How True Detective: Night Country got its ghastly ‘corpsicle’ just right
It starts as a flash — the briefest glimpse of something horrific, something freezing to the point of black. We get more: a head, a limb, a grimace. It starts to come into focus, around the scene, through bits of dialogue: These men froze to death in clearly agonizing terror, their bodies suspended mid-writhing as well as in the ground. Frostbite abounds; some even clawed their eyes out. Once they finally excavate the bodies, it will be as a singular, frozen mass, transported on a tongue of ice to the local rink so they can slowly defrost. It is Lovecraftian and spectacular. It is exactly what True Detective: Night Country production designer Daniel Taylor hoped it would be like.
“It’s the cornerstone of the entire show,” Taylor says. “It was absolutely terrifying to share the space with it. You were always aware. When we were dressing the ice 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, Taylorand showrunner Issa López sat down to wade through all the “random thoughts that enter your head about what it could look like” after reading the description “corpsicle” on the page. They quickly narrowed down some details of what it had to entail: While Taylor had initially supposed the bodies could be in knots, López wanted them more linearly laid out. The sloping cascade of limbs would allow for the group to be all clearly “terrified in one direction.” To help illustrate how each scientist might be situated and entwined with another, López gamely dropped to the ground to start acting out how the terrified bodies would be frozen.
Among the influences they ultimately pulled in:
That last one was a suggestion from their prosthetics team, Dave Elsey and Lou Elsey (a rec to López from Guillermo del Toro), who had the hard part of actually building the mass of bodies.
To do that, there was another back-and-forth of how the bodies would be interlinked and
Read more on polygon.com
