True Detective: Night Country Boss Reveals What Inspired The Gruesome 'Corpsicle' And How They Made It
We've seen a lot of scary stuff on True Detective over the years — but none of it compares to the high-grade nightmare fuel that Season 4's Night Country just served up.
In Sunday's second episode, Alaska cops Danvers and Navarro took a closer look at the frozen bodies Rose found out on the ice, identifying them as the missing research scientists and transporting the bodies in a single chunk to a local ice skating rink to preserve them, like one gigantic sculpture of human misery. In fact, classical sculpture was one of the key inspirations for what True Detective: Night Country showrunner Issa López lovingly refers to as "the corpsicle."
The mass of frozen bodies was "inspired by Dante's imagery" and "Renaissance sculpture of turning bodies," López tells TVLine. "All the references I used for the design were the tortured bodies of the Romanesque sculptures, souls in Hell, and the prosthetics team completely understood it. So if you read the scripts, in the script, it goes, 'It's like a knot of flesh and limbs and ghostly ice.'"
By episode's end, we learn that one of the missing scientists, Raymond Clark, is not one of the bodies frozen in the "corpsicle," which is a big break in the investigation — and a big problem for the show's production team, López remembers. "When the producers read it, it was like, 'How are you going to make a block of flesh and ice where you don't know how many men [there are]?' And I was like, 'Listen, I don't know,' but it needs to happen, because if I fail in that, the rest of the series falls apart."
López and the production team "spent months designing" the sculpture, and then after the actors playing the scientists were cast, "you scan them 3-D, they print them, and on the print, they do a sculpture that is silicone," adding detail "hair by hair" as they go. Sounds like a lot of work... but if the goal was to make us have trouble sleeping at night? All that work was worth it. (With reporting by Matt Webb Mitovich)
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