confronted with an interesting choice.  A good way to say it is that sometimes a storyteller will find themselves confronted with the conundrum of Robert Frost's two diverging roads.  One creative choice will amount to playing it safe.  The other is the path of greater effort, of seeing if you can go that extra mile to make your narrative work to the best of its abilities.  It's a tough choice to make, and a lot of artists tend to fold when confronted with such possibilities, and it's easy why they do that.  Going the extra mile for the sake of a make-believe plot can be what helps put your project (whether a book or film) over the edge.  The real trick and problem is the uncertainty.  Not every creative idea is going to be a good one.  Sometimes what looks good on paper comes off as ridiculous in real life execution.  There are also moments when the wannabe artist can delude themselves into thinking a dead cell of an idea is still worth salvaging, when all they're doing is putting lipstick on a pig.  It means that making a story work is going to be a gamble at the best of times, and there's no real telling how good or bad of an artistic judgment call was made until the final product makes it's curtain call.  Something tells me this was the kind of choice that Scharfman was faced with when it came time to first set his ideas down on the page, and later bring them to life on the screen.

The good news in his case is that I'm able to say, it worked.  The director took the best possible risks in the service of his story and it paid off.  Going back to what I said about B-Movies, that really does seem to be the genre that a studio such as A24 has gotten good at as they find their footing in this market.  And director's like Alex Scharfman seem great at delivering the goods, not just for the production company, but also for himself.  What we've got here is one of those pleasant and fun little surprises that life can throw at you every now and then.  It's probably going to go down in history as an underground sleeper hit, of sorts.  The kind of film that's destined to build it's reputation by good, old fashioned word of mouth, until it becomes one of those pictures that will be fun to put on or stream as part of the Midnight Movie circuit.  That seems like a fitting enough fate for a film like this.  It's the type of story that harkens back to the glory of Roger Corman and Vincent Price when the two were working together for American International.  Nowhere is this more obvious to me than with the casting of Richard Grant as the film's villain.  A good way to look at his performance is to view in terms of a specific acting legacy.  By giving a deliberately calibrated execution to his character, Grant has pretty much allowed himself entry into a select coterie of great character actors.  These are the ones who made scene chewing into an artform.  He's now up there with the likes of Price, Christopher Lee, or Tim Curry.

In fact, one of the great things to be said about both Grant's performance and his character is that it manages to hold its own in comparison with both his peers and predecessors.  What I mean is that if you were to take Grant out of the equation, and substitute either Lee or Curry in the villain role, then the great thing about that is that the film would still hold up just as well.  The fact that Grant is able to take this role and make it his own, while also signaling his awareness of the specific tradition of scene chewing villainy that he's a part of is a testament to the man's own talent.  Aside from this, part of the fun of imagining either Lee or Curry in Grant's role is that either choice would be a very amusing in-joke for fans who are aware of the others times when both these legends have had encounters with the Monoceros.  Beyond all this, however, the real fact is that Alex Scharfman has done cinema a bit of a favor.  What he's given us here is what I call a good piece of well made Schlock.  It's an unironic statement of not just the overall quality of the film, but also as a demonstration of well-earned aesthetic merit.  What the director has shown us with this picture is not just that Schlock has its place, but also that it's possible to take a Grade Z premise and elevate it to the level of genuine Art.  It's one of the rarest feats that anyone can accomplish in the film business, even today.  The fact that this is what Scharfman has done allows me to claim that The Death of a Unicorn is a film well worth seeing.