True Detective Season 4: What is the “corpsicle”?

True Detective Season 4 kicks off with a mystery, that soon turns into a seeming tragedy, one that involves eight dead men. So what is their “corpsicle”?

True Detective Season 4 – subtitled Night Country – is written and directed by Tigers Are Not Afraid helmer Issa López. And the Mexican writer-director has brought her love of horror to the series via both story and visuals, as discussed in our 5-star review.

The central mystery concerns the disappearance of scientists working at a research facility in Alaska. Detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) was sent in to solve the case.

Before the investigation truly gets going, however, the men are found, precipitating the use of the word “corpsicle.” But what does it mean? Warning – TRUE DETECTIVE SPOILERS ahead…

True Detective Season 4: What is the “corpsicle”?

The men are found in the icy Alaskan wilderness, naked, tangled together, and frozen to death in a “giant block of flesh.” This is what Danvers christens the “corpsicle.“

The human icicle is transported to a school gymnasium to thaw out, where it becomes clear that the men were climbing on top of each other as they died, some screaming, others scratching their eyes out.

Lopez calls the mess of men Night Country’s McGuffin, telling Entertainment Weekly: “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.”

“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 McGuffin of the series.”

How rats, shrimp, and Dante inspired the block of flesh

When trying to visualize the corpsicle, López and her team turned to both nature and literature. First up, the “rat king” – a mass of entangled rodents, attached to each other by their tails. López tells EW: “It’s a rat king of people that they panic and they die because they’re knotted.”

Then there’s the crustacean connection, with writer-director stating: “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 illustrations Gustave Doré drew for Dante’s Inferno were also a visual reference. As were Mexican mummies. “Each of their expressions had to be specific,” López says. “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.”