True Detective: Night Country Was Inspired By A Real Morbid Mystery

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

For filmmaker Issa López, a story's setting is pivotal to unraveling mysteries that are impossible to forget. When the torch for the long-standing "True Detective" franchise was passed down to her, López had to decide upon a location that evoked a brand of eeriness similar to the desaturated Louisiana bayou in season one of the show. As "True Detective: Night Country" was meant to be a noir-adjacent mystery, López settled on the fictional mining town of Ennis, situated in the snowy, windswept plains of Alaska. With darkness submerging the town for months on end, the central mystery in "Night Country" takes on a significantly unsavory tint, involving missing researchers and an unsolved murder within a tense spiral of conspiracy.

Although "Night Country" features several threads of mystery, the most prominent one that evades detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) is the fate of the TSALAL scientists who are reportedly missing. Later on, most of the bodies are found in the ice, with limbs twisted in grotesque angles, foreheads marked with strange symbols, and their faces branded with terror. It is an unsettling sight, this corpsicle, and it becomes the focal point of the investigation after being scrutinized under warm, harsh lights, with the melting snow revealing increasingly baffling details. Per an interview with Variety, López explained that these little details, along with the idea to set the mystery in Alaska, were inspired by a tragic real-life incident:

"And I remember that I had been thinking about the murder mystery, and I thought that putting it in the ice as a setting would be interesting. I was thinking of the Dyatlov Pass incident, which is a real event that happened in the Carpathian Mountains."

The Alaskan setting "felt perfect for a noir" because it helped capture the bleak hopelessness of an unraveling murder mystery set in the ice while underlining the constant dangers of living in such an environment. The Dyatlov Pass incident, which helped flesh out some of the story beats surrounding the TSALAL researchers, is still considered an unsolved mystery, despite being the focus of countless research and tested theories. While speculations range from unprecedented natural disasters to supernatural reasons, the gruesome nature of the tragic deaths continues to haunt anyone who is made aware of it.

Ten hikers, all of them students, decided to set out on a winter trek on January 23, 1959. Their goal was to go through Russia's Ural Mountains and trek onward, but when their sports club did not hear from them for weeks, a search party was sent out. Out of the 10, one student had previously turned back due to health issues, and the bodies of the remaining 9 were found over many weeks, each telling a bizarre and gruesome story that could not be explained at first glance.

Although the nitty-gritties of the Dyatlov Pass tragedy demand a closer, thorough look, the key focus of its mystery is the odd positioning of and injuries on the bodies that were found scattered within a set radius. The group's tent was found flattened with their personal articles intact, although someone had frantically slashed the tent from the inside, as if in a desperate attempt to get out. Injuries found on the bodies included a bitten-out knuckle, odd fractures, and twisted bones, along with missing body parts like eyes or tongue, which were later found in the vicinity after all the bodies were recovered. 

The undisturbed items that were found inside the students' tent (including neatly folded clothes and a plate of food) at Dyatlov Pass heighten the tragic undertones of the incident, as it hints that whatever happened must have taken the group by surprise. Although the cause of these deaths has not been officially declared, an educated unofficial guess is that at least five of them died from hypothermia. These bodies found in various states of undress point toward paradoxical undressing, where someone freezing to death feels their body heat up instead, and paradoxically starts to take off their clothes in a state of fright or panic.

The researchers in the corpsicle that Danvers and Navarro find in the snow are initially believed to have paradoxically undressed due to rapid hypothermia, but this theory gets discarded once the detectives find their clothes and shoes neatly stacked at a distance. The injuries on the frozen bodies of the TSALAL researchers also seem inexplicable, with limbs twisted at impossible angles or body parts missing without any explanation. The official report for these deaths is chalked up to an avalanche, but Danvers is adamant that something more surreal is involved here, and the answer to this mystery turns out to be equal parts thrilling and frustrating.

Although research studies have deemed a slab avalanche as the primary cause behind the Dyatlov Pass tragedy, there are no sure answers as to what triggered such a heartbreaking chain of events. It is, however, clear that the nine students had tried their utmost to aid one another moments before death, making sure that no one in their group was left behind alone during such a terrifying ordeal.