We Need To Talk About True Detective: Night Country's 'Corpsicle'

This post contains spoilers for "True Detective: Night Country."

The "True Detective: Night Country" corpsicle might just be the scariest thing on TV right now. We're three episodes into the chilling new season of HBO's bleak detective series, and the giant mass of frozen, terrified bodies only gets creepier with time. By now, the group of naked, dead scientists has mostly thawed out, dripping death all over the floor of a local hockey rink under the watchful, increasingly anxious eye of rookie cop Peter (Finn Bennett).

The corpsicle is clearly the horror centerpiece of "True Detective: Night Country," and the camera loves it. Each episode so far has been punctuated by close-up shots of the frozen faces of the doomed research team, and somehow, the jolt of adrenalized fear that accompanies the body horror reveal never quite wears off. In fact, the closer the group gets to a full thaw, the more uncanny they feel. "How many hours have you been here staring at this s**t?" a visitor asks Peter, concerned for his mental health.

The young officer hasn't said as much yet, but it's clear that he's both frightened of the bodies and entranced by them — just like those of us watching at home are. The longer we lock eyes with the unsettled dead, the more an impossible thought bubbles to the surface, pulled from us by writer-director Issa López's classic horror framing. It's a thought that's no doubt crossed Peter's exhausted, on-edge mind, too: could the corpsicle be, well, alive?

Stranger things have already happened in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. One scientist somehow lived through being frozen alive, losing limbs and developing a severe case of gangrene in the process. Travis Cohle, father of beloved "True Detective" season 1 weirdo Rust, seems to be wandering around on the ice despite having apparently died years earlier. And the tongue of Iñupiat activist Anne Kowtok was found six years after her death looking, for lack of a better description, way too fresh. Things in Ennis don't seem to stay dead (it's those pesky micro-organisms!), and as López returns to the show's horrifying central tableau again and again, the camera begs us to lean in close, looking for a stray twitch or blink from the should-be-dead scientists.

The corpsicle is scary because it has an unpredictable potential energy to it, but it also chills us because the set piece itself is a creative masterwork. In an interview with IndieWire, the team behind the prop explained that it was largely constructed practically, with detailed silicon dummies made to look just like each actor. López initially consulted with Guillermo del Toro about the ambitious idea, asking for a recommendation for a team that could craft the complicated, dynamic set piece. The "Pan's Labyrinth" filmmaker sent López to Igor Studios, where Dave and Lou Elsey headed up the team that worked on the corpsicle, working alongside VFX supervisor Barney Curnow, production designer Daniel Taylor, and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, per the outlet.

With its layers of bodies and grotesque positions, the corpsicle calls to mind the unnerving, black-hearted baroque artwork of artists like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Taylor cites other creepy works of art while speaking to IndieWire, mentioning underwater photography, the corpse-like sculptures of Berlinde De Bruyckere, the strange visions of painter Phil Hale, and the horrifying image of a contorted, scared-to-death face from Hideo Nakata's "Ring."

The in-narrative details of the corpsicle are just as disturbing: the scientists' eyes were scratched out, their eardrums were ruptured, and audiences still don't know what they were looking at during their time of death. Clearly, a lot of work went into making the corpsicle feel frightening on a bone-deep, instinctive level, and judging by the shiver still running down my spine, it's already paid off. "It's a work of art," López said of the tableau, "And it has to feel like art. Terrible dark art."

"True Detective: Night Country" airs on HBO and streams on Max Sundays at 9 pm PT/ET.