HBO’s True Detective: Night Country premiered over the weekend while throwing back to the first season‘s supernatural-tinged tone with a whole new look. Following stories in Louisiana, California, and the Ozarks, the newest round of episodes take place near the uppermost point of Alaska. The concept of extended night will be familiar to those who remember a certain horror movie called 30 Days Of Nights, which took place in Barrow, Alaska, which is a whole lot like the fictional settlement of Ennis, which is where Night Country takes place.
The atmosphere of prolonged nightfall adds to the eeriness of this season’s mystery, and the show (like the aforementioned movie) bypasses the how, IRL, this area of Alaska experiences a twilight-like Polar Night, so most of the extended nightfall isn’t actually pitch dark. Theatrically speaking, the darkness works out for the story, and fortunately, showrunner Issa López found an appropriate shooting venue outside of the U.S. The lead detectives portrayed by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are actually chasing these horrors in Iceland, as López detailed to Deadline:
“I was walking hand in hand with Florian Hoffmeister, the DP, who got a nomination [at the Oscars] when we were shooting for Tár, and he’s just incredible. The challenge of shooting in the eternal darkness and in the ice, he’s a man that could do it, only him. The other one is Daniel Taylor, who did the production design and was able to capture Alaska and make it happen in Iceland. So I felt very, very well guarded there.”
Detective Danvers (Foster) and Navarro (Reis) will keep digging up frozen horrors in the coming weeks, as HBO’s True Detective: Night Country continues to air on Sunday nights.