At the heart of the mystery in “True Detective: Night Country” is a grisly centerpiece: a group of perished scientists found frozen together in the Alaskan wastelands in a mix of human misery – advanced frostbite, ruptured eardrums, burned corneas and self-inflicted human misery. inflicted bites. The task of finding out who or what is responsible for the research team's demise at the seedy Arctic research station Tsalal falls to the fictional Ennis Police Department, led by Jodie Foster as Chief Liz Danvers, who dubs the crowd – ultimately mostly covered in snow found in the first episode of the series – “a huge block of flesh” and a “corpse”.
Far from being quickly deposited in a morgue or shipped off to the big boys in Anchorage, the structure has grown narratively larger with each episode. It is a monumental focal point, both in its importance to the story and in the effort to build it.
“This is from the mind of [True Detective: Night Country writer and director] “Issa López,” says Dave Elsey, who, along with his wife Lou, created the series’ prosthetics, including the iceberg full of doomed men; “Corsicle” was López’s name for the formation from the start. “She has a very dark spirit. She also has a dark sense of humor. And we knew that from the moment they said 'Corsicle' – we said, 'Oh, we're on board.'”
Image via HBO
First we see the body in all its eerie glory as it is dragged by a tractor to the Ennis ice rink to be defrosted – with Little Saint Nick playing in the background, which hardly qualifies as the darkest Santa Claus analogy of 2024. At the rink we witness the full reveal: a collection of corpses melted together in a block of ice, some standing, some lying down. The men are naked, huddled together and facing the same direction, as if staggering back in fear. Together they form something like a sculpture, perhaps 7 feet tall and 10 feet wide. “This guy scratched his own eyes out,” a responding officer noted.
In fact, the series was filmed almost entirely in Iceland, mainly in Keflavik and Dalvik; The Elseys joke that the bodies were shipped from Britain to where the Elseys themselves are based and where the body parts were first assembled into coffins. The rink – Reykjavik's Skautahöllin í Laugardal, whose website features angelic Icelandic children merrily sailing across the ice – was decorated with American flags and signs, with the body (which weighed more than a ton) rolled up and placed in the middle of the ice Ice was placed. “We had a very short window of time to use the rink because schools were coming back and they wanted to practice,” says production designer Daniel Taylor; The team only had the opportunity to explore the site for five days between school years. “We couldn’t let the kids whiz around, skate, or practice ice hockey with their bodies in the middle.”
The Body was far from the first time the Elseys had explored the spooky and otherworldly in their work: the pair have a particular penchant for the supernatural and menacing, from Dracula to X-Men: First Class to Ghost Rider. Dave even won an Oscar for his makeup in 2010's “The Wolfman.” For True Detective: Night Country, the Elseys started with a series of miniature models that mimic the joints of the human body, then gradually refined with López and Taylor on poses for each man that make them fit closely together. Once the general configuration was established, the Elseys created a digital sketch that gave the team a 360-degree view of the bodies.
What followed was even more difficult due to the Elseys' usual prosthetic work. “When you're processing cadavers, a lot of times you can hide things with blood, and you can hide things with clothing and things like that,” says Dave. Not so here: “We knew from the start that they were just naked people who were found in the ice.” These are doppelgängers – we don’t just make heads that look like the actors, but entire bodies that look like them Actors look.”
Image via HBO
That meant they needed the actors – the seven (more on the unlucky number seven in a moment) frozen scientists – to give the Elseys an extremely intimate look at their bodies. The Elseys met the actors at Pinewood Studios outside London, where one by one they stripped down to their underwear and performed their special pose of chilling agony in Pinewood's scanning facility. “It was fun because Issa was actually on the phone,” Lou says. “We had them on FaceTime video calls, so we thought, 'This is loosely based on what we had in the blueprint.' What do you think?' And then if there were any small adjustments, we would make them to make it work.”
For some of the actors, it was the first time they learned the details of the cruel fate that awaited their characters. “They all figured out what their story was at the same time,” says Dave. “So when we said, 'Put your hand up like this and pull your face down and then bury your fingers in your eyes,' he said, 'Oh, so that's what's happening?'”
To create the final models, the actors returned – this time to the Elseys' London studio to have casts made of their heads, hands, feet and teeth. Once again they were asked to recreate their painful demise – but this time with the added challenge of maintaining the pose while multiple layers of a silicone compound and a final plaster cast were applied to maintain the shape. “It's one thing to make a face, and another to maintain that expression for 15, 20 minutes at a time,” says Dave. “In the middle of it all, they looked like a mummy.”
From there, the Elseys set about putting the finishing touches on the models: Lou specializes in making prosthetics, while Dave usually focuses on makeup effects. “We had to take very detailed photos of all of her hair, the direction of her hair, her eyebrows, eyelashes, eyeballs, tooth color, everything,” says Lou.
Hair had to be sewn into each prosthesis individually, including facial hair, which was then shaved to create visible stubble. “Some of them had hairy bodies, some had old ones,” Dave says with a laugh. “We were very happy with the boys who showed up without a lot of hair. Some of them just had these great, big, hairy bodies, and we had to fit right in.”
A particularly horrific moment in the series comes at the start of the second episode, when an official trying to dig up the bodies accidentally breaks off a dead man's right arm just below the elbow – only for the man, Tsalal founder and director Anders Lund ( Þorsteinn). Bachmann) to reveal that he is not dead at all when he, the only and very frozen survivor of the Group of Seven, starts screaming.
To achieve this effect, the Elseys built Bachmann's prosthetic with a removable arm, complete with dangling breakable bones that could be popped back into place for further recordings. Then came the tricky part: squeezing the real Bachmann into the collection of corpse prosthetics for the screaming sequence, which required the actor to get on his knees and hold his arms awkwardly in the air. As Lund's fallen colleagues make their way to the rink, which is still in the ice – actually a combination of real composite snow, plastic ice pieces and Styrofoam that the Elseys designed to mimic different stages of the melting process – he ends up in the hospital brought. “We had small dentures made where he had suffered frostbite and his gums had turned completely black and receded,” says Dave. “He was really into it – anything we wanted to do to make him look like the model, he let us.”
Image via HBO
In fact, frostbite research became an issue for the Elseys during the project. They scoured medical literature and the Internet for evidence of the terrible damage that being naked in the Alaskan winter could do to the human body. Showrunner López's first description of the corpuscle in the script was “a knot of limbs and frozen flesh, screaming into the night with blind eyes.” This thoroughness continued throughout the show – after all, this is a series in which a glaciologist with experience in ice core drilling.
“We did enormous research into some of the most horrific images we have ever seen,” says Dave.
“Oh God,” Lou says, remembering with a shudder.
“We had files on it and showed it to the crew, and the crew said 'Ack!' And we said, 'This is what we do,'” says Dave. This research was at the forefront when the particle was loaded onto an Icelandic mountainside at night to film its first discovery. “We had all received warnings that if we lost feeling in any of our limbs we would have to go in. And in our head we just see all the work we've done with blackening limbs and we think, 'Yeah, we'll take your advice.'”
True Detective: Night Country is by nature not a program with many laugh lines. As the police begin digging up the bodies in the second episode, Danvers snaps at an officer who takes the opportunity to take a selfie, wagging his tongue behind the disfigured face of one of the wayward scientists. “Stop fooling around!” Danvers yells. “This is a crime scene!”
However, some nonsense was inevitable on set. To prepare for this scene, the crew had to wait for a heavy snowfall in which they could submerge the entire body part. “And then at one point there was a change in the weather and everyone was wrapped up in the freezing cold and there was a JCB [crane] picking up six or seven bodies,” Taylor says. “And we say, ‘I did [López] Does she want them to look this way, or does she want them to look this way?' You turn your bodies a little and then you think: No, that's definitely the case. Then you turn it the other way again. There's a moment where you ask yourself, 'What the hell are we doing?' What's this about?'”
“I constantly find myself involved in a situation that you normally would never do,” Taylor says. “And that was probably the icing on the cake.”
For example, the selfie ban did not apply outside of the camera. “We took selfies with it, and some of the actors did that too,” says Dave.
In the series premiere, Danvers gets the first clue that things are about to take a dark turn shortly after she enters the abandoned Tsalal, where she finds a severed tongue – one whose telltale markings suggest it belonged to Annie Masu Kowtok, whose years The murder in Ennis was never solved.
The tongue was also the work of the Elseys – and they made an extra. “The very first thing we did when we arrived in Iceland was we put one of these in a little display case on a little velvet cushion and gave Issa a little gift,” says Dave, grinning. “That was our first day on set. She was so excited about that poor tongue.”
Neither the Elseys nor Taylor are sure where the body is now: their best guess is a storage unit somewhere in Iceland. When asked if they think the unit could be opened one day in the future and scare anyone, the Elseys can only laugh.
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