How ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Creator & Director Issa López Found Her Frightful Groove: The Film That Lit My Fuse

The first season HBO’s anthology series True Detective changed the game in terms of telling a crime story in a relaxed fashion, allowing great actors to slowly peel their characters down to the core as they attempt to catch a serial killer. Nic Pizzolotto created that 2014 show’s first season, Cary Fukunaga directed the eps, and Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson played the lead crime solvers.

Issa López has taken the directing reins for the fourth season, as writer, creator and director of True Detective: Night Country. Her six-episode arc is set in Alaska in perpetual darkness, evocative of paranoid horror classics 30 Days of Night and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Jodie Foster plays Police Chief Danvers, teaming with Kali Reis, who plays the state trooper Navarro. They have to put aside their mutual loathing of each other to figure out what happened to the men in a research facility in the small town of Ennis. They’ve vanished, save for a tongue left behind.

It’s atmospheric, and you can feel the cold. López, who creates the tension and the horror, is the Mexican filmmaker who cut her teeth on films including Tigers Are Not Afraid and Todo Mal. She began writing and directing series that included Labyrinths of Passion. Find out how she found her way to this breakthrough opportunity in the genre game.