How True Detective: Night Country got its gruesome ‘corpse’ just right

It starts as a flash – the briefest glimpse of something horrifying, something icy to the point of blackness. We get more: a head, a limb, a grimace. It starts to come into view, all over the stage, through bits of dialogue: these men were freezing to death in clearly painful fear, their bodies hanging in the middle of the coils as well as in the ground. Frostbite abounds; some even clawed out their eyes. Once they finally exhume the bodies, they will be transported as a single, frozen mass on an ice tongue to the local ice rink so they can slowly thaw. It’s Lovecraftian and spectacular. It’s exactly that True Detective: Nightland production designer Daniel Taylor hoped it would be so.

“It’s the cornerstone of the whole show,” says Taylor. “It was absolutely terrifying sharing the space with it. You were always informed. When we were setting up the rink, you were always looking over your shoulder because it felt like someone was watching you – or six people were watching you.”

To get the shape just right, Taylor and showrunner Issa López sat down to wade through all the “random thoughts that pop into your head about what it might look like” after reading the “little body” description on the page. They quickly worked out some of the details of what it entailed: While Taylor had initially assumed the bodies could be tangled, López wanted to lay them out in a more linear fashion. The sloping cascade of limbs could clearly have the group “terrified in one direction.” To help illustrate how each scientist might be positioned and entwined with another, López playfully dropped to the ground and began imagining how the terrified bodies would be frozen.

Among the influences they eventually brought in:

• “A shrunken head where the skin begins to retract, revealing a mouth that is dislocated or disjointed” (a work by Phil Hale, a suggestion by López)
• Berlinde De Bruyckere, a Belgian artist who sculpts “really violent parts where you have cutouts through it, and you can see this kind of skin draped and stretched, and you’re not quite sure if it’s part of a body that you’re looking at”
• Ringu – specifically “a reveal where they open a closet” (if you know, you know)
• The Eternal Fear of Francis Bacon (the painter, not the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain)
• A photo of a baroque underwater dance to give the whole a ‘sense of movement’, as if this pile of bodies were merely standing still in panic

The latter was a suggestion from their prosthetics team, Dave Elsey and Lou Elsey (a rec for Guillermo del Toro’s López), who had the hardest part actually building the mass of bodies.

Photo: Michele K. Kort/HBO

Photo: Michele K. Kort/HBO

To do that, there was another back and forth about how the bodies would be connected and entwined, and discussions about the different stages at which they would be thawed. They received scans of the actors to make the proportions exact. After practicing the expressions, they had the actors hold “these terrifying positions” with their faces for twenty minutes so they could get a real live cast. They spoke to experts to get just the right level of “the blackness that had taken over their feet and fingers.” It was extreme, but that was what the little body demanded.

“Each eyebrow hair was punched individually; each tooth was cast individually. It was an incredible piece of artistry; I have never had a job where so much time and effort was put into making a prosthetic,” says Taylor. “We see it in the dark in the snowstorm, we see it under the bright lights of the rink – we can’t hide from it. It must be of high quality.”

The result speaks for itself: a colossal mass of horror, something impossible and deeply rooted at the same time. When asked whether he and López took the supernatural into account at all when constructing the work of art that is the corpse, Taylor declined to comment (at least for those who have only seen Episode 2). Suffice it to say, they wanted it to be a nightmare; as Taylor said of De Bruyckere’s art, “It certainly feels organic, but it’s really nasty.”

True Detective: NightlandThe first two episodes of the series, complete with the body, are now streaming on Max. New episodes drop every Sunday night at 9pm EST.