Nevertheless, it already stands as a culmination of what, in the hands of others, could have simply been a sketch gag or a one-off bit in a conventional comedy. Even Scharfman admits he originally imagined it to be a short film. Yet the more he toyed with the concept (sometimes substituting the unicorn with other magical creatures to see if it might play differently), the more he realized he had a truly killer opening for a larger story. Seriously, who doesn’t want to revel in a tale where a father and daughter mercy-kill the ethereal?

“When I first saw this script in my inbox, I thought, ‘I’m probably going to want to do this one,’” Ortega laughs about how she learned of the concept. Even better, the story gets right to it with Ortega’s character Ridley and her father, Paul Rudd’s mild-mannered Elliot, delivering the coup de grâce by page 10. “I love it when a script doesn’t waste time. It’s nice to just get into it. Like we want to see the unicorn.”

But the unicorn Rudd and Ortega’s characters see is not the beatific wonder doted on by Ridley Scott or Rankin/Bass. It has heavy clawed hooves, long cruel fangs, and hair that darkens with its mood. As one character surmises on the real unicorns of antiquity, they were supposed to be “divine monsters.” Which is true.

“The first recorded unicorn story goes back to like 400 B.C.,” Scharfman explains. “And it used to be a much more wild kind of monstrous creature that you have for most of their history.” The writer-director’s excitement is infectious as he rattles off facts and speculations. Roman historians might have misunderstood reports of Indian rhinoceroses when repeating tales of unicorns, and “in the Old Testament, the word used for unicorn, when you translate it back, is re’em, which actually meant aurochs… so [they were] more of a wild bull.”

What also became clear the more Scharfman researched the creature is they could be something that appealed to his heightened storytelling instincts. These were beings to be feared, respected, and in absolutely no uncertain terms, fucked with. “Old World gods,” as the filmmaker sums up.

He even found his way back to those Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries he saw as a child: “I became interested in the specific medieval unicorn mythology, and then [those tapestries] quickly came to the fore,” Scharfman explains. “Somewhere in the outlining stages, it became this idea of turning the movie into an adaptation of the tapestries.”