No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands of Big Pharma executives, who discover its horn and blood can miraculously cure all ailments, and want to sell its ground-up horn and blood to wealthy customers for big profits—until the unicorn’s angry parents come to seek violent revenge for their child.
Readers may, however, be surprised to learn that this film, for all its surreal imagery, is actually much closer in important ways to how ancient and medieval sources describe unicorns than perhaps any other recent media depiction. While twenty-first-century popular culture generally portrays unicorns as friendly, docile creatures and associates them with plush toys and backpacks for young girls, in premodern traditions, the most consistent traits associated with unicorns are their fierceness, their impossibility to tame, their devotion to their foals, and their ability to kill humans who would seek to capture them in large numbers.
Continue reading “Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous”