“In a lot of unicorn mythology, lions and unicorns were enemies,” Scharfman adds. “But here they’re kind of allies, or at least the unicorn seems to be happy to let them drink from the water the unicorn has purified.” It’s a departure from the myths, as well as where Death of a Unicorn goes next….
The Unicorn Crosses a Stream
In this scene, the kingsmen fall upon the poor unicorn and begin their attack as it attempts to flee across a stream. The image sets the stage for the bigger carnage to come later, but right down to the costumes of the hunters, beginning with the gent attending to the dog in the bottom left corner, this image helped inform the look of many of costume designer Andrea Flesch’s creations for the film.
“There’s certainly lots of little textures and details like Will Poulter’s bathing suits,” Scharfman comments. “There’s these really great stripes, vertical stripes on one of the characters’ pants, and that was certainly an influence that we took for Will. Costume-wise, Paul wears blue throughout the movie, Jenna wears red throughout the movie. They’re kind of moving towards each other [which gives you purple]… the Leopold family, which is played by Richard, Téa, and Will, they wear a lot of gold. Gold, white, black, that’s their palette, and when you look at the characters in these tapestries, they’re wearing red, blue, gold, and then there’s a lot of green in the background.”
Even the scientists’ lab coats in the film are made to mimic the high collars of late Middle Ages fashion.
The Unicorn Defends Himself
Now we get into the images that really start to influence the strange, bemused tone of Death of a Unicorn. And we are not referring to the orange tree high above the action of this scene or the red-roofed castle far off in the background. Both of those informed the look and garden of the Leopold estate, which the director is quick to point out to us. But it is the violent carnage and death in the foreground of this tapestry that immediately catches the eye.
“This was one of the first bits of unicorn violence that I had seen in any artwork,” Scharfman remembers. “When you look in this tapestry, when you go up close and you see it, it’s stabbing this dog in the intestines. It’s a hunting dog, so I think it’s self-defense. But when you go very close or if you got a high enough resolution version of it, it is very gory with the level of detail in this wound that it’s inflicting on the dog.”
