It begins like a flash – a glimpse of something terrible, something that freezes until darkness. We get more: a head, a limb, a grimace. Through portions of the dialogue, it becomes clearer around the scene: these men froze in visibly agonizing terror, their bodies both mid-writhing and hanging into the ground. There is a lot of frostbite; some even scratched their eyes out. Once they finally dig up the body, it is transported as a single, frozen mass on a tongue of ice to the local ice rink, where it is allowed to slowly thaw. It’s Lovecraftian and spectacular. That’s it True Detective: Night Country Production designer Daniel Taylor hoped it would be so.
“It’s the cornerstone of the entire show,” Taylor says. “It was absolutely terrifying sharing space with him. You were always aware. When we were setting up the rink, you kept looking over your shoulder because it felt like someone was watching you — or like six people were watching you.”
To get the shape just right, Taylor and showrunner Issa López sat down to go through all the “random thoughts that come to mind about what it might look like” after reading the “Corsicle” description on the page. They quickly narrowed down some details of what it must mean: While Taylor had initially assumed that the bodies might be knotted, López wanted them to be arranged in a more linear manner. The falling cascade of limbs would allow the group to all clearly be “scared in one direction.” To illustrate how each scientist could be inside and intertwined with another, López boldly dropped to the floor and began to act out freezing the frightened bodies.
The influences they ultimately brought in included:
- “A shrunken head whose skin has begun to pull back, exposing this 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 sections through which you have cutouts, 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 look at.”
- Ringu – specifically “a reveal where a closet is opened” (if you know, you know)
- The Eternal Torment of Francis Bacon (the painter, not the Lord Chancellor of Britain)
- A photo of a baroque underwater dance is intended to give the whole thing a “feeling of movement,” as if this pile of bodies were just pausing in panic
The latter was a suggestion from her prosthetics team, Dave Elsey and Lou Elsey (a letter of recommendation to López from Guillermo del Toro), who found it difficult to actually build the bodies’ mass.
To accomplish this, there was further back and forth about how the bodies should be connected and intertwined, and there were discussions about the various stages of their thawing. They had the actors scanned to get the proportions accurate. After workshopping the facial expressions, they had the actors put their faces in “these scary positions” for 20 minutes to give them a proper live cast. They spoke to experts to determine just the right level of “the blackness that had spread across her feet and fingers.” It was extreme, but that was exactly what the body demanded.
“Each eyebrow hair was punched individually; Each tooth was cast individually. “It was an incredible piece of artistry – I’ve never had a job where so much time and effort went into making a prosthetic,” says Taylor. “We see it in the dark in the blizzard, we see it under the bright lights in the rink – there is no hiding from it. It has to be high quality.”
The result speaks for itself: a huge mass of horror, something impossible and haunting at the same time. When asked whether he and López took the supernatural into account at all when constructing the work of art, the corpuscle, Taylor declined to comment (at least for those who have only seen Episode 2). Suffice to say they wanted it to feel nightmarish; As Taylor said of De Bruyckere’s art, “It definitely feels organic, but it’s really evil.”
True Detective: Night CountryThe first two episodes, complete with the corpse, are now streaming on Max. New episodes appear every Sunday night at 9:00 pm EST.