True Detective: Night Country Showrunner Drew Inspiration From Rat Kings for the “Corpsicle”

With the first season of True Detective exploring a world of murders and cults, the HBO series has always been grounded in the world of horror, though True Detective: Night Country has taken things to new and frightening heights with the reveal of a mass of dead bodies frozen together, which showrunner Issa López has referred to as a “corpsicle.” This week’s Episode 2 of the series has given audiences some of the most unsettling imagery seen in the whole series, with López recently recalling how she drew visual inspiration for the mass of bodies from the concept of a “rat king,” in which a group of rats is trapped in such tight quarters that their tails become tangled and the animals die en masse. 

“That’s the filmmaker’s problem when you have the writer’s cap on. So obviously when I sent it to the studio, they were like, ‘What are you thinking?’ And I said, ‘You’ll see.’ But I had no idea,” López shared with Entertainment Weekly. “Me as the filmmaker thought if we don’t manage to do this, I have to rewrite this, because if we fail with the corpsicle, there’s no series. It is so center. It’s the MacGuffin of the series.”

She added, “It’s a rat king of people that they panic and they die because they’re knotted.”

While the first episode of the series saw Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) investigating the bizarre disappearance of an entire crew of a research station, the episode culminated with the reveal that they had been found dead in the snow. Episode 2 saw the mass of bodies transported to a local ice rink, the only place that could store such remains adequately.

“I used to explain it to my team and the prosthetic makers, ‘Think of shrimp frozen in a block. You don’t know how many shrimp are there in that block. So let’s think like that,’” the showrunner detailed. “Each of their expressions had to be specific … And for that I thought of Mexican mummified bodies. We have that in Mexico. And as a kid, I saw them and they were engraved in my mind. So those expressions of agony come from mummified bodies.”

Despite the term “corpsicle” being ingrained in the development of the series, it wasn’t until the filmmaker was actually completing work on the show’s edit that she had a shocking revelation: no one in the show itself ever actually used the word.

“I was in the mixing room, and I said, ‘We should have a sound of the corpsicle,’” López confessed. “And my sound engineer turned to me, white-faced, and said, ‘You called it what?’ And I was like, ‘The corpsicle.’ And he said, ‘That’s not in the series.’ And I said, ‘Oh, my God, you are right!’”

It would ultimately be Foster who recorded ADR to cement the term corpsicle into the series.

New episodes of True Detective: Night Country air on HBO on Sunday nights.

What did you think of this week’s episode? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!