Meet the 2,000-pound corpse from ‘True Detective: Night Country’

In the heart of mystery in True Detective: Night Country It’s a grisly centerpiece: a group of dead scientists, found frozen together in the Alaskan barrenness in a jumble of human misery—advanced frostbite, ruptured eardrums, burned corneas, and self-bites. Finding who or what is responsible for the demise of the research team at the mysterious Tsalal Polar Research Station falls to the fictional Ennis Police Department, led by Jodie Foster as Chief Liz Danvers, who describes the block – which is eventually found covered in snow. From the first episode of the series – “A Giant Lump of Flesh” and “A Corpse”.

Far from being quickly deposited in the morgue or shipped to VIPs in Anchorage, the Hulk loomed larger narratively with each passing episode. It’s a massive pivot point, both in its importance to the story and in the effort it takes to build it.

“And this is from the mind”True Detective: Night Country Dave Elsey, who, with his wife, Lou, created the series’ prosthetics, including the iceberg full of distressed men, says: “Writer and director Issa Lopez.” “Corpse” was Lopez’s term for the formation from the beginning. “She has a very dark mind. She also has a dark sense of humor. And we knew that from the moment they said ‘corpse’ — we were like, ‘Oh, we’re on board.’

Image via HBO

We first see the body in all its sinister glory as it is towed to the Ennis Ice Rink by a tractor to defrost it – with “Little Saint Nick” playing in the background, in what is unlikely to top as the bleakest Santa metaphor of 2024. At the rink, we get Full disclosure: a group of bodies huddled together in a block of ice, some standing, some lying down. The men were naked, huddled together, facing the same direction, as if reeling from terror. Together they form something like a sculpture, perhaps 7 feet tall and 10 feet wide. “This guy had his eyes scratched out,” one responding officer noted.

In fact, the series was filmed almost entirely in Iceland, primarily in Keflavik and Dalvik; The Elseys joked that the bodies were shipped there from the United Kingdom, where the Elseys themselves were based and where the components of a body were first assembled into coffins. The ice rink – Skautahöllin í Laugardal in Reykjavík, whose website shows angelic Icelandic children happily sailing across the ice – was decorated with American flags and banners, with the carcass (weighing more than a ton) moved and placed in the center of the ice. “We had a very short window of time that we could use the ice rink because the schools were coming back, and they were scheduled to have practice,” says production designer Daniel Taylor. The team only ran the space for five days between classes. “We couldn’t have kids ice skating or playing ice hockey with the particle in the middle.”

The Corpse was far from the first time the Ceases had delved into the creepy and otherworldly in their work: the pair have a particular knack for the supernatural and the dangerous, from Dracula to x-men: first class to Ghost rider. Dave even won an Oscar for his makeup work in 2010 Wolf man. to True Detective: Night Country, Elsie’s family started with a set of miniature models that mimicked the joints of the human body, and she and Lopez and Taylor gradually settled on positions for each leg that would put them together comfortably. With the general composition in place, the Elseys created a digital drawing that gave the team a 360-degree view of the bodies.

What followed carried an extra level of difficulty compared to the Elseys’ usual prosthetic work. “A lot of times, when you’re mutilating bodies, you can hide things with blood, you can hide things with clothes and things like that,” Dave says. Not so here: “We knew from the beginning that these were just naked people found in the ice. It’s similar, we’re not just making heads that look like actors, we’re making whole bodies that look like actors.

Image via HBO

Which means they need the actors — the seven scientists (more on unlucky Number Seven in a moment) — to give Elsie’s family a very intimate view of their bodies. The Elseys met the actors at Pinewood Studios outside London, where one by one they stripped to their underwear and enacted their own mode of listless agony in the scanning facility at Pinewood. “It was fun because Issa was actually on the phone,” Lu says. “We had FaceTime video calls with her, so we said, ‘This is loosely based on what we have in the chart.’ ” what do you think?’ Then if there are any minor tweaks we will make it work.

For some of the actors, this was the first time they learned the details of the horrific fate their characters were destined for. “They were all discovering their story at the same time,” Dave says. “So when we said, ‘Raise your hand like this and pull your face down and then bury your fingers in your eyes,’ he was like, ‘Oh, this is what’s going on?’

To create the final models, the actors returned — this time to Elseys’ studio in London to make molds of their heads, hands, feet and teeth. Once again, they were asked to simulate their own traumatic death – but this time with the added challenge of maintaining the pose while multiple layers of silicone compound and a final plaster bandage were applied to maintain the shape. “It’s one thing to pull a face, it’s another thing to maintain that expression for 15 or 20 minutes at a time,” says Dave. “They looked like a mummy halfway through this.”

From there, the Elseys set about putting the finishing touches on the models: Lou specializes in the prosthetics manufacturing side, while Dave usually manages the makeup effects. “We had to take very detailed pictures of all their hair, the direction of their hair, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the eyeballs, the color of the teeth, everything,” Lu says.

The hair had to be sewn into each prosthetic individually, down to the beard hair which was then shaved off to create a visible stubble. “Some of them had hairy bodies and some of them had old bodies,” Dave says with a laugh. “We were very happy with the guys who showed up without a lot of hair. Some of them had these big, hairy bodies, and we had to match that perfectly.

A particularly horrifying moment in the series comes early in the second episode, when an officer trying to excavate bodies inadvertently cuts off a dead man’s right arm just below the elbow — only for the man, Tsalal founder and director Anders Lund (Thorsten). Bachmann), to reveal that it is often no He died when he, the sole frostbitten survivor of the Group of Seven, began screaming.

To achieve the effect, the Elseys built Bachmann’s prosthetic with a detachable arm, complete with separate dangling bones that can be snapped back into place for additional shots. Then came the tricky part: putting the real Bachmann in a set of corpse prosthetics for the screaming scene, which required the actor to get on his knees and awkwardly hang his arms in the air for the duration. Eventually, as Lund’s fallen teammates head to the ice rink still buried in ice—actually a mixture of real composite snow, plastic ice chunks, and polystyrene that Alse designed to mimic different stages of the melting process—he is taken to the hospital. “We made little dentures where he got frostbite and his gums turned black and receded,” says Dave. “He was very interested in it. Anything we wanted to do to make it look like a model, he let us do it.”

Image via HBO

In fact, research on frostbite became a theme for Elsie’s family during the project. They have been scouring medical papers and the Internet in general for clues about what kind of horrific damage bare-knuckle living in an Alaskan winter can do to the human body; Showrunner Lopez’s initial description of the corpse in the script was “a tangle of limbs and frozen flesh screaming into the night with blind eyes.” That precision has been the throughline throughout the show’s run — this is, after all, a series that has employed a glaciologist with experience drilling ice.

“We did an enormous amount of research into some of the most horrific images we’ve ever seen,” Dave says.

“Oh my God,” Lou says, remembering with a shudder.

“We had files of these, and we would show them to the crew, and the crew would say, ‘Ah!’ and Dave would say, ‘This is what we do.’” This research was top of mind when the body was loaded into place on an Icelandic mountainside at night to film its initial discovery. “We’ve all been warned that if we start to lose feeling in any of our limbs, we’ll have to go inside. In our minds, all we can see is all the work we’ve done as our limbs turn black and think: Yes, we’ll take your advice.

True Detective: Night Country It is, by design, not a show with many laugh lines. When the police begin discovering bodies in the second episode, Danvers attacks an officer who takes the opportunity to take a selfie, wagging his tongue behind one of the distorted faces of the errant scientists. “Stop fooling around!” Danvers shouts. “This is a crime scene!”

However, some goofiness was inevitable on set. To prepare for this scene, the crew had to wait until significant snowfall so they could fully submerge the body. “Eventually there was a break in the weather, everyone was curled up in the freezing cold, and there was a JCB crane picking up six or seven bodies,” Taylor says. “We wonder: Did (Lopez) want them to confront this way, or did she want them to confront this way?” You rotate the objects a little bit, and then you say: No, it’s definitely this way. Then you rotate them again in the other direction. There’s kind of a moment where you say, “What the hell are we doing?” ‘What is this all about?'”

“I’m forever involving myself in a situation you wouldn’t normally do,” Taylor says. “And that was probably the cherry on the cake.”

For example, the ban on taking off-camera selfies is not implemented. “We took selfies with him, and some of the actors did too,” Dave says.

In the series premiere, the first indication Danvers gets that things are about to take a dark turn comes shortly after she enters the abandoned Tsalal, where she finds a severed tongue — a tongue whose markings seem to indicate that it belonged to Annie Masu Kotok, whose years -The Ennis murder was never solved.

The tongue was also the Elsie’s work, and they created something extra. “The first thing we did when we got to Iceland was put one of them in a little glass case on a little velvet pillow and made a little gift for Issa,” Dave says with a smile. “It was our first day on set. She was so happy with that poor tongue.

Neither the Elsie nor the Taylors know where the body is now: their best guess is a storage unit somewhere in Iceland. When asked if they thought the unit might open one day in the future and scare the living daylights out of someone, all the Elsey family could do was laugh.