An Oscar-Winning Director Played A Hand In Creating True Detective: Night Country's Grotesque 'Corpsicle'
This post contains spoilers for "True Detective: Night Country"
Episode 2 of "True Detective: Night Country" is one of the most explosive installments in the series for years. First, there's the revelation that "Night Country" is a stealth sequel to season 1 of "True Detective" with the confirmation that Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw)'s late husband, Travis, is indeed Rust Cohle's father. Then, there's the confirmation that the Tuttle family, responsible for the ritual killings in season 1, are funding the Tsalal research station, further cementing "Night Country" as a long-awaited follow-up to Nic Pizzolatto's classic first season.
But even without the season 1 connections, new showrunner Issa López has done an excellent job of crafting a story and a world that could very easily stand on its own. Set in the fictional Ennis, Alaska, "Night Country" eschews the sweaty environs of Louisiana for a frozen town shrouded in perpetual darkness. Indeed, the sign greeting visitors to the town reads, "Welcome to the end of the world." As you might expect, given that foreboding introduction, Ennis is indeed home to several horrors that are wholly distinct from any other iteration of the crime thriller anthology.
So far we've seen ghostly figures that may or may not be hallucinations and witnessed an opening scene in the inaugural episode that plays like something straight out of John Carpenter's classic "The Thing." But surely the most horrific image "Night Country" has yet gifted us is the so-called "corpsicle" — the name Jodie Foster's Liz Danvers gives to a collection of bodies frozen together during some sort of feverish panic in the Alaskan ice. As it turns out, this unforgettable image was not just López's brainchild, but was brought to life with the help of an Oscar-winning director and a dedicated effects team.
Calling in the master
As if the image of frozen bodies stilled in a perpetual mental breakdown isn't horrifying enough, Issa López makes sure to give the corpsicle an extra dose of nightmare fuel by way of an introduction that recalls an infamously disturbing scene from David Fincher's "Seven." As episode 2 starts, Liz Danvers is startled when one of the seemingly deceased scientists starts writhing in agony while still trapped in the tundra. But even without this nightmarish jump scare, the corpsicle itself is a marvel of horror filmmaking ingenuity.
That's hardly surprising given the talent that worked on sculpting this grotesque tableau. As López told IndieWire, the episode 1 script originally read:
"The naked, mutilated bodies of at least four men are frozen solid on the icy ground, partly covered in the hardening snow. The wild expressions of pure panic on their faces are almost not human, but still we recognize the faces from the Tsalal Station."
Chilling enough. But López wanted to ensure this frightful image was realized as vividly as possible. So, she made a call to a modern master of the horror genre. She explained:
"I decided to ask the master of horrible creatures, and I called Guillermo del Toro. And I was like, 'Maestro, I'm going to be shooting in Iceland. So I need someone in the U.K.... I need someone who can create something as complex as this.'"
According to the article, del Toro pointed López towards Igor Studios' Dave and Lou Elsey who guided the creation of the corpsicle, alongside "Night Country" production designer Daniel Taylor, VFX supervisor Barney Curnow, and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.
Creating the corpsicle
It seems the extent of Guillermo Del Toro's involvement in creating the corpsicle was recommending Dave and Lou Elsey. But based on the lengths they and their team went to, and the undeniably upsetting final result, the famed director couldn't have given Issa López a better recommendation. As IndieWire reports, the actual creation of the model was a painstaking process that involved creating a digital model before the actors visited the Igor Studios' facilities to have "thousands" of pictures taken. As Dave Elsey told the outlet:
"The first time we ever met [the actors], they all had to strip off down to their underwear and we had to try to get them in the positions we needed. You couldn't have done plaster casts of them or anything, it would have been too complicated."
Making matters more difficult was the fact that López directed the actors over Zoom, issuing instructions as to how they should contort their bodies in order to convey the horror of the scene. This all culminated in the Elseys creating a real-world model based on the digital concept, which had been tweaked to include the actors' photos. The real model was created using foam body casts that were then used to construct the final silicon dummies, which, in turn, formed the modular pieces of the final corpsicle. This was then shipped over to Iceland where López and her crew had the unenviable task of not only lighting the final model convincingly, but lugging it around the frozen landscapes of Reykjavík, Akureyri, and Dalvík.
While the corpsicle would eventually end up under the bright lights of the Ennis hockey rink, the team also had to tackle what would prove to be yet another major challenge: burying it in actual snow.
This is just the beginning of López and del Toro's creative partnership
In order to shoot the scene where Rose Aguineau discovers the bodies and the scene where Liz Danvers and the Ennis police try to extract them from the ice, the crew had to actually bury the final corpsicle model in real snow. According to IndieWire, this involved using a "fairly hefty digger with chains," which was used to not only lower the model into the hole dug by the "Night Country" team, but also lift and reposition it several times in order to get the various shots needed.
Ultimately, this was all worth it. As López told the outlet:
"We were so worried up to the very last moment that it was not going to look cheesy or, you know, like something out of a mold, but [look] like a really frozen person. And it was so good, we didn't have to hide anything. We could hold long shots on the faces and the feet and all the details. So I was very very satisfied with our little corpsicle."
And to think, none of this would have been possible without a call to Guillermo del Toro, who's seemingly been a fan of López since he saw her 2017 breakout film "Tigers Are Not Afraid." Since then, he's reportedly signed on to produce Lòpez's upcoming "werewolf western" and has her on his director's wish list for "Cabinet of Curiosities" season 2. It's safe to say, then, that the corpsicle is just the beginning of what will surely be a long and fruitful collaboration between the two horror maestros.