Where does Night Country land in the tradition of “polar” horror and suspense? One can trace this season’s roots to 19 th-century works The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) and Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1897), via Night Country’s foregrounding of Tsalal Research Station, where eight scientists have vanished under exceedingly ominous circumstances. Season 4’s aesthetic captures the essence of loneliness, of estrangement, particular to the Arctic. It’s a land where voices echo and the wind moaning across the tundra sounds an awful lot like ghosts. Their streets and roads spiral from town center axes into surrounding hills worn to the gumline by eons of wind, connecting to nothing, vanishing like the ends of hemorrhaged veins into the vast empty. Reachable by radio wave, by sailing, by flight. The oldest, most rural communities are akin to ice-bright stars in a constellation-geographically isolated, adrift upon a black sea. To live in wintertime Alaska is to cultivate an affinity for extreme cold and darkness, or at least a stoic indifference. The frigid setting of Alaska is near and dear to my heart this season, which concludes on Sunday, also promised to combine some of my favorite genres-noir, suspense, and supernatural horror. Mild spoilers for all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country below.Īs someone born in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and a longtime traveler through its wilderness, I noticed my ears perk up when the trailers rolled out for Issa López’s Max series True Detective: Night Country.
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