True Detective Season 1 Might Be Connected To A Real Louisiana Cult Case

It's not every day you hear a TV creator suggest googling "Satanism," "preschool," and "Louisiana," but those mad-lib-sounding search terms were apparently the recipe for Nic Pizzolatto when he was writing "True Detective" season 1. Traveling back along the "flat circle" of time, as Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) would call it, "True Detective" made its series premiere on HBO in January 2014. Almost immediately, it became a water cooler phenomenon, as viewers grew obsessed with its nonlinear crime narrative involving Cohle, his partner Marty Hart (McCounaghey's possible half-brother, Woody Harrelson), and their investigation of a dead body crowned with deer antlers in a sugarcane field.

Throw in weird-fiction references to the mythical city of Carcosa and the Robert W. Chambers horror story collection, "The King in Yellow," and "True Detective" would begin to take on some quasi-supernatural shadings. Yet as its title suggests, it was also tapping into an interest in true crime, the way the Peabody Award-winning podcast, "Serial," would later in 2014. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly that year, Pizzolatto discussed how the Yellow King became his substitute for Satan as he drew from the headlines while writing "True Detective" season 1:

"To be clear, in our show, nobody is going to reference a book by Robert Chambers called 'The King In Yellow.' Then we'd just have an episode where Hart and Cohle are just reading 'The King In Yellow.' ... I just did a DVD commentary that plainly explains [the mythological backstory], but a lot of things are left in fragments for the viewer to piece together about how we arrived at where we arrive. You know, you can Google 'Satanism,' 'preschool,' and 'Louisiana' and you'll be surprised at what you get. But instead of having our Satan worshippers worship Satan, they worship the Yellow King."

The above comments from Nic Pizzolatto, hinting at a true-life case of ritual abuse in Louisiana, put "True Detective" fans on the scent of Hosanna Church in Ponchatoula. This is a story that made the New York Times in 2005, and it's one that should come with a trigger warning, since it involves the deeply disturbing sexual abuse of children and even animals. Hosanna Church was once a thriving congregation of 1,000 members, but by 2003, it was more of a cult, with only 10 or 15 people left. They were led by a pastor who walked into the local sheriff's office and confessed to rape and bestiality, setting off an investigation that uncovered, among other things, a youth hall with traces of pentagrams on the floor in a church along U.S. Highway 51.

It's easy to draw a line from details like that to "True Detective" season 1, where — at the end of episode 2 — Rust Cohle and Marty Hart roll up on the remains of a burned-out church in their cop car. As they get out, Cohle sees a flock of birds fly up from the weeds in a spiral formation, while inside the church (or what's left of it), he finds a mural on the wall of a woman with antlers. Pizolatto simply switched out that imagery for the pentagrams.

This leads to Cohle's famous voiceover line, "I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe." Many "True Detective" fans also felt that as they latched onto Yellow King theories well into season 3. In the end, however, season 1 shows that the evil Cohle and Hart confront is much more banal and liable to ride a lawnmower.

"True Detective" season 1 is now streaming on Max.