A John Carpenter Horror Classic Gets A Shout-Out In True Detective: Night Country
Issa López's "True Detective: Night Country," the fourth season of the pulp crime series created by Nic Pizzolatto, kicks off with one heck of a hook. Scientists holed up at the Tsalal Research Station on the outskirts of Ennis, Alaska (which is itself on the outskirts of civilization in the sparsely populated state) are winding down after a long day of doing ... well, whatever it is they do up there (the first episode does not make this clear). They're doing laundry, making dinner, settling in for a movie ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off") with a bowl of microwave popcorn, and evidently content to be where they are.
And then, in an instant, they're not there anymore.
A delivery man who shows up with supplies, expecting help in unloading his truck, wanders through the station seemingly seconds after the sequence we've just observed (Matthew Broderick is still rocking out to The Beatles' "Twist and Shout" on the television), only to find the facility absolutely deserted. It's the first of seventeen straight days of night in the remote region; no one wants to be outside in this brutal, below-zero weather if they can help it. What happened to them, and how could they just vanish into thin air?
We're still waiting for the answer at the end of the episode, though we at least know where they went: into a frozen pit of ice where their popsicle-stiff bodies are fixed in a moment of agony. It's a horrifying image, one that might have you recalling the chilling terror of John Carpenter's "The Thing." Judging from one blink-and-miss-it shot earlier in the episode, it's clear that López absolutely wants this classic film on your mind.
Has The Thing assimilated True Detective?
Based on John W. Campbell's sci-fi novella "Who Goes There?," which was first adapted to film by director Christian Nyby (with considerable input from producer Howard Hawks), Carpenter's "The Thing" strands us in an Antarctic research station packed with a surly, bordering-on-stir-crazy group of men who, one-by-one, are assimilated by an alien lifeform. They're stuck inside this meager edifice until a research team can extract them; alas, given the speed at which they're being assimilated, this means they're almost certainly doomed.
The Tsalal station is also an all-dude deal, but, as far as we can tell in the few moments we spend with them, they aren't at each other's throats like Carpenter's crew. It helps that their setup is much cozier than the Antarctic outpost. They've got internet access, a gym and shelves loaded with DVDs. This beats playing cards and a cheating chess computer.
The DVDs immediately caught my eye because this is the present day, and who except for cinephiles has that much physical media anymore? The scientists seem to have access to high-speed internet, but maybe it's not entirely reliable. This doesn't matter. What does matter is what's on the shelf. And, wouldn't you know it, a certain Carpenter title gets placed front and center – albeit in the background – of a shot.
Keep watching the shelves!
As Jodie Foster's ornery Detective Liz Danvers gets the lowdown from her deputies on the bizarre disappearance and what these men were up to in this mysterious, extremely well-funded facility, López frames her in front of the shelves. Because I'm the kind of guy who can't help but examine another person's film collection (quickest, most surefire way to find out if I want anything further to do with them), I squinted my eyes and tried to make out some of the titles. I immediately spied Ken Kwapis' dire 2007 Robin Williams vehicle "License to Wed" and Dave McNally's lose-all-hope-in-humanity action-comedy "Kangaroo Jack." Whoever stocked this library did so via a Best Buy bargain bin.
But just as I was writing these scientists off as movie buffs, López briefly cuts away from, then quickly back to Foster roughly the same position. Boom. It's "John Carpenter's The Thing." And it's not a DVD. It's a freakin' VHS copy.
I'm not one of those nostalgia freaks who watches old pan-and-scanned movies on videotape, so, aesthetically, these guys are still cultural philistines to me. But the film's inexplicably sudden appearance on the shelf suggests a mysterious force, perhaps the same one that (possibly) teleported these guys to their frigid demise, put it there. This means something. Or, y'know, the script supervisor just totally bungled the continuity.
Joking aside, I love López's intentionally cheeky gesture, and hope it means this season of "True Detective" will go full-blown Lovecraft as the first season threatened to do at times. Placing two strong, complex female cops at the center of the mystery is already a welcome change of pace, but López has the opportunity to blow viewers' minds. Let's get good and eldritch up in this piece.