A unicorn that kills shouldn't work. The creature belongs to children's birthday parties and Lisa Frank folders, not body counts. Yet 'Buddy' has become one of 2026's breakout hits precisely because it refuses that logic. At IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking Summit on October 24th, producer Tracy Rosenblum, co-writer Jamie King, and Roadside Attractions' head of digital marketing Melissa Yerou dissected the formula behind a film that turned every expectation of its central character inside out. ## The Premise That Shouldn't Have Worked On its surface, 'Buddy' appears to be a dark comedy about subverting childhood innocence. The film introduces its titular unicorn not as a symbol of purity but as something far more complicated—a creature whose violent tendencies clash with everything the cultural imagination has built around its species. It's a high-wire act: lean too hard into the absurdity and you've got a one-joke sketch; play it too straight and the premise collapses under its own weight. The team's discussion at the Summit centered on how they navigated that tightrope. They didn't just slap a horn on a slasher villain and call it subversive. Instead, the film uses its central contradiction—mythical purity meets murderous impulse—to ask what happens when we're confronted with something that refuses to behave the way we've been conditioned to expect. ## What the Film Is Really About Strip away the unicorn and the violence, and 'Buddy' is a film about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of things that don't fit. The murderous unicorn isn't just a gag; it's a walking embodiment of cognitive dissonance. How do you reconcile something that should represent innocence with actions that are anything but? The film suggests we do what humans always do: we rationalize, we reframe, we find ways to make the incompatible compatible. This tension runs through every frame. The unicorn's presence forces characters—and by extension, the audience—to constantly recalibrate th